The Ginger Tree

by Oswald Wynd

  Since you were here the country is beginning to show the scars of industrialisation. Last autumn I went on an outing with a Japanese friend to the same beauty spot beyond Tokyo we visited together only four years ago. Then we travelled by train, our view a pattern of rice fields, and thatched roofed villages, and little shrines hidden in clumps of tall trees, all these with the backdrop of the hills which were our objective. This time we went by electric railway, and the only thing I really recognised was that backdrop of hills. In place of rice fields were factories with black iron chimneys, and the villages had been replaced by shack communities to house the factory workers. The shrines were still tucked into their groves of tall cryptomeria but didn’t give the feeling they would survive for long.

  Tokyo is becoming bloated. They are reclaiming land out into the bay and putting down factories on ground still so unsettled the buildings have to be specially braced against earthquakes. Did you know that if you were to come back to Japan for that holiday, and travelled via the Pacific, the fastest ships for your journey are two Japanese vessels, both built here, the Tenyo Maru and the Chiyo Maru? When we were living in Peking there was scarcely a Japanese passenger ship of any size that hadn’t been built in Britain. Now they will never use a British yard again, except for ships of war. Apparently they haven’t quite acquired the skill for these yet, though they soon will.

  I know you will be protesting, and I can hear you doing it, but these are not a gentle, gracious people living in their world of yesterday. Most of the women still do, but practically none of the men. Even amongst my less than average intelligence male pupils the learning is all towards one end, practical matters, and practical means one thing: making in Japan every single object from pencil sharpeners to monster ocean liners, so that before long they will need nothing from the outside but raw material. When I went to Matsuzakara’s we were buying in almost all our cloth from Europe, when I left it was all coming from local factories, even imitation Scotch tartans. It is the speed of this change which is almost frightening.

  Perhaps part of my unease from all this comes from the fact that when I was working in the store I did have a sense of doing something in this country that no one else could do so well, even though I hadn’t been trained for the work. Now I live on a sort of fringe, tolerated, but of no importance, not even an object of much curiosity these days. Allowing for this, I still don’t think I am imagining a markedly changed spirit in this land, the emergence of a contempt for the West which the Japanese have been able to copy in such a short time and soon may overtake. I can now read the language well enough for the newspapers and in articles and editorials there is a kind of strutting arrogance which puts you in mind of the goose-stepping companies of soldiers often to be seen in the streets.

  I was interested in what you told me about Count Kurihama as military attaché in London. Either his social manners have greatly improved since I knew him, or that natural reserve appeals to the English. We have no communication of any kind. I made it quite plain before he left for Britain that I didn’t want any in future. I am no nearer to knowing what is happening to my son than I was when I last wrote. In my mind, sometimes, I try to follow his growth as a child, but this is really all fantasy. The truth is probably that if I met my Tomo in the street, a little boy with his hand in the hand of a Japanese woman, I wouldn’t know him. I can still feel almost totally destroyed by thoughts like that coming suddenly, but the state doesn’t last long. I don’t speak about him, even to people who knew me when I had my child, only to you like this. I’m pretty sure my American friends think it unnatural that I never talk about either of my children. Jane will be six, growing up without me. Best that she should.

  Somehow I cannot picture you in Rome. Washington, yes, the Pierce-Arrow motorcar, the house you described with its lawns open to the pavement, even the city itself, I could see it, but Rome, no. Rome to me is school textbook illustrations of ruins, and Father Tiber, and Romulus and Remus, fused somehow with His Holiness the Pope living alongside that huge cathedral. I can’t see kitchens and sitting-rooms in Rome, particularly your kitchen and sitting-room, particularly since you have admitted that Armand and you have ‘taken’ part of a palace! How splendid that sounds! Is there a grand curving staircase for you to come sweeping down in one of your gorgeous gowns, with dinner for forty by candlelight in a marble-floored salon? You see, it is all outside my ‘ken’, as they say in Scotland. In my world the arrival of a new American two-burner oil stove (with oven) is the big event of my year. But, separated as we are in so many ways, my affection for Armand and for you doesn’t change. And I value your letters so much.

  Yours,

  Mary

  PS In Rome you have surely gone back to a carriage again? Or did Armand have his beloved Pierce-Arrow shipped across the Atlantic? Someone told me that the inside of these motorcars, in the passenger compartment, have gold-plated handles to the doors. Bob Dale, of whom I have written, wants one day to import an air-cooled Franklin into Japan. He says these are the best motorcars in the world. I tell him that the ricksha is ideal for Tokyo’s muddy streets, but he hates riding in them, saying that men were never meant to do the work of horses. I am sure Bob thinks that living in China destroyed my conscience and he may be right; however these days I am very moral and don’t ride in rickshas. I can’t afford to. It is the tramcar for me.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  April 7th, 1910

  I spent the first really glorious spring Saturday with Emma Lou and Bob, one of those days when Tokyo pretends that it hasn’t given us a snivelling, bitterly cold winter, and because I had to change near to the entrance gates I went for a walk in Hibiya Park before going on to the Dales’ new house. The early irises were out and I found myself in the middle of one of those solemn flower-inspecting ceremonies that have an almost religious feel, family parties with subdued children, all keeping strictly to the paths or grouped in tidy clumps at strategic points. Cherry blossom viewing is an excuse to get drunk, but the iris apparently appeals to a different type of citizen who believes that the arrival of spring should be greeted with decorum. The whole park is very decorous, the warmer days not saluted by a riot of bulb colour, not a daffodil or a crocus to be seen, just that occasional patch of purple set against evergreen plantings arranged in a manner that is only a gentle disciplining of the natural. I think of those ovals and squares of packed flowers in Edinburgh’s Princes Street gardens, patterns as set as the design for a hearthrug, wondering what the Japanese would make of that ruthlessly imposed formality. I think they would be shocked at an insult to nature.

  Emma Lou is pregnant again. She told me this after lunch when Bob was out in what he calls the ‘yard’, working away at some scheme of his own because he says he can’t get the gardener to do what he wants. I had the feeling before Emma Lou gave me her news that something was rather damping down her joy at being the mother of little Bob, whom she calls Junior. Perhaps facing it again has brought back into mind what she went through to have Junior. Since there were no complications about the actual birth, at least that Bob was told about, the new father seems absolutely delighted by the prospect of more Dales to fill up the large rooms and long corridors of this house. I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt that Emma Lou, with that first success behind her, ought now to be settling happily to the task of building up one of those really outsize American families of the kind the Saturday Evening Post features in its illustrations of Thanksgiving dinners. Emma Lou is perhaps not quite so sure that she wants to be the vehicle for upholding this great tradition.

  I don’t really care for the house that Bob, foolishly I think, has bought. It was built by an Englishman in 1895, back in those wonderful days when to be a British business man in the Orient saw you hailed as a kind of messiah of the new progress and you could live like a prince. The house is of solid brick, cracked in places by tremors, particularly the ceilings, and I wouldn’t care to be under all that heavy plaster in a really big sha
ke. They have spent a lot of money on the place already, certain to spend a lot more, and the kitchen boasts all modern conveniences, hot and cold water to a shining white porcelain sink, and an electric icebox, the first I have ever seen, this a huge great white thing with what looks like a fat wheel on its roof. Every now and then it starts to click in an alarming manner. Emma Lou is very proud of her monster and tells me that it is quite impossible to keep food in a hygienic manner without one, so I don’t suppose I will ever be eating hygienic food in my own house. I didn’t even ask the price of importing that box from California, I should imagine more than I earn in a year.

  The Dales’ new servants gave the impression they were rather awed by having to work surrounded by all this domestic splendour, really expected to be technicians, not only knowing how to deal with the icebox, but having to cope as well with an electric carpet sweeper which is noisy enough to be an express train at full speed going through a station. My not very enthusiastic reaction to all these joys of modern living could be because I can’t afford any of them. Still, what would I do with an electric carpet sweeper when all I have underfoot is straw matting? As for the icebox, I’d be in terror that it would explode during the night and burn down my house. For me even the Dales’ gramophone, which is supposed to bring the world’s greatest music into your home, is a kind of horror, unnaturally thinned voices coming out of a background scrape almost like fingernails down a blackboard. Until they can get rid of that scratching I will also do without a gramophone.

  All this is making a virtue out of what I can’t have. The Scots tend towards this, sanctifying poverty, believing that salted porridge and oatcakes, added to a mental diet of high thinking, have put us a lot nearer the throne of the Almighty than any of those self-indulgent English are ever likely to get. I don’t have to look hard for traces of a puritan arrogance in me, and in a way this has been very useful in the life I have to lead now in Tokyo. At the back of my mind is the feeling that there is a kind of virtue somewhere in not just being able to walk into a shop to buy a pair of shoes, but having to save for six months before you can re-shoe your feet, perhaps cutting out a meat meal a week in order to manage it. Somewhere, somehow all this is recorded in your favour in a big ledger, credit marks in black, while the rich of this world, wallowing in their luxuries, are getting those red debits on every page which will see them moving into eternity with a mortgage they will never be able to pay off.

  Bob Junior is a very healthy baby, fair like both his parents, so I can play with him without being reminded of Tomo. He is being fed on imported dried milk, Emma Lou much put off the fresh kind by that alleged scandal about cows being infected with tuberculosis bacilli because the diseased animals give more milk. I am not sure I believe the story, and continue to get my bottle delivered daily. If Japan’s bugs had been going to kill me they would have done it by this time. Compared with China this is a pasteurised paradise.

  97 Nishi Kogura Machi, Otsuka, Tokyo

  August 19, 1910

  An extraordinary day following on that weird letter last week from Bob Dale wanting to see me in his office at noon today on an urgent private matter and asking me, if I met up with Emma Lou before this appointment, not to mention the matter to her. I did the sensible thing when you get a communication of this kind, nothing, no letter and no telephone call, though Bob had underlined the bank’s number in red. I really hadn’t intended to go and then, as I might have expected of myself, curiosity was too much, and by eleven this morning I was getting on a tram for downtown.

  The Kansas and Midwest Warranty Trust Banking has the plaque for its Tokyo offices, in English and Japanese, on the cement wall of one of the just completed office blocks in Nihonbashi, ground floor with its own direct entrance from the pavement, quite spacious inside, marble-faced square pillars and that slightly hushed air the better banks strive for, the feeling you are in the outer sanctuary of a temple to the real gods of our time. There was a great deal of mahogany about, not a wood you see much of in Japan, and this must have been imported, already carved to a taste that certainly wasn’t local. Behind an ornamental grille sat a Japanese teller alongside a miniature American flag which, either by design or accident, was rippling in the breeze from an electric fan. The only other human visible was a lady typist, operating her machine by the hunt and peck method I used sometimes at Matsuzakara’s for foreign letters. At her rate I’d be surprised if output reached two letters a morning. Though in Western dress, which included a white shirtwaist, she was Japanese, too, her hair done in that bun-on-the-roof style I gave up long ago. Somehow Bob’s outer office employees gave the impression that they hadn’t yet quite found out why they were here. For a moment I thought the teller was going to shout for help.

  Bob must have been clock-watching and expecting me, though I hadn’t said I would come. A mahogany door opened and he came out, a professional smile making him look not quite himself, so that if I hadn’t seen him in it I might have wondered, as one does with undertakers, what his private life was like. We talked for an hour and at the end of it I was still not, as Bob would put it, in the picture, certainly not a picture that could in any remote sense involve me. What did come across was that Kansas and Midwest Warranty Trust, under its local manager, was making slow progress in its appointed task here in Tokyo which was to put good US dollars to work inside the Japanese economy. Midwest Warranty has invested in expensive marble and mahogany as part of its bid to be the first American bank ready to use its money to help expanding local industry. An assessment of the situation had suggested rich veins lying waiting to be exploited by financial mining, but to Bob’s pained astonishment, those prospect surveys had overlooked one little point, which was Japanese reaction to a heap of Midwest US dollars helping to run their businesses.

  It had been quite a simple reaction: thank you so very much, no. Bob just couldn’t believe they meant this, feeling that his approaches had been wrong, so he tried a selection of new ones, discreet advertising, person to person contact via introductions, even to knocking on doors without introductions, which I could have told him was totally hopeless in this country. Wherever he went he met politeness and that Japanese convenience phrase: ‘Ah, so desuka?’ which can mean anything, but quite often means that way to the exit. The disillusioning message had finally reached Bob that the new industrialists out here preferred to do their own financing, prepared to struggle along with a yen that still hadn’t become a really stable world currency.

  I was quite worried about the implications of all this on Emma Lou and Bob’s life in Japan, but couldn’t see where I came into things, at least in terms of a solemn appointment in his office. Also, since I have taken to having my main meal midday I get hungry about half-past twelve, and at quarter past one I was really hungry and not expecting Bob to ask me to join him where he usually lunches, the Imperial Hotel grill, because in a place like that we could so easily run into someone who would later run into Emma Lou at the American Club. At a quarter to two I suggested we adjourn to the little place behind the Ginza I used to use from Matsuzakara’s.

  As I chewed at pieces of age-toughened ox I suddenly had the not very brilliant idea that the Baroness Sannotera just might, through her husband, be able to offer useful contacts. He was shocked. He didn’t want the Baroness anywhere near Midwest Warranty, she was a radical who had been jailed for insulting the Emperor. And further it was most unwise for me to have any contact with the lady, particularly now that I worked in mission schools, and I was stiffening against this advice when suddenly he plunged into the real purpose of our meeting.

  Bob’s idea is to loan me money. I sat staring at him while he gave me the picture of Midwest Warranty’s new policy for Japan. If the native industrialists didn’t want any of his dollars, then he was going to use these to finance foreigners to take yen from the Japanese. Simple, as an idea. His bank’s operations would be adapted to the country, taking on what amounted to agency functions, arranging for distribution, showrooms, and so
on, in fact wet-nursing new enterprises from abroad that might not otherwise be prepared to gamble on the chance of a market in Japan. In my case the financing would be for an exclusive salon offering Western fashion clothes, this later perhaps to be expanded to much cheaper, simple lines that could be made in large quantities and then marketed through those new selling outlets that are opening up in cities all over the land, the department stores.

  As I listened to all this it became quite obvious that I had been ‘investigated’ as a possible commercial proposition; he knew a great deal more than I had ever told either him or Emma Lou about my time at Matsuzakara’s, how I had started out adapting for the local market clothes from Western fashion magazines and then gone on to doing quite a bit of straight designing on my own. What he did not know, and some instinct kept me from telling him, was that I had never put these designs on paper for myself, working out ideas with material direct on to one of our imported frames and then having sketches made by Emburi San. It was my assistant, also, who at a later stage was responsible for the detailed paper patterns sent to the workroom for the sewing girls. It wouldn’t be easy to open a salon without Emburi San’s help, and also without those girls trained to work on Western style garments. I sat there thinking about the possibility of using Bob’s dollars to buy away from old Hiro practically a whole Matsuzakara department, and Bob is dead set against any hint of bribery and corruption. There wasn’t a red wool embroidered motto hanging framed on the wall of his office, but there might well have been.