The China Lover E-Book

Ian Buruma

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 618

Beschreibung

When Sidney Vanoven is sent to occupied Japan, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it is his dream posting. By day, he works in the censor's office watching Japanese films; at night he immerses himself in the sensual pleasures of Tokyo. His job leads him into the circle of the beautiful film star Shirley Yamaguchi, a passionate and indomitable woman, whose wartime secrets hint at deception and betrayal. As he learns more of her story it seems to echo Japan's own dark secret. In The China Lover, Ian Buruma has created an exhilarating saga of war-torn Japan that is epic in scale, richly imagined and vividly populated. It is quite simply unforgettable.

Leseprobe

THE CHINA LOVER

Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in New York state. His previous books include God’s Dust, Bad Elements, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania and Murder in Amsterdam, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Current Interest Book and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He was the recipient of the 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award, which honoured him for his distinguished body of work, and the 2008 Erasmus Prize.

‘Passionate and intimate’ James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday

‘An exciting and revealing novel… Strange and beguiling’ Susanna Jones, Literary Review

‘Buruma skillfully weaves his tale around the real events of Yoshiko’s extraordinary life, with well-known names such as Frank Capra, Truman Capote and Sam Fuller appearing among the supporting cast… Insightful and intriguing’ John Walshe, Sunday Business Post

‘With a sharp yet generous eye, Buruma explores the moods and sensibilities of the movie business in wartime Shanghai and postwar Tokyo… The China Lover overflows with intriguing characters… finely drawn and true to the spirit of the history it covers.’ Seth Faison, Los Angeles Times

ALSO BY IAN BURUMA

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

Conversations with John Schlesinger

Occidentalism: A Secret History of Anti-Westernism

Inventing Japan: From Empire to Economic Miracle 1853–1964

Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing

Anglomania: A European Love Affair

The Missionary and the Libertine: Love and War in East and West

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Japan and Germany

A Japanese Mirror: Heroes and Villains of Japanese Culture

Playing the Game

God’s Dust: A Modern Asian Journey

Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers, Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes

The Japanese Tattoo

First published in the United States in 2008 byThe Penguin Press, 75 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2014by Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Ian Buruma, 2008

The moral right of Ian Buruma to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 9781782395614

Designed by Sophie Huntwork

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondon WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Eri

Contents

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part Two

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part Three

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Acknowledgments

PART ONE

   1   

THERE WAS A time, hard to imagine now, when the Japanese fell in love with China. Well, not all Japanese, of course, but enough to be able to speak of a China Boom. Like all such crazes in my country, the China Boom was only a fleeting thing; here today and gone tomorrow. But it was spectacular while it lasted. The boom hit the country in the autumn of 1940, just as our foolish army was getting trapped in a quagmire of its own making. Nanking had fallen a few years before. Our bombers were roughing up Chungking. But all to no purpose. Frankly, we were like a tuna fish trying to eat a whale.

Back in Tokyo, the humid summer heat lingered unpleasantly. Asakusa, usually so full of life, looked exhausted, as though people no longer had the energy to enjoy themselves. Most of the action had moved west anyway, to the Ginza area, but even there a gloomy atmosphere hung heavily in the sultry air: the coffeehouses were half empty; bars had fallen on hard times; the food in the restaurants didn’t taste as good as before. Joy was in any case, if not yet strictly forbidden, officially discouraged, as “unpatriotic.”

Then came that crazy China Boom, like a rainbow in a dark gray sky. Films set in China were suddenly the rage. And all the girls wanted to look like Ri Koran, the Manchurian movie star. You would see them strolling down the Ginza, their short legs, like plump white daikon radishes, squeezed into tight silk dresses. Cosmetics were used to make their eyes look more slanting, more exotic, more Chinese. “China Nights,” Ri Koran’s hit song, evoking the louche glamour of nocturnal Shanghai, was played on the wireless all day long. The girls would hum its lilting tune, closing their eyes in rapture, gently swaying, like tropical flowers. A coffee bar in Sukiyabashi, named China Nights, employed Ri Koran look-alikes. Not that they really looked like her. Their crooked teeth and stocky build betrayed them immediately as Japanese country girls. But there they were, wrapped in a bit of garish silk, with a flower in their hair. That was enough. The men went crazy over them.

Perhaps the drabness of the home front made the Asian continent seem alluring by contrast. And it is not as if this boom was the first of its kind. As I said, we Japanese often catch collective bugs, which cause temporary fevers for this or that. You might say it’s in our blood. But perhaps the real reason was more mundane. Listening to Ri Koran’s song allowed people to forget, if only for a short while, about wars, economic slumps, and soldiers slogging through the mud of a blood-soaked land. Instead of being a place of a thousand sorrows, sucking us into worse and worse horrors, China became a place of glamor, promising untold pleasures.

It all seems so long ago now, as I contemplate the wreckage of our foolish dreams. China Nights is long gone. The Ginza a ruin. Japan a country of ruins. I’m a ruin. Anyway, just a year after it erupted, the China Boom was all over. After Pearl Harbor, victory over the Anglo-American barbarians was all people thought about. It proved to be just another one of our dreams, a mirage in the desert toward which we, a thirsty people, crawled in the vain hope that we would quench our thirst for a little justice and respect.

But before getting ahead of my story, I should like to explain my own love for China, which was not at all like that superficial China Boom of 1940. To understand my feelings, I have to take you back to the 1920s, to my native village near Aomori, a small place in a narrow-minded province of a small country, whose people held the narrow views of frogs stuck in a dark well. To me, China, with its vast spaces, its teeming cities, and its five thousand years of civilization, always represented an escape from the well. I was one little frog that got away.

Where I grew up, loving China was not exactly viewed with approval. There was old Matsumoto-sensei, of course, a thin man in a faded blue kimono and tortoiseshell glasses, whose long white hair floated around his shriveled neck like a tangle of cobwebs. But the China he loved stopped somewhere in the twelfth century. He lived in a world of musty Confucian classics, whose wisdom he attempted to impart to us with scant success. I can still picture him, his head almost touching the pages of the Analects, a half-smile playing on his cracked lips, as he traced the Chinese characters with the long brown fingernail of his right index finger, oblivious to the sniggers of his pupils. Even now, when I hear the names of Kōshi (Confucius) or Mōshi (Mencius), the image of Matsumoto-sensei comes back to me, with the burnt-milk smell of an old man’s breath.

My father, Sato Yukichi, had actually been to China as a soldier in 1895. But there was no love lost between him and the country of his former enemies. He didn’t mention the Sino-Japanese War often. I even wonder whether he ever had more than the haziest idea of what it was all about. Just once in a while, when he had drunk too much saké, he would throw back his head and burst into a marching song, cupping his hand to his mouth imitating the sound of a trumpet. He would then bore us with stories about Commander Koga rescuing the imperial flag, or some such act of derring-do. Or he went on about the weather in Manchuria, which, as he never tired of telling us, was colder even than our snow country in winter, so cold that your piss froze solid, like an icicle, from the tip of your penis to the frozen ground. Mother would always withdraw at this point and make clattering noises as she busied herself in the kitchen.

One day, when I was still a boy, I discovered a lacquer box among my father’s books, which contained some woodcuts of famous battle scenes set in landscapes covered in thick snow. Since the pictures had hardly ever been exposed to daylight, the colors were still as crisp and true as when they were first printed—fiery reds and yellows of gunfire; the dark blues of wintry nights. The horses, in pretty checkered padding from their necks to their ankles, were so vividly drawn that you could almost sense them shivering in the snow. I can still remember the titles: Hard Fight of Captain Asakawa, Banzai for Japan: Victory Song of Pyongyang. And the Chinese? They were depicted as cringing, yellow, ratlike creatures, with slitty eyes and pigtails, either writhing in terror or prostrated under the boots of our triumphant soldiers. The Japanese, looking splendid in their black Prussian-style uniforms, were much taller than these dead Chinese rodents. They looked almost like Europeans. This didn’t strike me as particularly odd at the time. Nor can I say that it filled me with pride. I couldn’t help wondering why beating such pathetic enemies should be presented as something so glorious.

These pictures were my first glimpse of a wider world, far away from our village near Aomori. But they were not what made me dream of leaving the old place. I think, now I look back, that such dreams were nurtured by something more artistic. I’ve always thought of myself as an artist at heart, a man of the theater. This began at a very early age. Not that we had the opportunity of visiting anything so grand as a Kabuki theater. You had to go to Aomori for that. Our village was too remote even for the travelling players, offering a bawdier and much inferior form of drama. And even if they had graced us with their temporary presence, my father would never have let me go anywhere near such entertainments anyway. As the village schoolmaster, he prided himself on his respectability. Men of substance, in his view, did not go to see performing riffraff.

Entertainment, where I grew up, consisted of one man only, the estimable Mr. Yamazaki Tetsuzo, candyman and “paper theater” performer. He would arrive, on festival days, on his old Fuji bicycle, carrying a wooden contraption rather like a portable set of drawers that contained a box of candies, a paper screen, and a stack of pictures, which he would pass in front of the screen one by one, while mimicking the voices of characters shown in the pictures. Since our village was buried in thick snow during the winter season, Yamazaki could only reach us in spring and summer. We always knew he was coming as soon as we heard the sound of wooden clappers, which he knocked together to announce his arrival. Before the show began, he would sell candy. Those lucky enough to have money to buy it were allowed to sit right in front of the screen. I was never that fortunate. My father, though rarely expressly forbidding my attendance at the candyman’s theater, certainly didn’t approve of spending any money. Aside from anything else, he declared that such candy was unhygienic. He may have been right, but it wasn’t the candy that provided the main attraction.

Mr. Yamazaki wasn’t much to look at, a skinny, bespectacled man with a few licks of well-greased hair swept across his shining pate. Though he told the same stories over and over, he allowed himself room for improvisation. When he spoke in the falsetto voice of a beautiful woman, you almost believed that the skinny old candyman, as if by magic, had been transformed into a great beauty. And when the beauty turned out to be a ghost, who slunk off at the end of the story as a malevolent fox, his impersonation of the animal trickster made us break out in a cold sweat. His sound effects were as important as the lurid illustrations of brave boy heroes and demon foxes. He was especially good at such dramatic touches as rolling thunderstorms, the clip-clop of wooden sandals, and the clashing of samurai swords. But his pièce de résistance, most popular with us, his most devoted fans, who would anticipate its coming like true connoisseurs of the theater, was the extraordinary honking fart, emitted by the pompous lord in a well-worn story called Snake Princess. On and on he went, like a human trombone, for what seemed like minutes without pause, his face getting redder and redder, veins bulging on his forehead, as though he were about to explode. We were in hysterics, no matter how many times we’d seen this remarkable performance. But then, suddenly, like a pricked balloon, his face quickly regained its normal shape, and he stopped the show, even though the story was still far from reaching its conclusion. He wrapped up his pictures, and folded the makeshift stage, neatly stacking it on his Fuji bike. “More, more!” we’d shout. But to no avail. We had to be patient until the next time we heard the noise of his wooden clappers announcing his arrival.

I have seen many great performances since, from far more famous entertainers than this humble candyman, but first impressions are precious as gold. Nothing would ever compare with the magic of Mr. Yamazaki’s paper theater productions. I quite lost myself in his stories, which painted a world that was so much more attractive than the dreary everyday life of our village; not just more attractive, but in a way more real. In the same way that one can feel resentful at having woken up from a particularly vivid dream, I hated it when Mr. Yamazaki’s stories ended in mid-flow. I was hungry for the next episode, even though I already knew exactly what was in store.

There was no reason for Mr. Yamazaki to pay any special attention to me, a fawning, stagestruck little boy, who never bought any candy. But after many days of following him around like a homeless puppy, offering to polish his bicycle, asking him to take me on as his apprentice (as though my father would have let me), he finally deigned to speak to me. It was a hot afternoon. He squatted down by the dusty roadside, mopping his brow with a cotton handkerchief and sipping cold barley tea from his flask. Squinting through the smoke of his cigarette, he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said I wanted to be like him, travel around and put on theater performances. I begged him to be my teacher. He didn’t laugh or mock me, but slowly shook his head, and said that it was a hard life, being a performer. He did it because he had no other choice. But I looked like a clever little boy. I could do much better than him. And he had no need for an apprentice, anyway. I must have shown my disappointment, for as a kind of consolation, he reached into his candy bag, fished out a picture book, and handed it to me as a gift.

It was a more precious gift than the candyman could possibly have imagined. I would go so far as to say that it changed my life. For this was my introduction to Suikoden or All Men Are Brothers, my favorite book of all time, my Bible, as it were, whose stories about Chinese swordfighters released into the world during the fourteenth century as demons I learned to recite word for word. I could tell you the stories of all of them, all one hundred and eight heroes: Shishin, the warrior with the nine dragons tattooed on his back; Roshi Ensei; Saijinki Kakusei; and on and on. These immortal warriors, battling in the marshes of central China, were so far removed from the twisted yellow creatures in my father’s woodblock prints that they seemed to be from a different species altogether. They were giants, not cowering dwarfs. They had style, these fighters for justice and honor, and they were free. Perhaps that was the main thing, their sense of unlimited possibility. The Suikoden heroes could only have existed in a vast place like China. Compared to them, Japanese warriors were bumpkins with small dreams, constrained by the narrow boundaries of our small island country.

I read the book over and over until the cheap paper wore so thin that it began to fall apart. Alone, in the yard of our house, I wielded my bamboo sword in imaginary battles against wicked rulers, striking poses I knew from the pictures, putting myself in the roles of Nine-Dragon Shishin or Welcome Rain, the dusky outlaw with his phoenix eyes. We Japanese prize loyalty and honor, but we copied these virtues from the ancient Chinese. Reading All Men Are Brothers made me wonder, even as a child, about the fate of that great nation. How could it have allowed its people to fall so low? I knew better than to ask my father, who had nothing but contempt for “the Chinks.” So I posed the question to Mr. Yamazaki, who tilted his head and sucked in his breath. “I don’t know about such difficult matters,” he said, and told me to study hard, so that one day I would know the answers to all my questions. But even though he was unable to enlighten me on the sad fate of China, he did make room for me in the front row, right under the screen perched on his bicycle, in spite of the fact that I was never able to buy any candy.

   2   

IFIRST SAW Yamaguchi Yoshiko perform in the great city of Mukden in October 1933. Mukden, which we called Hoten, was the busiest, most cosmopolitan city in Manchuria, more modern even than Tokyo in its best days, before our capital city was turned into a smoldering ruin by the American B-29s.

It was her eyes that left the deepest impression. They were unusually large for an Oriental woman. She didn’t look typically Japanese, nor typically Chinese. There was something of the Silk Road in her, of the caravans and spice markets of Samarkand. No one would have guessed that she was just an ordinary Japanese girl born in Manchuria.

Before we Japanese arrived, Manchuria was a wild and terrifying place, located perilously in the border areas of Russia and China, which didn’t belong to anyone. Once the seat of the great Qing Dynasty emperors, Manchuria fell on hard times after the emperors had moved south to Peking. Warlords did as they liked, looting this vast region of its treasures, while pitting their bandit armies against one another, causing terrible misery to the impoverished people who were unfortunate enough to get in their way. Women were taken as slaves, and men were killed or forced to join the bandits, who swept through the villages like a swarm of locusts. The poor, long-suffering people of Manchuria ate nothing but bitterness for hundreds of years. Those few brave souls who tried to resist would end up hanging upside down from the trees, their intestines spilling out like broken wires, as terrible examples to others who might have similar ideas. Order was eventually restored, however, and not a minute too soon, when the great state of Manchukuo was founded under our tutelage.

Manchukuo was a truly Asian empire, ruled by the last scion of the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Pu Yi. But it was also a cosmopolitan empire, where all races mixed and were treated equally. Each of the five main races, Japanese, Manchu, Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian, had its own color on the national flag: mustard yellow with stripes of red, white, black, and blue. Then there were Russians, in Harbin, Dairen, and Mukden, and Jews, as well as other foreigners from all corners of the world. Arriving at the port of Dairen, at the southern tip of Manchuria, to me felt like arriving in the great wide world. Even Tokyo felt narrow and provincial in comparison. Cosmopolitanism was in the very air. Apart from coal dust and cooking oil, you could pick up the pungent melange of pickled Korean cabbages, steaming Russian pierogis, barbecued Manchu mutton, Japanese miso soup, and fried Peking dumplings.

And the women! The Mukden women were the most beautiful north of Shanghai: the Chinese girls, lithe and nimble as eels in their tight qi pao dresses; the kimonoed Japanese beauties, perched like finely plumed birds in their rickshaws bound for the teahouses behind the Yokohama Specie Bank; the perfumed Russian and European ladies taking tea at Smirnoff’s in feathered hats and furs. Verily, Mukden was paradise for a young wolf on the loose. Since I was a fit young man, always well turned out, I had no reason to complain of a lack of female attention.

Every autumn since the early 1920s, Madame Ignatieva, who had once sung Madama Butterfly in St. Petersburg for the Czar and Czarina, would perform in the ballroom of the Yamato Hotel, a grand but rather forbidding establishment, whose turrets and castellated walls had the air more of a fortress than a hotel. Madame Ignatieva and her husband, a White Russian nobleman, had fled from the Communists in 1917 and lived in Mukden ever since. The count, always impeccably dressed in his old army uniform complete with the Cross of St. George bestowed on him personally by the Czar, ran a boardinghouse near the railway station.

The highlight of Madame Ignatieva’s artistry was the “Habanera” from Carmen. She also sang arias from Tosca and Madama Butterfly, but Carmen was considered by music lovers to be her finest piece. The hall was packed. The crystal chandeliers cast a sparkling light on the gilded chairs and the medals pinned to long rows of uniformed chests. Everyone of any consequence in Mukden was there, and some people had come down especially from Shinkyo, the capital city of Manchukuo: General Itagaki of the Kanto Army, our garrison force in China, sat in front, with Hashimoto Toranosuke, head Shinto priest of Manchukuo, and Captain Amakasu Masahiko, president of the Japan-Manchukuo Friendship Association. I spotted General Li, chairman of the Shenyang Bank, looking martial in his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache; and Mr. Abraham Kaufman, head of the Jewish community, sitting in the back row, trying to stay out of the way of Konstantin Rodzaevsky, an ill-mannered ruffian who was always pestering us to “clean out” the Jews.

And there, bathed in the spotlight, was the splendid figure of Madame Ignatieva herself, dressed in a long black gown, with a shawl of black lace trailing along the floor. She smiled as she strode to the center of the stage, a red rose in her right hand, her chin held high, acknowledging the applause with curt little nods to all sides, like a haughty pigeon. “Strode” is actually not the right word; she undulated, voluptuously, in the way large Western women do. And right behind her was her star pupil, a sweet young Japanese girl in a long-sleeved purple kimono with a pattern of white cranes. She was like a delicate flower, just before its moment of bloom, radiating a childlike innocence as well as a kind of exotic elegance not normally seen in Japanese girls. Perhaps she was a little nervous, for just as Madame Ignatieva was about to take her place at center stage, the girl stepped on the tip of the long black shawl, stopping her teacher in her tracks. For an instant the smile vanished from Madame Ignatieva’s face, but she immediately recovered and opened her throat for the “Habanera.” The girl’s dark eyes widened as if to plead for our forgiveness and she blushed most prettily.

It was, as I said, those wide eyes that left an indelible impression on me. Though not beautiful in any conventional sense, and rather too large for her small face, almost fishlike even, they nonetheless expressed a delightful vulnerability. There was no more trace of nervousness when she launched into her first song, following the per formance of Madame Ignatieva. I remember “Moonlight at the Ruined Castle,” a Japanese song which made us all weep; then Beethoven’s “Ich Liebe Dich,” then a folk song in Chinese, then a Russian song whose title I can’t remember, and finally a charming rendering of Schubert’s “Serenade.” It was quite clear, even at her tender age, that Yoshiko was not like the provincial warblers who can make concerts in Japan such a torment. Her command of languages and grasp of different national styles was extraordinary. Only the cosmopolitan soil of Manchukuo could have yielded such a treasure. I know it is easy to say in hindsight, but I knew then that Yoshiko, at the tender age of thirteen, was something very special indeed.

Yoshiko was born in 1920. Her father was the kind of adventurer we called tairiku ronin, or continental drifter, a Sinophile who roamed across the Manchurian plains in search of fortune. This, alas, remained elusive. For the most part, he made a precarious living teaching the Chinese language to Japanese employees of the South Manchurian Railway Company. Precarious, that is, not because he was especially poorly paid, but because he had a weakness for gambling. One of his pupils, at one point, was me. Before she was adopted by a Chinese general, Yoshiko lived the typical life of a Japanese child on the continent, mixing freely with children of other races, even as she received the strict education of a proper young Japanese.

The year of Yoshiko’s birth was just a decade before the birth of Manchukuo. Or perhaps one should say just eleven years before the conception of Manchukuo. For this happened with a big bang, on September 13, 1931, when a bomb exploded on the railway tracks just outside Mukden. Quite who the culprits were was not made clear at the time. Let us assume it was from a Sino-Japanese one-night stand that Manchukuo was eventually born. Our Kanto Army quickly secured all the towns along the South Manchurian Railway and the territory was effectively ours—except at night, when local bandits still made a safe passage along the railroad impossible. Less than a year later, the former Manchu kingdom, which had gone rotten like an abandoned old mansion and become a refuge for the worst ruffians in China, became a modern state.

But I’m a romantic, so I prefer an alternative date for the birth of Manchukuo. On the dawn of March 1, 1934, Pu Yi, the last scion of the Manchu Dynasty, dressed in the yellow silk robes of his imperial ancestors, prayed to the sun in the garden behind his palace in Shinkyo, and was officially reborn as the Emperor of Manchukuo. The moment he emerged from his audience with the sun, the new state had become an empire. I was obviously not allowed to attend this ceremony, which had to be carried out by him alone. But I shall never forget the sight of Emperor Pu Yi later that day, in his magnificent double-breasted uniform, with gold epaulettes streaming down his narrow but hallowed shoulders and a gold helmet sprouting red-tinted ostrich feathers. The band played the Manchukuo anthem, as the Emperor goose-stepped along a red carpet to his throne, escorted by Prince Chichibu, three officers of the Kanto Army, and ten Manchurian pageboys from a local orphanage. His trousers were too long, his bespectacled head almost disappeared into his feathered helmet, and his goose steps made him look a bit like a puppet on strings. Frankly, the ceremony was not entirely devoid of comedy. And yet there was an unmistakable sense of grandeur about the occasion. People need spectacles to nurture their dreams, give them something to believe in, foster a sense of belonging. The Chinese and Manchu people, demoralized by more than a hundred years of anarchy and Western domination, needed it more than most. And—although people tend to forget this now—we Japanese gave it to them; we gave them something larger than themselves, a great and noble goal to live and die for.

It was altogether a good time to be alive, for those of us who had big dreams for Asia and Manchukuo. It was certainly the best of times for me personally. After years of drifting from job to job—a private teacher in Dairen, a researcher at the Manchurian Railway Company, during which time I studied the Chinese language, and an independent consultant on native affairs to the Military Police in Mukden— I had finally landed the perfect job. Quite frankly, in Japan I had been a failure. I failed as a student of economics in Tokyo, because I barely ever saw the sunlight. My life was spent in the cinemas of Ueno and Asakusa. This is where all my money went. The walls of my tiny room were covered with pictures of my favorite stars, which I stole from the local picture palace at night. I would love to have worked in the movies, even as a humble assistant director. But in Japan you needed connections, and I had none. For who was I? An obscure dreamer from a village in Aomori prefecture.

In Mukden, however, under the auspices of the Kanto Army, I, Sato Daisuke, was able to open my own office: the Sato Special Services Bureau for New Asian Culture. The services I offered were somewhat diverse, and subject to a certain degree of discretion. Let us say my business was information, finding out things, some of them of a delicate political nature. This took a certain theatrical talent. To blend into the local scene, I had to learn how to speak and behave like a local. Luckily I am blessed with an excellent ear. Friends sometimes joked that I was a human parrot. When I’m with a stammerer, I stammer; with someone with a thick Kansai accent, I speak like an Osaka merchant. That is why I picked up Chinese with relative ease, astonishing other Japanese. To my compatriots I remained plain Sato Daisuke, sometimes dressed in Western suits, sometimes in Japanese kimonos, sometimes in a Kanto Army uniform. With the Manchus and Chinese, I was Wang Tai, and I chose the best Chinese clothes, made of the finest silk by the most reputable tailor in Shanghai. Politics was part of my job, but culture was my real domain; and by far the most pleasant task, certainly for me the most important, was to find local talent for Manchukuo broadcasting and motion picture companies. This is how my own modest gifts found their perfect application.

The problem with Japanese entertainment in Manchukuo was not the lack of money or goodwill. Since the picture studios, as well as the broadcasting stations, were funded by the Japanese government, there was plenty of cash to spend on the best equipment money could buy, from Japan, but also from Germany and even the United States. The Manchuria Motion Picture Association had superb studios. And though some of the money (and most of the native actresses) stuck to the hands of Kanto Army officers, there was still plenty to spare for making top-notch films. The Mukden Broadcasting Corporation too was entirely up-to-date, with the latest soundproofed recording studios, some of which had room for an entire symphony orchestra. Artists visiting from Japan could not believe their eyes; they had never seen anything like it. People sometimes forget this when they criticize us for what happened later. But it is a plain fact that in Manchukuo we dragged Asia into the modern world. This enterprise, so often misunderstood, was surely something we can still be proud of.

To raise the morale of the native population and make them understand what we were fighting for, it was no good just shouting the usual slogans about Japanese-Manchukuo friendship. Nor could we hope to appeal to the natives by showing films of Japanese pioneers building schools or designing bridges. These things just bored them to tears. And, frankly, who could blame them? They bored me, too. The Manchu mind was, in any case, much too sophisticated for our regular propaganda, and at the same time almost childlike in its craving for comic entertainment. We needed to enlighten and educate, naturally, but also amuse. We wanted to make good movies; not just good movies, but the best, better than the pictures made in Tokyo, pictures that would embody the spirit of the New Asia. This couldn’t be done without top native performers who could sing and act in Chinese, as well as understand our cause, and speak enough Japanese to communicate with the directors and cameramen, who came from our homeland. Finding such people was my headache, often alleviated, it is true, by the company of some lovely Manchurian actresses, whose talents were estimable, though not always quite what was required by the Mukden Broadcasting Corporation.

The man in charge of our propaganda in Manchukuo was an odd fellow, with a finger in many pies, named Amakasu Masahiko, a captain in the Kanto Army. A born fixer, who knew all the powerful people in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Manchukuo, both respectable and not so respectable, Amakasu was like a spider in a giant web. There was nothing in Manchukuo that escaped his attention: the opium trade went through his office, as did other discreet enterprises necessary for the state to function properly and efficiently. Apart from everything else, Amakasu combined the tasks of supervising the security of Emperor Pu Yi and presiding over various important cultural and political institutions, such as the Shinkyo Symphony Orchestra and the Concordia Association, to promote racial harmony and social order in Manchukuo.

Although he was a figure of great cultural refinement, Amakasu had a somewhat fearsome reputation. Room 202, his suite in the Yamato Hotel in Shinkyo, was guarded day and night by heavily armed soldiers from the Kanto Army. But Amakasu was not a man to leave anything to chance. He always slept with a pistol by his side, a black German Mauser C96. There were many people who would have been happy to see him dead. And even those who would not were afraid of him. The odd thing was that he didn’t look at all imposing. A trim little man with a shaved head, shaped a bit like a peanut, and round tortoise-shell glasses, he rarely smiled and almost never raised his voice above a breathy murmur. To look at him, he could have been an accountant or the manager of a drugstore. But looks are deceiving. Amakasu was feared for good reasons. We all knew that he had spent time in prison back in Japan for murdering a Communist, as well as the Red’s wife and young nephew. Amakasu was a lieutenant in the Kempeitai at the time, our Military Police, and he strangled the entire family with his own bare hands.

A strange bird, as I say. But I liked him. We shared a love of the arts. Amakasu adored classical music and would sit in his room listening to his phonograph for hours on end. And like me, Amakasu was a great reader of All Men Are Brothers; a copy always lay by his bedside, next to his Mauser C96. We sometimes discussed the merits of various heroes. His favorite character was Riki, also known as the Black Whirlwind, the hard-drinking warrior who wielded two axes in battle, and who, rather than live in shame, preferred to commit suicide after his band of brothers was defeated. Like his hero, Amakasu was loyal to his friends and a sincere patriot. What endeared him to me most, however, was not his patriotism, which I never doubted, but his unfailing courtesy to the native people. Often, when Japanese officials spoke of “harmony among the five races,” they were just mouthing official words. One of the great tragedies of Manchukuo was that those who most loudly proclaimed our ideals so rarely managed to live up to them. But not Captain Amakasu. He really meant it. I have reason to know this from personal experience. Let me relate just one example.

Most of Amakasu’s business was transacted in his hotel suite, but once in a while he would entertain at a Japanese restaurant nearby, called the South Lake Pavilion, a place frequented mostly by Kanto Army officers. I attended a party there in the winter of 1939. It was a bitterly cold night. The streets were frozen solid. Even the slight mist that hung over the city seemed to have hardened into a cloud of pins and needles. A full moon shone through the haze like a milky fluorescent light.

Amakasu sat on the tatami floor at the head of the long rosewood table, with a straight back, as though a steel rod had been inserted into his spine. Dressed in an olive green uniform, he gazed silently through his round spectacles, drinking his usual White Horse Whiskey. He barely touched the food, even as his guests, including a senior Kempeitai officer and a burly Kanto Army colonel, became increasingly merry on the saké, poured for them by several gorgeous actresses from Manchuria Motion Pictures, who made up for their linguistic deficiencies by being absolutely charming. However, Amakasu was not in a sociable mood. Something was bothering him. An occasional grunt was all that escaped from his lips when anyone addressed him directly.

At one point a surgeon, by the name of Ozaki, an important figure in the Japanese-Manchukuo Friendship Association, raised his cup and proposed a toast to the harmonious relations between the five races. A fat, grinning, red-faced man, the type who fancies himself the life and soul of every party, Ozaki was an egregious example of those who spoke of harmony without sincerity. In any case, Amakasu raised his glass too, and Ozaki, who had a surprisingly mellifluous voice for such a coarse individual, launched into an army song, jerking his short little arms back and forth, like a tortoise turned on its back, and the others followed suit. Even though the actresses didn’t know the words, they humored the men by smiling and clapping along as well.

Ozaki then proposed an egg race. Clambering down on all fours, not an easy thing to do for a corpulent man in his inebriated state, he ordered one of the actresses to do the same. When she hesitated to take part in the childish game of blowing an egg across the matted floor, a slap on her silk-clad bottom, provoking much laughter from the other guests, forced her onto her knees. One of the men slipped his hand up the skirt of MeiLing, then Manchukuo’s leading actress, and told her to top up his saké cup. Conviviality swiftly descended to lewdness, with cries to hold a “Miss Manchukuo” contest. The Kempeitai officer ordered one of the women to balance a saké bottle on her head, then made her drink from a cup on the floor, like a cat. When she failed to keep the bottle from falling off her head, the lecherous colonel demanded a striptease.

I shall never forget what happened next. Amakasu, already ramrod-straight, stiffened even more. His face had gone very pale, like the moon outside, and his eyes glinted behind his spectacles as though they were catching fire. “Enough!” he rasped in that breathy voice of his, as though he had a permanently sore throat. “Enough! Actresses are not geisha, they are artists.” Nodding toward the girls, he continued: “I demand respect for the artists of the Manchuria Motion Picture Association, and hereby wish to apologize for the behavior of my boorish countrymen.”

Although there were several men in the room who outranked Amakasu, his words had an instant effect. There was no need for him to shout. The fact that he had spoken at all was sufficient to impose instant obedience. The actresses bowed their heads and fixed their eyes on the floor. Ozaki realized he had overstepped a dangerous mark and kept quiet for the rest of the evening. The men started to pay respect to the Manchurian ladies, some even offering to pour saké for them. The reason I can still vividly recall this incident is that it showed another side of this much-feared and indeed maligned man that has not received its due attention. Amakasu may have strangled a family of Reds, but he was also a Japanese gentleman of the greatest sincerity.

It was Amakasu, at any rate, who asked me to find a local singer who could speak sufficiently good Japanese to work with us on a new radio show to be called Manchukuo Rhapsody. “The independence and unity of our state cannot be taken for granted,” he told me. “Education through entertainment should be our motto. Our message must be sweet, even if our aims demand sacrifice, rigor and perseverance.” This is the way he usually spoke, when he spoke at all: in clipped sentences, like a man who has no time to waste.

After giving this much thought, and conducting a few auditions in my office with some extremely attractive ladies, which produced nothing in the way of musical or indeed linguistic talent, but were perfectly agreeable otherwise, I hit upon an idea that was so obvious that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it before: the girl singer at the Yamato Hotel. Her Chinese was fluent, and since she was in fact Japanese, she could obviously speak in her native tongue. In short, she was just what we were looking for. Age might be the only issue, but that could be accommodated. “Go and talk to the parents,” said Amakasu, whose thin lips curled into a rare hint of a smile. “I’m sure we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement.”

   3   

EVERY MAN HAS his weaknesses. Mine was young women, especially Chinese women, and most especially Chinese actresses. I say Chinese, but could have said Manchus. We Japanese liked to pretend that most Chinese in Manchukuo were Manchus. In fact, there was little distinction between the two races. Chinese or Manchu, I adored making love to them. They had none of that giggly, schoolgirlish coyness of Japanese women. Their erotic attraction was like Chinese poetry— refined, romantic, and elusive. There is something particularly alluring, too, about the Chinese body, which matches the Chinese mind in its subtlety and finesse: the long elegant legs, the pert, round bottom, the perfect breasts, not too small, not too big. Where the Western woman is large and coarse, like an overripe fruit, and the Japanese woman is small, shapeless, and bland, like cold beancurd, the Chinese woman is a banquet of flavors, spicy, sweet and sour, bitter; she is the finest specimen of a racial selection that found its perfect form after more than five thousand years of civilization. And the feeling that she was mine, all mine, afforded a pleasure that was more than just sexual. I would go so far as to say it was spiritual.

Miss Yamaguchi’s father, Yamaguchi Fumio, had a different weakness, which was, as I mentioned earlier, gambling. To look at him, he was an inoffensive type, slight of build and sporting a pair of owlish spectacles. But he was actually a bit of a rogue. Once in a while we would visit a brothel in Mukden, stocked with fine Manchurian girls, but this wasn’t really to his taste; he would always be waiting for me, nervously sipping tea in the reception room, long before I was ready to leave. He much preferred the click-clack of mah-jong tiles, the rustle of playing cards, or even the chattering sound of fighting crickets, anything indeed that was worth a gamble. The problem with his particular vice was financial. He was always in debt, and relied on the likes of General Li of the Shenyang Bank to bail him out of trouble.

To be frank, Li was a former warlord from Shantung, who took our side in the early 1930s, and was made chairman of the Shenyang Bank as a token of our friendship. The old warhorse had taken a liking to the Japanese gambler and proposed a fair exchange. The Yamaguchi family would have a free place to live in the General’s compound, if Mrs. Yamaguchi would teach the General’s concubine proper European table manners. A somewhat peculiar arrangement, perhaps, but Yamaguchi found the company of the General, with his Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, his dark blue Rolls-Royce, and his liking for mah-jong games, which he invariably lost, thus enabling Yamaguchi to recoup some of his debts, congenial. And instructing his number two wife in the art of eating green peas with a knife and fork, or lifting her little finger when drinking Indian tea, was not too strenuous a task for Mrs. Yamaguchi, who was a modern, educated woman with very fine manners, acquired at a first-rate Catholic school in Nagasaki.

General Li’s compound was in the diplomatic quarter of Mukden, a quiet area with large brick mansions in the European style—Baroque, Renaissance, Rococo, or whatnot—standing in the shade of fragrant apricot trees and sweet-smelling acacias. Many wealthy Chinese, friendly to our cause, lived there. The poorer natives dwelled in the walled Chinese city, a lively but rather unhygienic place of dark alleys that reeked of charcoal, garlic, and human excrement. Japanese tended to congregate around Heian Avenue, a big wide boulevard leading to the main railway station, up-to-date and clean, lined with department stores that could stand comparison to the best stores in London or New York. General Li’s house, not too far from there, was a modern structure in white stucco with a wide entrance flanked by a portico of lime-colored columns.

The Yamaguchi family lived in a redbrick house that used to be occupied by one of the General’s older concubines. Before moving there, they had lived in a comfortable but less romantic part of the city, in the kind of clean, modest house designated for middle-ranking Japanese company men. Though Yoshiko was brought up to be a proper Japanese girl, her father made sure she spoke good standard Chinese, a highly irregular thing to do, but he was, after all, an admirer of all things Chinese, and sought to impart this to his daughter. Other Japanese did not always look kindly on such enthusiasms, so a certain discretion was in order, not only to shield little Yoshiko from teasing at school, but also Yamaguchi himself from the unwelcome attentions of our Kempeitai. He had the excuse of being a Chinese teacher, to be sure, but one still had to be careful not to catch “a case of jaundice,” as the Japanese in Manchukuo used to say.

Nothing of the sort was called for in General Li’s compound, which is why Mr. Yamaguchi, though not necessarily his wife, was so happy to move there. He could indulge in his Chinese passions as much as he liked. The household routine proceeded like clockwork: twice a week the General would come down from the main house, lose a game or two of mah-jong with Mr. Yamaguchi, have Yoshiko prepare his opium pipes, and retire with his favorite concubine—a tiny woman hobbling around the compound in her tightly bound feet, who was probably relieved not to have to spear any more peas on her silver fork.

According to my information, there were few visitors to the Yamaguchi family quarters. But there was a young Jewess, a school friend of Yoshiko’s, named Masha, who would come round regularly. It was she, I believe, who introduced Yoshiko to her singing teacher, Madame Ignatieva. Since she attended the same Japanese school as Yoshiko, her Japanese was fluent. I checked out her parents and found nothing remiss. Her father, who owned a bakery near the railway station, was a loyal member of the Japanese-Jewish Friendship Association.

The General was so fond of Yoshiko that he decided to adopt her as his unofficial daughter. This would have been in 1934, round about the time of Emperor Pu Yi’s inauguration. Ceremony is very important to the Manchu mind. Particular care is taken over family rituals. So to be adopted by a Manchu family should be considered a great honor. And I was greatly honored to be invited to witness the ceremony in General Li’s compound.

Kneeling in front of the Li ancestral tablets, Yoshiko was given her Chinese name, Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran in Japanese, and was officially received into her second family. The ceremony was attended by both her parents, as well as the General and his wife and five concubines, who were all dressed in splendid Manchu robes. The girl acquitted herself of her task quite beautifully. First she bowed to her new Manchu father, then to his ancestral tablets, and thanked the General in beautiful Chinese for the honor of bearing his name. This was followed by a banquet, attended by everyone in the household, including all the General’s concubines, who tittered charmingly behind their ivory fans. I was tempted to deepen my acquaintance with one or two of them, but knew better than to reach for these forbidden fruits. We were served at least one hundred dishes, including, this being winter, a superb dogmeat stew, a specialty of the Manchu cuisine.

As his favorite daughter, Yoshiko spent most of her free time in the General’s rooms. Since he got ill-tempered whenever she was not on hand to serve him, she would rush to his villa as soon as she came back from school, to prepare his pipes and make sure he was comfortable. She could not leave to get on with her homework until he had fallen asleep, which, after a pipe or two, usually occurred with merciful swiftness.

Mr. Yamaguchi was not best pleased with the suggestion of putting his daughter in a wireless broadcast. “We are a respectable family,” he protested, “and my daughter is not a showgirl.” Mrs. Yamaguchi served us Japanese tea and remained silent. Yoshiko looked up at me with those big luminous eyes of hers, pleading with me to help her out of her dilemma. She was not averse to singing but hated to upset her father. I asked her mother what she thought. “Well,” she replied after some hesitation, “Yoshiko does love to sing . . .” I added that it was “for the sake of our country,” thinking that a dose of patriotism might help. Besides, it would earn Mr. Yamaguchi some much-needed protection from prying officials. “Well, yes, that is as may be, but . . .” And so it went on for some time, until the question of gambling debts was carefully broached and the matter was concluded to the satisfaction of all, including General Li, who was tickled to have her perform under his family name. Henceforth, Yamaguchi Yoshiko would appear on the Manchukuo Rhapsody radio show as the young Manchurian singer Li Xianglan, or Ri Koran.

   4   

TIENTSIN COULD NOT have been more different from Mukden. First of all it was in China, not Manchukuo. A wide avenue cut right across the foreign concessions like an open sore, the symbol of China’s submission to Western colonial powers. On the south side of the White River (actually black with filth, carrying bits of rotten fruit in its sluggish stream, as well as driftwood, dead cats and dogs, and sometimes human remains) were the Americans, British, French, and Italians. The Russians and the Belgians were on the other side of the avenue, which changed its name as it passed through the various foreign concessions, starting off as Woodrow Wilson Boulevard, and ending as the via d’Italia by way of Victoria Road and rue de Paris.

Tientsin was a city wreathed in smiles, most of them phony. The privileges enjoyed by the white race in their concessions were like dark stains on the honor of all Asiatics. They did as they liked and literally got away with murder. One of the most highly respected Chinese officials, in charge of Tientsin Customs, was assassinated in a cinema by gangsters hired by the British. Like me, he loved the movies, and was peacefully watching Gunga Din when he was brutally gunned down. Since the British refused to hand over their hired killers to the police, and Customs affairs were handled by us Japanese, we had no other choice but to blockade the concessions. For this brief period—until we restored full Asian sovereignty a few years later—we could feel proud of ourselves.

Despite such outrages, some contemptible Japanese wished to behave like the Europeans, angling for invitations to the Tientsin Club, where they might be allowed in as “honorary whites” if accompanied by their British hosts. Such people, in my view, were not only contemptible but absurd, looking like monkeys in their ill-fitting tropical suits. You would see them, eating rich cakes at the Kiesling Café, hoping to catch the eye of the British consul, or some other long-nosed bigwig. The most they got, I believe, was a severe case of indigestion.

As for myself, I always thought that Chinese dress was more becoming to my trim Asian physique. Most people took me for a Chinaman and that suited me fine. Indeed, I felt flattered, for I much preferred the company of Asians, who were so much more civilized than the Western riffraff that floated, like scum, on the surface of local society. Tientsin, to me, reeked too much of butter. Before we managed to bring him to his senses and remind him of his duties, Emperor Pu Yi, too, was part of that buttery world, frittering away his time on the tennis court and drinking tea with foreigners. He lived in an old Chinese mansion on Asahi Avenue, where we could watch him as he held court to a variety of European charlatans. One used to come across him also at the Empire Cinema, especially when they showed Charlie Chaplin films. He seemed utterly mesmerized by the little American tramp. I never once saw him laugh, but his fascination never waned. Even after we had restored him to the throne in Manchukuo, Emperor Pu Yi had to be kept entertained in his private cinema at the old Salt Palace with Chaplin movies. He sat through them no matter how many times he had seen them already until, finally, the films were worn out, and new copies had to be ordered from Shanghai. I recognized, in my humble way, a kindred spirit in him, even though I didn’t share his particular passion for Charlie Chaplin.

There was one place in Tientsin where I was able to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the concessions, and forget the shabby intrigues and general skulduggery that took place there. It was an unassuming establishment behind a crimson gate, on the edge of the Native City, named East Garden. They knew me so well there that my pipes were always prepared without a word needing to be said. All I required was a cup of green tea and my pipe, and I was off into a world of my own. Stretched out in that room filled with the smell of sweet dreams, I quite forgot the war-ravaged country with its stench of blood and excrement, its poverty and degradation, its humiliating submission to the rapacious imperialists. When I closed my eyes, I just let my mind drift, without imposing my will, and the inside of my skull would be filled with images of incomparable beauty. I saw Song Dynasty Chinese landscapes, with soaring mountains and rushing rivers, and boatmen fishing in the mist of dawn. I saw the roofs of Peking, glowing in the dusk of a late spring evening, red and gold and yellow, and I saw the blue hills of Manchukuo, stretching far into the horizon. And I saw my lover, Eastern Jewel, walking toward me, as though in a motion picture, against the backdrop of a garden in Hangzhou. She beckoned me to come to her, as the pan-pipes of a court orchestra keened on the sound track of my mind.

To call Eastern Jewel pretty would be an injustice. She looked much too unconventional for that. Her pale moon face, radiating soft light, combined the fresh beauty of a young boy with the yielding loveliness of a young girl, like those Tang Dynasty sculptures of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Her body was that of a gorgeous woman, but she had the aristocratic bearing of a young prince. She lived in a handsome gabled villa in the Japanese Concession, not far from the Chang Garden. She, too, went by the name of Yoshiko, or Princess Yoshiko, to be precise. But to me she was always Chin, as in To Chin, or Eastern Jewel, and she called me not Sato, but by my Chinese name, Wang.

Her Japanese was so fluent that many people took her for a native of my country. But in fact, Eastern Jewel was the daughter of Prince Su, tenth in line for the Manchu throne. Alas, the prince died young, and Eastern Jewel was adopted by a Japanese patron of the Manchu cause, a provincial worthy named Kawashima Naniwa. Renamed Kawashima Yoshiko, she grew up in Japan, where at the tender age of seventeen she was seduced by her fifty-nine-year-old stepfather, who declared that she, as a Manchu princess, had inherited great benevolence, whereas he, the scion of an ancient samurai clan, was imbued with natural courage, so it was their duty under heaven to produce a child of benevolence and courage. Fortunately, a child was not born from that union. To promote the liberation of Mongolia, and perhaps to ward off scandalous gossip, Yoshiko was married off to a plump young Mongolian prince, whom she detested so much that she fled to Shanghai, where she had a passionate liaison with Major General Tanaka, chief of our Secret Service.