by Loet Velmans
In 1954 Hill called me into his office again. “I think the time has come to open an office in Europe. And I think you’re the man to do it.”
“But we haven’t got a single client over there!” I protested.
“That’ll be your job, young man,” he drawled.
And so we found ourselves crossing the Atlantic again, on the Queen Elizabeth I, but with one big difference: this time, we were traveling first class, not steerage. After trying out Paris and The Hague, I eventually settled on Geneva as the most favorable location for an international headquarters.
Two decades later, at a time when Japan had emerged as an industrial powerhouse, I attended one of the first meetings that brought business executives from all the Pacific Basin nations together. At dinner in Kyoto, we were a mixed group: six men, one each from Australia, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Japan, and the United States. It was a pleasant social occasion: we went around the table telling one another about our backgrounds. Yet, hard as we tried to include him, our Japanese host, who spoke fluent English, would only respond with a sweet smile.
The following afternoon, during a long break, some of my colleagues and I went for a stroll in a nearby temple garden. We encountered a group of young girls in school uniform. In broken English their teacher told us that they were from a small town in the north and that her twelve-year-old pupils had never seen a Caucasian in the flesh. It explained the girls’ giggles and snickers. One of our group invited the youngsters to pose for a group picture. They happily consented. The experience was a refreshing break from our tense discussions on the often otherwise dull subjects of import quotas and government subsidies. It was now 1974. Encountering another face of Japan made me realize that to encompass all Japanese in my visceral reaction was neither fair nor helpful. From that day on I began to draw a distinction between the prewar generation of Japanese—those of my own age—and the contemporaries of my children, born after the war.
Also in the mid-1970s, in Tokyo, three salrymen (business executives) introduced me to the rites of the geisha house. It was an elegant occasion, where an ornately made-up and elaborately costumed young woman fed me delicate morsels of food and an infinite number of cups of sake. My Japanese hosts laughed and flirted; one of the women played the lute, another sang with a birdlike voice. After dinner, my friends took me to a bar on the Ginza, Tokyo’s entertainment district. Inside, an all-male, middle-age crowd was belting out songs, fully lubricated with sake, whiskey, and brandy. After a while it struck me that they seemed to be singing the same melody over and over. They would end the song with a thunderous cheer, and then launch into the same refrain all over again, with the volume turned up another notch. It sounded very jovial. I kept tipsily asking for a translation. I assumed that when these buttoned-down, white-shirted, and up-tight technocrats finally let down their hair, there was bound to be some good off-color stuff. My Japanese chaperons giggled, but ignored my request. I persisted. Finally I got my answer. The man who gave it had his mouth set in a frozen grin. The song was quite proper, he said, and not at all what I thought. It was a highly patriotic song, a military march, written to keep up morale and sung on memorable occasions—as when the Japanese fleet was steaming toward Pearl Harbor. I bowed, and thanked him for the information. Suddenly, I was stone-cold sober.
Eventually I was invited to a private home. It was the first time this had happened in my twenty-five years of visiting Japan. My host, the chairman of a powerful advertising agency, was a colorful character who exploded the myth of all Japanese businessmen being one gray, indistinguishable mass. He cherished two passionate hobbies: motorcycles and cookery. My wife and I were shown into the elegant living space of a roomy home furnished with highly polished, sawed-down Louis XV furniture. At the far end of the room was a counter at which we were seated to observe our host display his culinary skills. Our host prepared each dish very carefully. He worked alone, his wife assisting only in serving us a succession of tempura courses. Neither of them sat down to eat with us. We were offered a never-ending array of exotic and exquisite deep-fried, bite-sized morsels of tuna, prawn, oyster, meats, vegetables, and flowers. Towards the end of the meal I felt emboldened to ask how the chairman had fared during the war.
“Please have another chrysanthemum,” he said cryptically.
Over the course of time I got a little more used to the Japanese. Our company had bought a small Japanese consulting firm in Tokyo, and I visited Japan at least one a year. I had learned to appreciate my Japanese business contacts as extremely smart and polite people. In negotiations they proved to be tough and often stubborn, but in the after-office hours they were a civilized lot, always correct with an occasional flash of kindness. I was invited to classical concerts and the Kabuki theater, with its graphic depiction of conflict between the noble and humane against power-hungry evil. There was no longer any reason to think of the Japanese as the bad guys. Yet I never lost my compulsion to keep a wary eye on them.
In 1974, having been instrumental in setting up Hill and Knowlton’s international network, I returned to New York, where I eventually assumed the position of chairman and chief executive officer of the U.S. and worldwide operations. I had served nineteen years in Europe and had also been responsible for supervising the Tokyo office. But my dealings with the Japanese did not end there. When talk of a U.S.-Japan “trade war” created an urgent need throughout the business community for public relations advice on dealing with Japan, I became focused on the country once again.
Some forty years after the end of the war, I was seated in a comfortable armchair on a high floor of a modern Tokyo office building. Facing me was the president of Mitsui, one of Japan’s most powerful conglomerates: a pleasant, round-faced, and soft-spoken man. We were cochairing a task force of Japanese and American businessmen that was to look into ways of improving communications between our two countries. It all seemed so simple: devise effective communication, and better understanding would follow. I looked cautiously at my host. He sent me a faint smile. What were his thoughts about the West, and about Japan’s defeat in the war?
An aide walked in, bowed deeply in my direction, and handed his boss a note. The chairman excused himself for the interruption and left the room. Returning after about ten minutes, he said, “We have a crisis in Madagascar. No matter, we will have it all under control very soon.” He added: “We have excellent intelligence all over the world.” Inevitably, my thoughts strayed to the quality of Japanese intelligence prior to World War II, when Japanese residents of Southeast Asia (in contrast to the unfairly interned Japanese Americans) had turned out to be effective spies for the Japanese invaders.
I had finally learned, to my great frustration, that World War II was a topic not to be discussed with foreigners. For the Japanese, the war was treated as an intimate family album: its pictures were to be shown only to family members, and as presented in the bland history books used in Japanese schools. When it came to wartime behavior, the Japanese appeared to be suffering from a case of collective amnesia. Under no circumstance was blame to be ascribed to any Japanese, dead or alive.
As a speaker at a meeting on trade held in Hakone, an elegant lakeside resort within easy driving distance of Tokyo, my presentation dealt with the American public’s attitudes toward economically successful Japan, which had conquered the U.S. automobile, TV, and electronic markets while protecting its own turf from foreign imports. Looking out at the large audience in a sumptuous brightly lighted hall, I noticed that the Japanese delegation formed a solid, stone-faced mass. I needed a moment to collect myself—I suddenly saw the faces of my prison guards before me. Then I shook myself and regained my self-confidence. I became overconfident and began to take satisfaction in haranguing them on their failures. I doubted that I was getting through, but I did not care. In the discussion afterward each side remained convinced of the righteousness of its own position. The two points of view were diametrically opposed. The culture gap remained wide and deep.
Gradually I learned to feel more comfortable, especially in one-on-one encounters. But it had taken me more than thirty-five years to reach this point. Now and then, I must confess, I did enjoy a little schadenfreude, especially when the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and other Southeast Asians made it clear, time and again, that they had neither forgiven nor forgotten the behavior of the Japanese during the war.
Several years ago Edith and I rode a tourist bus through central Java. Our fellow visitors were all Americans. None of them had even the remotest personal tie to Indonesia. By contrast, we, as native-born Dutch, felt great sentimental affinity toward the Indonesians. We therefore squirmed in our seats when, in answer to a question about Indonesia’s history, our English-speaking guide condemned his country’s long Dutch colonial era as an unforgettable period of deprivation and humiliation. At a rest stop we confessed to our guide that we were Dutch natives. We then asked whether his village had suffered from Dutch domination and oppression. He smiled broadly and said in fluent Dutch: “I am so happy to speak your language again, meneer, mevrouw. Let me tell you. Three and a half years of Japanese occupation were far worse than three hundred years of Dutch colonial rule.”
In the 1990s the Japanese economy passed into a long period of serious decline. Japan’s economic crisis left the world flummoxed once again: How could this have happened? How could the Japanese have fooled us all along about their economic strength? Why weren’t we smart enough to foresee the collapse?
Of course, very few thinkers and analysts ever get it right. No one predicted the rise and fall of Hitler’s Germany either. We in the West have been consistently wrong, always shortsighted in our judgment of political and economic trends. No one foresaw the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, nor that the dot-com boom would end up being a bust. Western businessmen had for a long time been dazzled by the success of Japanese industry. We had even tried to copy some Japanese business methods: quality-control circles and on-time delivery systems became accepted practices and entered the business lexicon. Most of us did not pay much attention to the intrinsic weaknesses of the Japanese system. The intertwined, incestuous relationship between business and government had been largely responsible for Japan’s economic victories. We knew all about that. But we knew little, and understood less, of one of its main downsides: the banking system’s habit of extending, with the government’s blessing, huge amounts of credit to a large number of enterprises that were neither destined to grow nor, at a later time, able to cope with a slowdown in demand. This tight collusion between government, industry, and bankers created what came to be known as Japan, Inc. The government also kept up an illusion of economic and financial solidity by subsidizing Japan’s small and backward but politically powerful rice growers, and by spending great amounts of money on roads that led nowhere, as well as on all sorts of other superfluous public construction projects. At the same time, Japan, Inc. shut all foreign competitors out of its domestic market by erecting high tariff walls, while the Japanese equivalent of our Federal Reserve was skillfully manipulating the yen-dollar exchange rate to assist Japanese exports. In the end, of course, the whole house of cards came crashing down.
With the emergence of China as a major player on the world stage, Western voices have begun expressing the hope that Japan will reconsider its assumption that it is the most powerful and only real pace-setting nation on the Asian continent. It is encouraging to note that many in Japan’s postwar generation are open to that view. But I feel we must always remember that we have been here before. All too frequently, the West has thought that Japan was becoming less isolated from the rest of the world. (All too often, it seems to me, our eagerness to see change has colored our judgment and made us overly optimistic.) I am also reminded that at a time of great human misery, resulting in large migratory waves, Japan remains the only prosperous industrialized country nearly hermetically closed to refugees and allows only a handful of foreign residents each year to acquire Japanese citizenship. Other countries worry about being able to handle the successful integration of large-scale immigration; only Japan seems more motivated by a desire to preserve its individuality and self-imposed insularity. And despite protests from the Asian nations that suffered under the Japanese occupation, leading Japanese politicians, including the current and last prime ministers, insist on making the annual pilgrimage to a shrine that honors Japan’s wartime leaders.
Most of the POWs, my Japanese guards, and my older Japanese business contacts are now dead. The Zeemans Hoop has long since been turned into scrap metal. Spring Camp has become jungle once more, although Changi Gaol still stands (it is now Singapore’s high-security prison). Soon there will be no one left to remember, no one left to apologize to. The current generation of young Japanese (grandchildren of my contemporaries) is more open and communicative than their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. My friend Lex, with whom I shared a cell in Changi, was comforted by a conversation he had with Japanese students near the bank of the river Kwai. They were curious to know what had happened during the war and seemed skeptical of their elders’ version, which claimed that the railway had had the noble purpose of making a significant and lasting contribution to the Thai economy!
Perhaps one day these younger Japanese will take a cue from the heirs to Germany’s Nazi regime, who have demonstrated that frankness and repentance will go a long way toward diminishing mutual prejudices and helping to restore faith and trust among peoples. Whether America erred or was justified in using the atomic bomb, it has certainly gone out of its way to express regret and remorse for the horror it unleashed on two Japanese cities and the Japanese nation as a whole. So far, the Japanese have failed to reciprocate.
Some years ago, I participated in a role-playing exercise in which a small group of Americans was assigned to act like Japanese, and the Japanese like Americans. It came as no great surprise to me that neither side was able to successfully impersonate the other: the Americans were too boisterous to find the right tone; the Japanese squirmed at playing tough. We laughed a lot, but I realized that it would take a long time before Westerners and Japanese would be cured of their incompatibility.
I have often wondered what strange twist of fate led me to become a participant in the messy late-twentieth-century U.S.-Japanese trade controversy (as a consultant and a member of a bilateral U.S.-Japan organization). It may be that, as a former POW, I felt I possessed some insight my amiable, generous, and often less experienced American colleagues lacked. It might also have helped that for more than thirty years I had constantly shifted gears from one culture to the next; often speaking in and listening to three or four different languages several times in the course of a single day. I had become an itinerant outsider. All that might have contributed to my coming to terms with my more unpleasant memories. It also forced me to shake hands with my former oppressors and made it necessary for me to try to understand their position.
I offer my story, therefore, not as a cautionary tale, but as the observations and reminiscences of a single witness to a chapter of World War II that has been all but forgotten. I hope that when my grandchildren, and perhaps their children’s children, read it, the lack of understanding between our cultures will have become a thing of the past.
I believe that one day this may really happen—but only after each side proves itself willing to acknowledge its own shortcomings. Then both sides must also be prepared to abolish the prejudices that still linger. As for my own generation, we Westerners share with our former Japanese enemies and adversaries the commonality of death, which will extinguish all manifestations of national pride and racial distinction.
Acknowledgments
WHEN I BECAME A PRISONER I got into the habit of taking notes. I scribbled these down on pads and sheets of colored paper. Later, when times turned tough, I used any scrap I could lay hands on. Later still, when I had shrunk into a walking skeleton clinging on to the barest of possessions, I lost the lot. I had neither the courage nor the stamina to resum
e taking notes. I no longer wished to record the atrocities happening around me.
What I have now written is largely based on memory. I started the process when I retired. Many memories had stayed with me; they were like implants in my brain. Others I found near the surface, often lurking just below a façade of cheerful optimism. I could recall them at the drop of a hat. Yet others would reappear as I emerged from a deep night’s sleep or an afternoon’s slumber on my favorite sofa. And then there were those that lay buried deep down inside me. These were harder to recover: images, sounds, and smells, even tastes, all eclipsed for decades.
As my main editor, my daughter Hester encouraged me to abandon a lifelong practice of writing dry and often dull business memos and reports for a more writerly style. One important suggestion she made was difficult to follow. “Let your guard down,” she said. “Show your emotions.” Marianne, her twin sister and a publisher said: “Peel off the layers.” Both admonishments were respectfully accepted. Still, baring my emotions was easier said than done.
So I wrote and with Hester’s help re-wrote several drafts, determined to leave for my children and grandchildren a record of what happened to me in World War II. In doing so, I followed in the footsteps of Edith, who wrote a book about “her” World War that was published some years ago. She was the one who insisted that I should not abandon the project, especially during the dark days when I had had enough of delving into the painful past. This book would not have been written without the encouragement of Edith and Hester.