War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

By then John was building his own life in Singapore. Japan was a distant memory for him. After work with Proud as a cipher clerk, he had got ex-serviceman’s assistance to enrol at the Raffles College, the precursor of Singapore’s university, when it resumed in October 1946. Rather than Japan or Australia, he was rapidly putting down roots in this created colony where a mixture of races was not so much of a stigma. He had joined a church and lined up a job with a big British firm. It was somewhere he felt he belonged.

  To Charles, Singapore was another place of failure, disappointment and rejection. With the help of George Sansom, who used his influence with the occupation authorities, he obtained permission to enter and reside in Japan. When the war crimes trials finally ended, Charles took a ship to Yokohama. At the end of 1948 he put down his single bag, containing a few clothes, his dog-eared copies of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and his campaign diary, on the floor of Eddie’s little shack in Tsurumi.

  He was 60 years old. He wondered what kind of new start could be waiting.

  One day that winter, as the family huddled around the stove, there came a knock on the door and a call from a woman’s voice. The visitor came in, unwrapping a coat and scarf – it was Suga, the lover Charles had farewelled in Tokyo all those turbulent years before, now a sturdy middle-aged figure with firmer lines of authority in her face.

  How she found Charles he would never know. She claimed it was just intuition that convinced her he was still alive and would return to Japan at that time and to that place. She had stayed at her last teaching post as principal of the Sagami girls’ high school until classes were suspended in the final weeks of the war. Then she’d gone back to the family home at Kurume, to stay with her brother’s family and their elderly father, the calligrapher.

  The dialogue between them – about the war, the character of the Japanese, the difference between East and West – became the dominant conversation at Tsurumi. So, when the time came for Charles to travel down to Kyoto to start writing for the newspaper a couple of weeks later, it seemed only natural for her to go with him. They found an old two-storey wooden house in a side-street of the inner city, only a few blocks from many of the places depicted in the Dai-bosatsu Tōge saga, mercifully intact thanks to Kyoto’s exemption from bombing that America’s scholars of Japan had gained from their government.

  The editors and readers of the Kyoto Shimbun politely absorbed Charles’ columns many of which pointed out where Japan had left the path of enlightenment and become arrogant. He spoke frequently at the Kansai Asiatic Society, to a mixed audience of Japanese and some of the older foreigners who had returned. When he put his columns into a book titled The Future of Japan, it got respectful reviews including one from the elderly liberal politician Ozaki Yukio, to whom Charles had tipped his hat in the 1930s. He and Suga kept up their constant dialogue and chatter, often quipping back and forth in improvised haiku or entering long and comical monologues in the rakugo style.

  But the fall of China to the communists and the outbreak of war in Korea shifted the mood of self-censure. The Occupation came to an end. From out of hiding in Thailand came Tsuji Masanobu, the mastermind of the ‘clean sweep’ massacre in Singapore. He stood for election for the new conservative grouping, and won a seat in the Diet. Charles got the Asiatic Society to send him a flattering invitation to speak, and he agreed. But he must have got wind of the grilling that awaited, and cancelled at the last minute, pleading a car breakdown.

  Yesterday’s enemies and villains became today’s friends and assets. Eddie impressed the Americans so much they recruited him to work as an agent with their army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Kobe. He and his family moved down to stay with Charles and Suga. Leonie became the housekeeper in effect, as Suga had not been brought up for cooking and cleaning and had imperious ways from her life as a school principal.

  A couple of years later the household was enlarged even further. Suga’s brother had been captured by the Soviet Army in Manchuria, where he had settled, and was taken off to a labour camp in Siberia where he died. His wife and two small children had been evacuated to Japan and returned to the Otsubo family home in Kurume, where she struggled along, working as a housemaid and sewing to support them all. She died of exhaustion and illness. The boy, Daikichiro, and daughter, Akiko, came up from Kurume to live with Charles and Suga, who put them through the remainder of their schooling. Though Charles and Suga were the formal guardians, Eddie and Leonie became their elder siblings, mentors and friends.

  Eddie commuted on the railway to his work down in Kobe. He was mysterious about it, but Charles gathered it involved penetration of the Japanese communist party, leftist trade unions and the pro-Kim Il-Sung section of the local Korean community.

  The Americans worked closely with the Japanese police, who in turn had the support of the main yakuza gang in the city, the Yamaguchi-gumi, ready to answer violence with violence in the streets. Eddie would disappear for days, staying in the CIC safehouses, picking up the ‘dead drop’ messages from his informants left in the chinks of walls or under stones, drinking with the police and the gangsters.

  Sometimes his American colleagues would come back to the Bavier house for long poker games, with Leonie cooking a Malay sambal for all. Uncle Victor, Eddie’s partner in the black market, moved down to stay with them too, until his business took off in a legitimate way after a well-judged marriage to a former Miss Kobe.

  At separate times, Eddie’s former Kempeitai comrades would also turn up for poker games. All those in Singapore jails had their sentences commuted in 1950, including the unit commander Onishi, and were repatriated. The British had turned their attention to fighting communists too. The Onishi butai formed its own veterans’ association. Eddie went to their maudlin get-togethers at the less-fancy hot spring resorts. They would all wear garish yukata, sing war songs and outrageously woo the middle-aged waitresses cheerfully serving the banquet and pouring the sake. On occasion, they would go to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, where the Kempeitai had its own memorial on one side of the main avenue.

  In 1958, the Americans withdrew from their counter-intelligence role in the Japanese population, and the CIC went back to the bases. Eddie found a new job with a shipping company in the port of Yokkaichi, close enough for he and Leonie to send their children, who now included their son Eric, to the Catholic school in Tsu, called St Joseph’s like the one he and John had attended in Yokohama.

  Gradually the crowd in the Kyoto house thinned out. Suga replaced the children with pet dogs she collected from the streets. The Western suit, collar and tie that Charles kept for visits to the British consulate remained in the cupboard. He moved about in his indigo-dyed kimono. His day still started at dawn with a splash of cold water in the yard, then a walk to the park near the Imperial palace with five or six dogs tugging him along on their leads. In the evening he would cross the road to the sento for his bath.

  He wrote less and less for the Kyoto Shimbun, and started trying to write the story of his life. The pages piled up, yet somehow the early days in Yokohama were the most vivid and he lingered among the characters who loomed large in his life then: Chika, Mr Mishima, the maids O-Ito and O-Koto.

  Walking the dogs near the palace one dim winter morning, he thought he heard a woman’s voice call out his name: ‘Hachisaburo!’ But it must have been a crow. Charles turned and looked toward the towering dark green trees. There was nobody there.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Sydney 2014

  The long trail to find out the story of Charles Bavier started in Tokyo in 1983 and is still full of significant gaps three decades later.

  After reading the contents of the box left with me by my German colleague Sebastian Fraubenius, the first step was to ring Charles’ elder son, Edward Bavier, at the number in Singapore on his name card. He was coming to Tokyo shortly and agreed to meet. He turned out to be an older version of the smiling Eurasian in the photograph. His story put
more astonishing detail into his father’s journey.

  In the CV, written to smooth his acceptance back into Japan after the Second World War, Charles Bavier had been deliberately vague about his role in Singapore before its fall, and in Australia afterwards. As we have seen, he had actually worked for British counter-intelligence against Japan and had got out of Singapore just before it fell in February 1942. He had spent the rest of the war years in Melbourne and Brisbane, working on propaganda like the leaflets I found in the box.

  On my way back to Australia at the end of my Tokyo posting in 1983, I called at the little bungalow in the Singapore suburbs where Eddie and Leonie then lived, Eddie working for an oddly named company, Oxalis Shipping. He was open about his wartime role, his trial and imprisonment.

  John Bavier was also in Singapore. He had retired from his job with the British chemical firm ICI and devoted himself to church work. Where Eddie was outgoing, John was shy and reticent. I dragged some detail of his Bougainville experience out of him. The meetings with the two sons provided an immediate newspaper story about two brothers who found themselves fighting on different sides of the war, the irony of circumstances that made one a hero, the other a war criminal.

  Eddie belonged to an association of the veterans of his old Kempeitai unit, the Onishi Butai. He gave me a membership list. On a return visit to Japan, my friend and former interpreter Hiroko Katayama arranged visits with several of them.

  Eddie’s immediate superior, former sergeant-major Ishibe, received us at his house on the fringes of Tokyo, and served coffee on a patio surrounded by exotic plants and bonsai. Ishibe spoke fondly of Eddie, and acknowledged his own time in Changi without rancour. ‘Of course we used a bit of torture to get them to talk,’ he said. ‘Nothing too serious – a wind-up telephone and wires, or a hose down the throat. It usually worked, without permanent harm.’ In a downmarket shopping arcade near Osaka Station, we met another old Kempeitai soldier, who spoke of the Japanese sweep down Malaysia in December 1941, and how he had beheaded suspected informers for the British during the advance. It was hard to believe that this harmless suburban man before me, a shopkeeper in a shabby suit and spectacles, had once swept off heads with his samurai-type sword.

  Eddie had much more to tell. But then he died suddenly in 1987, aged only 65, during heart surgery. It seemed unlikely I would get much more out of John Bavier, who died in 2004. Charles Bavier himself had died in 1977, and Otsubo Suga in 1984, their ashes interred together at the Umamachi-dani, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto.

  Gradually, Charles’ character started to emerge. In Yokohama I met Sadaichi or ‘Sam’ Sakai, the elder half-brother of Eddie and John who was a child of their Japanese mother’s first marriage. Sam was a tall, laconic man who spoke excellent English with an American accent. He told me a lot about Charles Bavier, not all of it favourable. The man had been an inveterate philanderer. Suga, the Japanese woman he had married on his final return to Japan, had been a pupil of the first wife Naka, Sam believed.

  In Melbourne, John Proud, the head of the propaganda unit that had employed Bavier had already died. After FELO (the Far Eastern Liaison Office) wound up in 1945, he went on to run information activities for the British in many parts of the world and broadcast commentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He spent much of 1948–49 in Shanghai, escaping in a small ship just before communist forces took the city. Later he ran a radio station in Cyprus during the Greek Cypriot uprising. He died in 1979. His deputy Paul McGuire became Australia’s ambassador to Italy. He died in 1978. Alfred Deakin Brookes became the first head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and held that position from 1952 to 1957. He died in 2005.

  Proud’s widow, Coral, recalled Bavier as a mysterious presence at FELO, who kept his Japanese wife hidden in their home. She recalled he worked in Brisbane with a Japanese officer known only as ‘George’. Her friend Helen Ferber, a linguist who had worked alongside Bavier in the shortwave broadcasting office in Collins Street, recalled a man with a reputation as a ‘bottom-pincher’ who paid unwelcome attentions to some of the women in the office.

  The bundle of manuscript titled ‘Hachisaburo’ followed me around postings, nagging at me in the back of my mind, but the trails had gone cold, the contemporaries always just deceased when I started looking for them. Without more supporting material and evidence, how to write up the life of this man?

  Yet re-reading of the manuscript threw up more clues, in forward references and passing comments. The arrival of the internet and the search engine began eliciting more sources. Memoirs were being published, or put up on war history websites. At the National Library of Australia, I stumbled upon a collection of papers left by the late Harold Williams, an Australian businessman and amateur historian long resident in Kobe, which included a longer version of Bavier’s memoir, taking his story a little further forward, plus some of Williams’ own comments (generally dismissive and sceptical) about his postwar encounters with Bavier at the Asiatic Society in Kyoto. Former secret archives in Britain and Australia were opened, backgrounding chapters in Bavier’s life, including hints about his 1938–42 service for MI5 in Malaya and Singapore, and his work at FELO in Melbourne and Brisbane. Many of the FELO records survived culling and are now available at the National Archives of Australia.

  The Australian War Memorial archive also revealed the identity of the man John Proud’s widow, Coral Proud remembered only as ‘George’. For years I wondered what had motivated this man to work for his country’s enemies, even in a way aimed at limiting the sacrifice of Japanese lives. Was he a member of Japan’s communist movement, driven underground before the war? Or one of the Christian minority, who had pursued their faith in hidden ‘house churches’ since the suppression and martyrdoms of the early 17th century? It turned out it was neither. Through contacts in the journalism circles of Tokyo, I made contact with the family of Inagaki Riichi, the man who was ‘George’, and found out more about him and his subsequent life. I wish I’d found him before he died. Inagaki was truly a man of heroic independence and integrity.

  After the war Inagaki returned quietly to Japan with repatriated prisoners of war and took up a career in magazine publishing. He kept his secret but wrote under a pseudonym about his disillusionment with Japan’s war aims while in New Guinea, for the magazine Chuo Koron. Adored by his family and cheerful, he seemed ‘to carry a deep sorrow inside him’, according to his niece Inagaki Nobuko. He died in 2004, predeceased by his wife. In accordance with his wishes, their ashes were scattered in the sea ‘because the ocean has no borders’.

  Bavier is fondly remembered by Eddie’s three children who’d all lived in the same house in Kyoto for some years. The other descendants of his Swiss father, Edouard de Bavier, living in several parts of Europe, had also come to accept his paternity. The identity of his mother remains a mystery. The chateau at Dully was sold in the 1950s and has now been converted into apartments. Bavierville at Negishi has long disappeared, its site covered with apartments.

  *

  Charles Bavier was interesting, but what of his significance? To follow his story through the tumultuous events of the early 20th century in Asia is an education in itself. The result is a deeper understanding of the historical memories that influence the behaviour and thinking of the modern states that emerged from the post-Imperial order. Through his experiences we can learn much about the relationships between Japan, China and Korea, between the different races of Southeast Asia, about the shaping of many of the region’s nations, and about the awakening perceptions of the Western world, Australia and New Zealand in particular, about the new regional order now unmistakeable in Asia.

  But the impact of the man himself? Bavier was a man of deep thought, but narrow education, prone until late in life to juvenile fantasies of military grandeur. At the end, Bavier probably thought of himself as a failure, by not reaching the military renown he had craved. His experiences in soldieri
ng all ended ignominiously. He is a psychological case study: raised as an obvious alien in a highly exclusive culture, aware of his father’s repudiation of him, to his death not knowing the identity of his birth mother. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bavier was a flawed character to modern eyes, especially in his less-than-admirable attitudes to women and his awkwardness in interactions with the Western mind.

  But it was this unique psychological make-up which made him a man of the hour in 1942–45. Bavier was a Japanese in a European skin. The Nisei (second-generation Japanese–Americans), brought in as interpreters for the Allies in the Pacific were already American in a Japanese skin. The children of pineapple and sugarcane farmers for the most part, mostly from southern Japan, few of them had the deep fluency of Bavier in high-level Japanese and probably none his knowledge of Japanese classical and contemporary culture. His is still the only English translation of Dai-botsatsu Tōge, which inspired several postwar samurai movies. Sakaguchi Harumi, a former United Nations official in Papua New Guinea and historian of the Pacific War in his retirement, had been led to Bavier’s story by meeting a Japanese war veteran who kept one leaflet written by Bavier in his possession because it had made a huge impact on him at the time. Sydney Crawcour, emeritus professor of Japanese at the Australian National University, met Bavier in Melbourne in 1942 while a very young army recruit starting Japanese language training, and again in Brisbane during the war, and visited Bavier and Suga in Kyoto during the 1950s. He remembers a man with a vast grounding in Japanese and Chinese classical literature.

  Such cultural penetration allowed Bavier to craft leaflets and broadcasts that got into Japanese minds, and made some of them think about an alternative to blind sacrifice. The result was the saving of thousands of lives in the South-West Pacific – not just the 4000 Japanese who surrendered or allowed themselves to be captured, but as many or more Allied soldiers who otherwise would have been taken with them. That, after all, is not a bad achievement.