War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  Determined, strongly built, with the exotic look of many Kyushu people, she was a Japanese version of the bluestocking, dressed most of the time in a kimono of fine, indigo-dyed cotton, with her hair piled up quite loosely with a tortoiseshell comb. She came to improve her English but soon became Charles’ teacher too, probing all his pronouncements on Japan and arguing the contrary case. He came to depend on their twice-weekly sessions on the terrace of her boarding house, or decorously in the owner’s formal back room if the weather was cold, to explore his thinking on the Nakazato book. There was no subject she shrank away from, in the sexual and moral questions of the adultery, prostitution, rivalry, betrayal and murder in its pages.

  One day, when neither of them had classes, they arranged to meet at a tea house in Yokohama. It was a beautiful still and warm day. Instead of her usual plain blue, Suga was wearing a kimono patterned with purple morning glory flowers. On an impulse, Charles suggested a walk in the country instead of going into the tea house. They took a train towards Kamakura and got off at a little station, then headed up a hill beyond the few houses to an isolated clump of trees. They stopped to look at the wide calm expanse of Sagami Bay. Suga turned to face him and looked up directly into his eyes, never wavering. She seemed to move closer without taking a step. There and then, Charles broke both his rules.

  Naka became quite jealous of Charles’ increasing distance. Her two older boys were now in their senior school years with the Alsatian fathers up at St Joseph’s on the Bluff, and were starting to pull away from Charles. At one point Shun, who was ill with tuberculosis, attacked him on some small grievance and Charles left the house to get one of Naka’s family to come over and talk him down from his rage.

  When the translation of the first three of Nakazato’s books came out in a single volume as Great Bodhisattva Pass, which was celebrated with a convivial party in 1929, Suga was in his mind rather than Naka. This wasn’t Charles’ only concern though. By this time, even his oldest Japanese acquaintances were starting to keep their distance when in public or among strangers.

  The number of arrests throughout Japan multiplied, and celebrity gave no immunity. The last attempt by the communists to regroup was smashed. Two of the party’s central committee members were tortured by their own colleagues on suspicion of being police spies. One who avoided execution and made his escape did actually surface to reveal he had indeed been informing for the Tokko.

  The police arrested Kobayashi Takiji, the most famous ‘proletarian’ writer whose novel about life aboard a crab-fishing factory ship in the freezing Okhotsk Sea had been a sensation in 1929. He died in the cells – of a heart attack, the police said, but no hospital would do an autopsy and his family said the body was battered and bruised, with burn marks on the forehead, nail or drill holes in the thighs and broken fingers.

  At the Tokyo Imperial University, the followers of the ideologue of Imperial absolutism, Uesugi, harried the constitutional scholar Minobe Tatsikichi over his paper putting the theory that the emperor was an organ of state. The government sought a way out by appointing Minobe to the House of Peers in the Diet, on condition that he voluntarily retire from the university. But it did not end there. The ultra-nationalist Kokuhonsha, or National Foundation Society, continued the attack against Minobe in the parliament and launched actions against him in the courts. A group of army reservists came and burnt his books in front of the Meiji shrine. The Diet’s lower house passed a resolution condemning the organ-of-state theory. When the procurators called in Minobe for repeated questioning, some were his former students: they avoided calling him by the respectful term sensei and used a more neutral word meaning ‘doctor’. In the end Minobe issued a written admission of error and resigned from the parliament.

  Nothing could stop the extremists in the military. A colonel from the army’s Imperial Way faction cut down a general from the moderate group known as the ‘Control Faction’ or Toseiha, Nagata Tetsuzan, with his sword, and was duly put before a firing squad. Six months later came the infamous Ni-Ni-Roku affair, named for numbers in the date 26 February, when whole army units took over the centre of Tokyo and killed some of the cabinet with the intention of then presenting themselves as the true alternative government to Hirohito, the emperor.

  Like millions of other people in the snowbound and curfewed capital, Charles waited for results of fighting and manoeuvres conducted around the Imperial palace until the coup d’état was quelled, chiefly on the initiative of Hirohito himself. There were court martials and executions by firing squad, including that of an old Shanghai acquaintance Kita Terujiro. The rightwing Kokuhonsha which had harried Professor Minobe was hastily disbanded. But the rebels became heroes in many quarters, admired for their selfless ‘purity’. Their proponents used the argument that the emperor had been isolated and misinformed by a cabal of corrupt politicians and plutocrats intent on selling out Japan’s vital interests to foreigners.

  Charles found his own position less favourable. In 1933, the government decided to end the premium that had been put on foreign expertise since Meiji times. The rate of remuneration for foreign teachers in government schools, such as himself, was cut to a quarter of what had been paid previously.

  Strange men began striking up conversations with Charles in railway carriages or coffee shops, making provocative statements against the British or Americans in an evident attempt to get him to make a counter-argument. The lobby of the Imperial Hotel, where he sometimes went to meet visitors, had snoopers almost tripping over each other – from the Home Office, the Gaimusho, the army and the navy, and increasingly the German and Italian embassies.

  Posters went up warning people against foreign spies, portrayed as Sherlock Holmes–like figures in deerstalker hats. Sometimes school children would follow Charles and other non-Japanese in the street chanting ‘Spy, spy, spy’. They were not always rebuked by elders. When they travelled around as a family, Naka was glared at. At Nagoya Station once, changing for the line down to Ise, an army officer looked at her with ill-concealed contempt. Occasionally there were obscene comments hissed at her in crowded railway carriages.

  Mysterious accidents and illnesses began striking down foreigners with the language skills and cultural insights that might have allowed them to penetrate the façade put up by the official information program. The city became drab. Girls were rebuked for wearing Western clothes and make-up. The coloured under-kimono disappeared in favour of white, signifying wifely purity. Baroness Ishimoto, an advocate of birth control methods and education, came under attack from a government intent on building the population as rapidly as possible, to fill the ranks of conscripts and provide the millions of settlers planned for the mirror-villages each Japanese neighbourhood and hamlet was encouraged to sponsor in Manchuria.

  After Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in outrage at the criticism of its conduct in Manchuria by the Lytton Commission, the Gaimusho increased efforts to build favourable press coverage, bringing in a succession of foreign journalists and writers on guided tours. They were shown the deepest courtesy, lavished with hospitality, and conducted around the modern institutions and industry that Japanese rule had brought to Korea and Manchuria. Many went away and duly reported that Japan was a most misunderstood nation, simply trying to bring the benefits of science and welfare to its benighted neighbours trapped in superstition. One journalist from The Sydney Morning Herald swallowed the line from the Mantetsu’s glib public relations man, Henry Kinney, about Lytton being a ‘hectoring racist’.

  Officials were nervous about these guests straying outside the bounds of their stage-managed itinerary and meeting up with local sources of alternative information. Charles’ name must have been passed around, because the telephone calls kept coming from these visitors, and the blame came to him for any critical points in their published reports.

  The flow of naval officers coming to him for English lessons had long since stopped. At Yokosuka, su
rveillance was so close that it became pointless to visit anymore. Then in the spring of 1936 came a sudden raid on Charles’ house at Honmoku by the naval version of the Kempeitai, whose officials left the house in disarray and carried off boxes of his writings and reference materials.

  Not long afterwards, attending a reception at the Tokyo Club in Toranomon, Charles was relieving himself in the lavatory when the adjacent place was taken by a middle-aged Japanese man.

  ‘Bavier-san, what are you waiting for?’ he probed. Charles took a quick sideways glance. It was one of his old pupils from the Yokosuka naval base, Koga Minekichi, by then a rear-admiral getting more frequent mention in the newspapers.

  ‘Many of my colleagues think you’re a spy,’ he said. ‘You have no protection. Get out now, while you can,’ he said, before fastening his trousers and disappearing quickly back into the party.

  Chapter 12

  ISLAND FORTRESS

  Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

  — The Art of War by Sun Tzu

  Hong Kong–Singapore 1936–42

  But where to go? Charles contemplated his options. As the Japanese had undoubtedly noted, he would make a very good spy for the British or Australians, but the question of his citizenship was still hanging over him.

  While he was preparing to marry Naka back in 1921, he’d been informed by the British consulate in Yokohama – there would not be an independent Australian mission in Japan for another 15 years – that it could not carry out the ceremony or register the marriage, as his naturalisation as a British citizen was only ‘local’ to Australia.

  At the time Charles had written off letters to the highest authority he could think of in Melbourne, the Governor-General’s executive council, applying to have his citizenship made ‘Imperial’. First came a reply from a secretary for immigration that it would not be possible to lodge an application for Imperial status as he had not been resident in Australia for the previous year, as required. Then a terse note from the viceroy’s secretary that any children of their marriage would not be recognised as British citizens.

  Five years later, in September 1926, Charles had been informed by the consulate that as he had been outside British jurisdictions for seven years, even his local naturalisation was subject to revocation under Australian law. He sent off another letter querying this, and asking now whether if he came back to Australia, Naka and their two boys would be allowed to settle.

  A very cold letter came from an assistant secretary in the Australian Immigration Department confirming that this was the case, unless he could show he was on some mission of service to British interests or had maintained a ‘substantial connection with His Majesty’s dominions’.

  As you have lived in Japan since 1919 your certificate is liable to revocation early next year if you continue to reside outside of British territory … With regard to the question of the admission of your Japanese wife and your children into Australia, I have to inform you that in view of the ‘White Australia’ policy it is regretted that authority cannot be granted for them to enter and settle in this country.

  Charles’ Australian citizenship was duly revoked in early 1927. With his father dead, the chances of his Swiss paternity being acknowledged had also disappeared. He had been left with simply the entry of his birth in Chika Sakai’s family register, her koseki, as having been born to her at Negishi – an entry she always insisted was a fiction of convenience. At the time Charles had gotten himself re-registered as a Japanese citizen, then went to the British consulate to hand in his British passport and the impressive certificate of naturalisation under which he’d entered the Australian Army and served at Lone Pine.

  Now in 1936, with Japan repudiating him too, he spent the next few months collecting testimonial letters from the schools where he taught, telling the principals that he was thinking of moving abroad to further the understanding of Japanese culture and thereby perhaps reduce tensions with the Western powers. It was quite plausible: the government had decided on the diplomacy Charles had previously suggested when he returned to Japan, and had set up a Society for International Cultural Relations, though now it was more a cover for its expansion across Asia and another vehicle for espionage.

  In August of 1936, Charles obtained a Japanese passport. He said a few farewells but made no big announcement. He and Suga stole a last night together at a small inn in the low-city side of Tokyo by the Sumida River. They arrived separately, Charles after some random tram journeys to throw off any surveillance. In the morning, Suga embraced him fiercely, her eyes wet with tears, then walked off, head high, not looking back. He watched her disappear round the corner. Charles wondered if he would ever see her again and felt a wrench in his heart he thought immune to feeling.

  With Naka, he packed up the house quickly. Shun had gone down to Kyushu to work and was already independent. Sadaichi had just turned 20 years of age and was about to do his army service. He moved in with his uncle at Tsurumi. They said goodbye, not knowing this was the last time Naka would see her older boys, and boarded an NYK ship. They sailed out of Yokohama and watched Mount Fuji, illuminated by the late afternoon sun, gradually disappear.

  They were heading for Hong Kong. It seemed the best option. There would be plenty of people wanting to learn about Japan, no restriction on the entry of non-white people, and Charles could begin again the residency that might earn a new British passport. Among his testimonials was a letter from George Sansom at the British Embassy. Sansom was by then the pre-eminent scholar of Japan in the diplomatic service, and a superb linguist. Charles had met him in the 1920s at an historical study group meeting in the Japanese Language and Culture Academy started by Viscount Fukuoka. He’d been kind and encouraging when they’d met on later occasions.

  Sansom had mentioned a particular person Charles should contact after settling in. So, after moving into a small flat in Kowloon, getting the boys enrolled in La Salle College, and getting the first responses from interested students following an advertisement he placed in the South China Morning Post, Charles went along to see this person.

  Charles Drage had an office in the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Building, with a plaque by the outer door declaring him as Commercial Advisor to the Governor. Charles handed Sansom’s letter to a secretary, an English woman with a crisp accent, and waited. After 15 minutes an inner door opened, a man in the officer’s uniform of a shipping line left, and the secretary asked him to go in.

  Drage came around from behind a desk quite bare except for two telephones. The room had a bookshelf and cabinet, a few semi-comfortable chairs and photographs of ships on the wall. Drage himself had a cheerful manner and a weather-beaten face that came, Charles later learnt, from a career in the navy.

  ‘So you know George, do you?’ he asked, after ushering Charles to a seat. ‘Very sound man. Very useful to us to try to work out what our Japanese friends are up to. He told us you were coming.’

  Over the next half hour Drage questioned Charles about his past, and especially about his motives for leaving Japan. He took a few notes, most intently when he described the period of his military service in Australia, even asking for precise dates. He gave a vague description of his own role, as ‘keeping an eye open’ for the government on ‘anything coming up that it should know about’.

  ‘Well, you could be most useful, Mr Bavier,’ he said, standing up and thrusting out his hand. ‘I’ll circulate your name around a few offices and check to see what’s offering. Meanwhile, I’d keep our meeting quiet, and if you come across any Japanese chaps, let them do the talking.’

  Charles was soon distracted as his teaching work quickly built up. The family settled into a routine of getting the boys to their school before Charles went off to meet his students at their offices. It was a greatly changed city from the Hong Kong he’d encountered 25 years earlier. There were new offices in the art d
eco style, air-conditioned shopping arcades had replaced many of the long colonnaded counting houses on the island side, and behind them apartments climbed the steep slopes of The Peak.

  The general attitude towards Japan and the Japanese had also noticeably cooled. A young army subaltern studying with Charles hastily snatched away an infantry manual he’d idly picked up from a table while waiting for him to get ready, even though it was little different to what had been handed out to the rank and file in the old 23rd Battalion. Naka started getting cold looks and brusque treatment from the stallholders in the market. Even before the Shanghai Incident initiated an open war between Japan and China, a year after their arrival, she had stopped wearing her kimonos outside the house, and went out in public in the long floral dresses favoured by Eurasian women.

  Although they didn’t mingle very much with the British residents, except for short encounters at the boys’ school, it soon became evident that authorities were waking up to Hong Kong’s vulnerability, once the Japanese started extending their naval operations and supply bases down the Fukien coast. The armed services were concentrating their Japanese linguists in the colony. Occasionally Charles recognised faces from embassy gatherings and other meetings in Tokyo and Yokohama.

  Charles and Naka bought a radio set with a shortwave band, and would listen to the evening broadcasts – the service in Japanese much more stridently patriotic than the English one. Naka found several Japanese-owned shops, a photographic studio and a hairdressing salon run by an urbane and gossipy Japanese man. Keeping in mind Drage’s caution, Charles tended to stand aloof when they went into these places together, pretending he was not keeping up with the conversation. As a result he heard more than intended, and picked up a pattern of inquiry in the chatter, one directed at finding out the comings and goings in the garrison and colonial administration.