War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  ‘You are a foreigner and this is an important naval base,’ the senior Kempeitai man said as they left. ‘We must be vigilant against spies.’

  The books came back with a messenger-boy a week or so later, without an apology.

  The authorities left Charles alone after that for a long while, although it hadn’t escaped his notice that in the villages and towns around Yokohama, and presumably all over Japan, young men were being encouraged to join an official youth association. Older men who’d done military service were enlisted in a veterans’ organisation, and were expected to turn up for periodic pep talks from visiting army officers. The message was deeply conservative, suggesting that Japan’s national character was fully formed and immutable, and superior to all others.

  At the schools where he taught Charles found the reading of the Imperial rescripts carried out with deeper formality and reverence than before, even as the deteriorating mental and physical state of Yoshihito, the Taisho emperor, became a matter of quiet gossip and incidents of lèse majesté, to the point where the crown prince, Hirohito, was made regent at the end of 1921.

  Textbooks were replaced to reflect a deliberate effort to counteract the dangerous cosmopolitanism of the era. The texts for language classes tended to use sentences about the heroic life of the soldier as their examples. History had become a blur of fact and mythology. At one of the schools, the principal insisted Charles join him when he gave an ethics class to senior students.

  ‘You as the youth of Japan must simply learn to love our empire and devote yourselves to it,’ he exhorted them. ‘Once you do that, all your worries will fall away.’

  A few months after the great earthquake, it was decided to assign active army officers to universities and high schools, to make military cadet training more professional and to watch out for ‘dangerous thoughts’ among the young men, such as a refusal to bow at the Yasukuni shrine to the war dead. They were an inhibiting presence in the staff common rooms. One of Charles’ colleagues had liked to joke that the Imperial talismans of mirror, sword and jewel actually represented the female and male sexual organs respectively and the semen passing between them. He now spoke very cautiously.

  At one school, the army officer was a particularly narrow-minded individual and regarded Charles as an instigator of subversive thoughts simply by his foreign appearance and dress. When Charles corrected him on one point of drill, he reported him for ‘maliciously criticising the Imperial Armed Forces’.

  A Captain Arai at another school asked the boys why they were loyal to the emperor.

  ‘Because the Imperial line goes back to the beginning of the nation,’ one boy replied.

  ‘Because he embodies the incomparable Japanese nation,’ ventured another.

  ‘Because he is our benevolent ruler,’ said a third.

  ‘Wrong!’ said Captain Arai. ‘Your loyalty has reasons, therefore it is conditional. True loyalty has no conditions – it is pure loyalty!’

  Countering the hedonistic fashions sweeping in from the West and building a bulwark against a decline in morale was one side of official concern. The other was the influence of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, particularly as the gay decade slid into the great worldwide Depression. This was preceded by a spectacular banking crisis in 1927 when the Suzuki Shoten, a trading company, collapsed over sugar deals with the Bank of Taiwan, taking it and several other banks down, among them the Fifteenth or Peers’ Bank. There were massive losses for the aristocracy, and a general run on banks nationwide that caused the failure of numerous companies.

  The settlement of a territorial dispute with Moscow had led to the withdrawal of Japanese troops from the northern half of Sakhalin island in exchange for oil rights, and the opening of a Soviet embassy in Tokyo in 1925, whose diplomats were closely watched.

  Much easier to observe was a noisier group of would-be Marxists evolving from the student debating societies at the Tokyo Imperial University and Waseda University. The threats to authority they presented then were more symbolic than lethal, as when a number of Marxist students disrupted a ceremony at Waseda held to mark the transformation of the student equestrian club into a military studies group with instruction from army officers. The vice-minister of the army was jeered off the stage. That led to the first police raid on the campus, to confiscate Marxist writings.

  In the political sphere, still meeting great objections from the liberal politicians and the surviving Meiji elders, a new mechanism of thought control was being introduced. A drastic new ‘peace preservation’ law was being enforced by an enhanced special ‘higher’ police department, known as the Tokko. Its officers were a new ‘thought police’ who aimed to ‘hear what has no sound and see what has no shape’.

  At the end of 1925, the appearance of posters attacking military education at the Imperial University in Kyoto precipitated a wave of raids on student dormitories and the homes of professors. Over the following four months dozens of people were arrested for possessing Marxist books. Almost 40 students, more than half from Kyoto, were charged with violating the Peace Preservation Law and Publication Law and given jail terms of up to a year or put on probation.

  In the first elections held under the universal male franchise, in February 1928, the authorities were alarmed at half a million votes going to parties deemed to be fronts for the Communist Party. Then the Tokko found out the party was regrouping underground and had held a secret meeting at a remote hot-spring resort. Its agents carried two waves of arrests over following weeks, pulling in more than 1500 suspects, and forcing the dissolution of the New Man Society that Ryusuke had been instrumental in helping to start.

  By then, the thought police were refining their strategy. The objective was not to imprison and punish, but to convert through a process known as the tenko, or confession. The thought criminals had to be protected from themselves, by being directed towards realisation of their errors. Every possible influence was brought to bear, with parents, former teachers and work colleagues brought in to visit the suspects. Keeping them in the cells until repentant was no legal problem, as the law allowed instant re-arrest for a new examination as soon as one term expired.

  Isolation, and the prospect of social ostracism, was enough to weaken the revolutionary resolve in most cases. For the seriously intransigent, the eventual trials resulted in life jail terms, the Shusui Kotoku case having alerted authorities to the danger of creating martyrs. But there were acts of public tenko by two party central committee members, who renounced the Comintern, supported annexation of weaker nations, and suggested a new communist party should owe loyalty to the emperor. It led to a torrent of contrition by rank and file party members.

  There was a more routine repression, as the Depression hit Japan hard in 1929, cutting rural incomes by two-thirds and putting millions of industrial workers out on the streets. The police used their new tear gas against workers mobbing the city electricity office in Tokyo. When the remaining communists started forming their own ‘red self-defence committees’, trying to attack police stations and rob banks, the police improved their armoury and protection. Versions of bullet-proof vests, helmets and shields started to appear. If deemed necessary the army was also called in, with lethal results when idled shipyard workers came out to demonstrate in Yokohama and Kobe.

  The police and the military were much more tolerant to the other elements attacking the fragile structure of parliamentary rule. The light sentences for the murderers of the anarchists at the Kameido police station and the failure to rebuke the groups responsible for the mass murder of Koreans gave a signal to the numerous right-wing groups that their activities were deemed patriotic.

  Politicians perceived as having surrendered vital Japanese interests or to have been corrupted by big capital came under increasing risk of assassination, along with their financial backers. The succession of the young new emperor, Hirohito, to the throne after his insane father even
tually passed away in 1926 gave a new focus to their loyalty.

  A German-influenced philosopher, Uesugi Shinkichi, articulated a doctrine of absolute authority residing in the emperor. His followers formed the Shichiseisha, or Seven Lives Society, and were soon disrupting lectures and debates at the Tokyo Imperial University, throwing chairs and brawling with leftist students.

  It gradually got much, much worse, as the hot-head groups proliferated under romantic names: Righteousness Corps of the Divine Land, the Shinpetai or Heavenly Soldiers, Ketsumeidan or Blood-Oath Brotherhood and so on. Their young fanatics would march up to politicians or businessmen and shoot them dead, then surrender immediately to police who handled them with respect. They welcomed their death sentences, by the rope for civilians or the firing squad for the young military and naval officers.

  Urging them on were equally fanatical Buddhist priests of the Nichiren sect. One stirred up a Chinese crowd in Shanghai in 1931 with his insulting rants. When the Chinese beat him to death, it was the excuse for the ‘Shanghai Incident’ where the Imperial navy sent in its marines and used its air wing to punish the Chinese quarter while the nervous Europeans looked on from the International Settlement. Another priest instigated the two young Ketsumeidan assassins who the next year shot dead the politician Inoue Junnosuke and the internationalist founder of the modern Mitsui zaibatsu, Dan Takuma. He also stirred up the young navy officers who murdered the prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, for having called back the navy from its Shanghai rampage. The priest had put them on his list of 20 targets for assassination to ‘purify’ Japan. He welcomed the trial as a platform for his ideas, which drew admiring comments in some of the press.

  Sections of the priesthood had in fact become a volunteer arm of Japan’s intelligence community, its shaven-headed bonzes roving far and wide over the mainland. Officers in the Kwantung army, ostensibly protecting the Japanese railway concession in Manchuria, staged bombings and other incidents to justify an extension of their control over the whole region. They ignored an admonition from the new emperor, and in 1931 orchestrated the formal separation of the area from China, setting up a subject state under the ‘restored’ last Manchu emperor, Pu Yi.

  A few leaders spoke out against the invasion of the Asian neighbour which had given Japan so much of its civilisation. The educationist Ozaki Yukio was one. Charles saw him on the opposite platform at Shimbashi Station not long after he spoke out, and raised his hat to him.

  It was a wild, unsettled time in Japan, where leaders of parties and the great industrial zaibatsu could be felled on the pavement outside their offices, where the police arrested tens of thousands in dawn raids every year, where companies went bankrupt, prices collapsed, savings disappeared and daughters were sold into brothels. Prominent writers committed suicide – Arishima Takeo in 1923 with his lover, the wife of a wealthy businessman, and in 1927 Akutagawa Ryunosuke, author of Rashomon.

  For those who sought a logic behind the rising passions and discontents – and there was a number of Western officials and journalists coming to look for it – the answer was that there were many explanations, but where loyalty to the emperor was concerned there was no logic, just pure emotion. The assassinations justified themselves. Killing, cutting out the impurity, was the end in itself.

  The public mood was turning against all things foreign, not just the Comintern. But Charles had some protection from being in close contact with some of the elements perceived by the authorities as the most virulent. A shared membership – of a class, a hometown, a company – provides bonds of loyalty and mutual help in most countries and Japan was no different. The South Manchurian Railway, known as the Mantetsu, was being developed into a huge industrial and development agency. Its many arms provided a refuge for dismissed extremists from the army – a general who’d led an ill-judged expedition into Siberia was made director of its newspaper, the colonel who staged the blowing up of the local Chinese warlord’s train in 1928 became a director of the railway itself, and the Kempeitai officer who had murdered Osugi and his family became the chairman of the Manchurian film company, and so on.

  But the company was also a sanctuary for a diverse crowd of scholars and activists interested in remaining involved with China and the challenge of transferring the Japanese model of development to the Asian mainland, even if they had their private reservations about the renewed Imperial cult. The railway had set up a new Information Section in 1927 under the son of a former army minister, later called the East Asia Economic Investigation Bureau. It recruited several adventurers, journalists, self-appointed spies and students of China, including some from the Chinese revolutionary and New Man Society stream.

  Several friends of Charles’, moved into jobs at the bureau, housed in the Mantetsu Tokyo office. Sceptics in the heart of the Imperial adventure, they provided many sardonic insights into events on the continent and some lucrative translation jobs for Charles during this time.

  Similarly, Charles’ idea of promoting Japanese culture to the West had not entirely died. During the latter part of the 1920s, he came to know a professor of literature at the Rissho University, Kato Asadori, and through him the head of the Shunjusha publishing house, a Mr Kanda, who was preparing a tour of kabuki theatre to America. Charles suggested writing a synopses of Japanese books that might be offered to foreign publishers for translation.

  Kato then suggested Charles try his hand translating the hugely popular novel series Dai-bosatsu Tōge. Charles thought he was joking. It was daunting in its sheer volume, heading towards thirty books with no conclusion in sight. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like it could explain the psyche of the country, and the equivocation of its turn from Oriental seclusion to embrace of the wider world.

  Charles had enjoyed the short serial novels of Nakazato Kaizan that had started coming out in 1913, the title referring to the mountain pass directly west of Tokyo that had been a backroad to the former Imperial capital Kyoto, more arduous than the more travelled coastal highway and much less safe from banditry, but allowing journeys less subject to the scrutiny of the shogunate’s spies and gatekeepers.

  Dai-bosatsu Tōge was also known as the ‘Great Bodhisattva Pass’ after the enlightened beings who, on the point of reaching the ultimate perfection of the Buddha, selflessly hang back in the world to help others in their struggle. In Nakazato’s writing, it became an overarching symbol of a purpose and pattern to the good and evil, the beauty and the ugliness he wrote about, and he made the pass itself, like the position of the bodhisattva at the junction of life and bliss, the point of transition in many episodes of his rambling narrative.

  It was set in the Japan of about 60 years before the time Charles started reading the novels on his regular travels between Tokyo and home in Yokohama. Around the year 1863, the order that had held Japan for more than three centuries was crumbling. The Tokugawa shogunate was unable to repel the Westerners who arrived with their smoking steamships, Gatling guns and explosive shells; they had won port concessions and lodged themselves, like Charles’ father in Yokohama, Nagasaki or Kobe. The ties of loyalty between the shogun, the daimyo or feudal lords, and their retinues of samurai were frayed. The call to ‘restore the emperor, expel the barbarian’ gripped the minds of many samurai, who drifted away from their lords to form bands of restorationists plotting and preparing in the inns of Kyoto, while the shogunate sent down levies of skilled swordsmen to fight them. Taking advantage of the chaos were numerous robbers, blackmailers and psychopaths masquerading as samurai of honour. Nakazato painted a vivid picture of an ancient, courtly city gripped by fear and violence. Tonsured heads rolled in streets that reeked of freshly gushing blood. Cabals of samurai plotted in the elegant buildings of the Shimabara pleasure quarter, attended by courtesans in elaborate coiffures and exquisite kimonos who tottered on black lacquered sandals. Their enemies in rival factions slashed through paper-walls in surprise attacks as they caroused.

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nbsp; In his evenings Charles would set to work translating the stories, dictionaries to hand. He got to know Nakazato, whose laconic speech, sharp gaze and firm courtesy spoke of his immense insight. The Japanese was crystal clear to Charles. It was nearly all action and dialogue. But the English, how he wrestled with that! Looking at it much later, even he could see the flow of sentences was not native, and some chosen words for the Japanese were antiquated or too narrow in meaning.

  For two years Charles half-lived in this imagined Japan on the edge of transition, as the contemporary Japan outside went through its own chaotic shift. The main character of the series, Tsukue Ryunosuke, a samurai and master swordsman, fascinated Charles in much the same way as he enthralled the Japanese public, eventually inspiring a genre of unauthorised movies. Charles came to see Ryunosuke as being emblematic of the current era, as the young fanatical believers in the Japanese ‘essence’ and the ‘Imperial way’ levelled their pistols and swords at leaders trying to guide Japanese through international diplomacy and commerce.

  To Charles, Ryunosuke may have unconsciously also reflected himself: his own disconnection from his ancestors, his wild ambitions, his readiness to serve under whatever colours would have him, and … his own inability to love, it seemed. Like nearly all the prosperous men of his time and place, Charles took advantage of the young women expected to serve the male guests at their places of employment, the restaurants and coffee houses in the cities, the inns at the hot-spring resorts where the frequent conferences, reunions and study sessions were held. His two rules were to keep a proper distance from his female students, and not to try to ‘break’ a virgin.

  Then into his life came Otsubo Suga. Daughter of a renowned calligrapher and classical scholar in Kurume, on the island of Kyushu, she had been pushed almost as far as possible for a woman in the modern education system, graduating from the Women’s Higher Normal School at Ochanomizu in Tokyo in 1923 with a speciality in sciences. From there she had moved into teaching positions, with the Peers’ School in Tokyo and then with a government girl’s high school near Yokohama.