The Ginger Tree
Page 27
She has asked me to spend August with her in a house she has taken at Karuizawa, and I think I had better go, even if this means enduring Bob’s weekend lectures on the coming decline and fall of the British Empire.
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
January 9th, 1914
I was thirty-one yesterday, have been in the Far East for eleven years, for most of them looking after myself, and I ought at this age and from this experience to be a balanced, sensible woman about ready to hunt for the first grey hairs. Instead, when I got to bed at about half-past one this morning I heard the temple gongs announce the hour until seven, not even dozing, lying thinking about a third-generation Minnesota-born Norwegian who was, he said, debauched by Harvard into becoming a Bostonian. Some people seem tailored to fit their names, and that is John Hansen. I haven’t asked how tall he is but it must be at least two or three inches over six feet. He is conscious of extreme height and is perpetually just slightly bent to keep in contact with the rest of us down below. He is so fair that going white will make little difference, with a long, bony face and long bony fingers, and I swear his American has a Norwegian accent, but he says that this is because I have never before run up against a cultured New Englander, and the way he speaks is upper-class Boston, something he worked hard for five years to acquire because in the international foreign correspondent business unless you come from Boston you haven’t a hope in hell.
We were introduced by Bob Dale seven weeks ago, but have actually known each other for some three hundred years, in various forms, John suggesting, very much in his cups of rye whisky, that one of them must have been as a couple of Japanese ‘semi’ insects screeching on the same branch. I never sing and neither does he, but we had both been trying to up amongst the pines above the moat in the outer precincts of the Imperial Palace, to which the public are admitted if they conduct themselves with proper decorum and respect. There couldn’t have been any police on duty because we weren’t thrown out. This isn’t love, it is too enjoyable. But I can lie in bed and make a Gregorian chant out of his name.
Neither of us has any sense of future, he has a wife and two children living in a place called Waltham. Her name is Elizabeth and three years ago she told him that if he refused to settle to a decent job, and continued to wander about the world writing pieces for the Christian Science Monitor, he could consider their marriage as finished for all practical purposes except that she would expect half of the cheques he received and he needn’t think he could cheat on her because she knew somebody well up on the Monitor staff and could easily find out exactly what John was earning. Which is why, he says, he will be poor forever, and is looking for some nice, warm-hearted woman ready to keep him in the style to which he would like to become accustomed, and with no questions asked. He doesn’t think I am rich enough yet but if I really keep at it and open a factory making corsets I may qualify.
I had been missing joy. We make it together. He doesn’t mind about Elizabeth any more, but loves his children, a boy and a girl, which is sad. All these years I have never really talked to anyone about Tomo, but I did to John. What he said was: ‘You poor bitch.’ Then he bought us another drink.
I am drinking too much, something I have never done before. It just happens, I suppose, because I am keeping pace with him. If I don’t, he says he can see a Scotch Presbyterian reformist glint in my eye, and he’s had that before, in the New England version. Tokyo has always been Kentaro’s city to me, in which I was allowed a place on sufferance, but now John and I own it. At the moment what we own is a winter snarl of snow and sleet and inches of mud in every street, but when the spring comes we will take over the plum blossom and the cherry blossom, and then the beach at Kamakura for the hot weather. He has to go to Shanghai in March, but only for two weeks.
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
February 2nd, 1914
John would like to move in here with me. He hasn’t suggested it, there hasn’t been a word said on either side about it, but it is what he wants. I want it, too, and yet there are all kinds of bars. The extreme respectability of these apartments is not one of them. Some of my neighbours are Japanese ‘modern girls’ being maintained in so-called foreign style by business gentlemen whose main domestic addresses are elsewhere in the city. From that point of view it wouldn’t matter at all; from mine it would for some reason.
I have been trying to think why. I suppose part of it is still Mama in Edinburgh in spite of what I have made of my life since then, but another part is how I have been living since I broke from Kentaro’s protection. One of the reasons I endured that wretched little Japanese house, and then my teaching English and that whole pattern was a probably ridiculous feeling that I must completely own myself again and that some sort of respectability in the eyes of the world was part of this. I am terrified of losing what I have with John, taking up the attitude that would lead to this, or even just saying the word that would do it. But if I open this door and have him move in I will be living again in defiance of the world around me, and I know what that means, a label that would stay with me for the rest of my life.
I can’t fool myself either that there would be any security with John, that is not on offer. Already what we have is threatened by habit. Yesterday when I was waiting for him in the lobby of the Imperial he came in, saw me, raised a hand, then turned aside to talk to a group of three pressmen, keeping them from the bar while he told some story that had them all laughing. It was nothing really, and yet it wouldn’t have happened two weeks ago.
Last night I woke up with the thought that in Tokyo it may be known that I can never have another child. Foreigner gossip goes round and round in circles here and I shouldn’t let myself feel sick at the idea of what might be said about me in bar talk that John could have heard before we met. I wonder what it would be like to live in a society where you just took what you wanted with no thought or worry about consequences to yourself or to others. Would it be bliss or hell?
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
July 9th, 1914
I have taken to visiting my neglected friends again. Alicia is suddenly almost frail, and was rather cool, perhaps because we don’t meet as often as we used to. It could also be that she has heard about John Hansen and thinks, as she would probably put it, that I have ‘broken out again’. These days she is seeing a good deal of the wife of the British Ambassador, and the Embassy appears to have taken her under its wing, which I suppose is natural enough; as we grow older we seek our own kind, losing the inclination to experiment.
I went to see Aiko, too. There is a rumour that she has a Japanese radical leader as her lover, but if this is true then there was certainly no evidence of a man in the little house where she now lives surrounded by what I can only call squalor, her indifference to minimal comfort as marked as her total lack of interest in dress. She has, of course, nothing but contempt for my business, regarding it as a form of pandering to the subjugation of our sex, part of a male conspiracy to keep women content with fripperies, treating as sophistry my argument that since convention, and most climates, demand that we wear clothes it is not a bad idea to make these as attractive as possible, or at the very least neat, tidy, and clean. I have long had a sneaking feeling that Aiko doesn’t really share her race’s belief that personal cleanliness is equal to godliness.
Emma Lou is now certainly the friend with whom I am most at ease, not a hint left of the hysterical girl of that time at Takayama. Once she expected the world, through Bob, to offer her everything on a platter, but has come to realise that to clutter your life with hopes of this kind is a waste of time and the sensible thing is to settle for what you have in hand, looking around to notice how much worse off some others are. It is almost the old evangelical count your blessings, and is out of character in some way. There are times when I seem to sense something explosive under this new calm. She is much more intelligent than I thought when we first met, and growing more so, whereas Bob seems to me to b
e sinking deeper and deeper into the sagging chair of his dogmatisms. I think he has really done very well, financing a whole string of foreign companies with a potential for penetrating the Japanese market, none of these really big, but enough of them to give him the feeling he is achieving at least part of what he set out to do in this country.
When I was with Emma Lou on Tuesday for a cup of the tea I taught her how to make, she surprised me by asking suddenly if John Hansen and I were exchanging letters. I said that if three from me and one back from him could be called that then we were doing it. I also told her without any prompting that after his two weeks in Shanghai John had gone on to Hong Kong, then to French Indo-China, then Singapore, and that there was now a project for a series on the Dutch administration of Indonesia which would take him to Java. Emma Lou may have heard things in my voice that I wasn’t meaning to have it convey for she said, quietly: ‘Don’t waste yourself again, Mary.’
It was probably good advice but I didn’t know how to acknowledge it, so I had another cup of tea. So did she. Then the children descended on us. Emma Lou is training a new amah to help look after them, a raw country girl clearly terrified of American young, and not without reason.
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
August 4th, 1914
John is in Yokohama staying at the Grand. He didn’t admit having been in Japan for two days before telephoning, but did say he had come on the French line Porthos and I know when she docked because we have been waiting for a long overdue shipment of Belgian trimming lace which was in her holds. He has asked me to lunch tomorrow at the Imperial. When you have decided to deal firmly with something that has become a bit of a problem, lunch is a good time to choose, no soft lights, no music, and poor waiter service.
I have no cause for any bitterness, that flare-up between us was mainly the result of a form of starvation from my side, I wanted it so much that it happened. It is humiliating to realise this, and to have to meet him again knowing that truth. But I am also curious to see how a man like John parcels up something like our relationship for discreet disposal. I know what a Japanese man would do: nothing, simply go away without a word; but in American society women have secured the right to be deferred to, their feelings officially respected. There is that beautiful fetish of equality which I have seen even Bob acknowledging in his relations with Emma Lou, probably as a result of having been at a co-educational college. The Englishman, like the Japanese, still hasn’t allowed his life to be complicated by such foolishness.
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
Lunch with John was certainly memorable, but not for the reasons I was expecting. I was almost half an hour late, held up by a fitting for one of our more temperamental clients who had managed to antagonise even the usually bland Emburi San. John was already at a table, with two whiskies waiting. He stood up, came around to pull out my chair, then said almost in my ear: ‘Mary, last night at eleven Britain declared war on Germany. I’ve just come from the press agency. The cables came through too late for this morning’s papers.’
I sat down really without any reaction at all, this only beginning to come as John, drinking his whisky, talked. The murder of an Archduke in a Balkan town hadn’t meant a thing to me, an item eclipsed by a train crash on a branch line from Tokyo in which two people had been killed and fourteen injured. That was real, I had travelled on the line with Aiko.
For more than ten years now European politics have really been totally beyond the areas of my interest, and I found it hard to believe that the assassination of a man about whom I knew nothing at all was going to lead to a war involving most of Europe and probably a good bit of the world beyond it. John says that is what will happen but I wonder if he is taking an American view of another European flare-up that won’t really become a lasting fire? After all, the Kaiser has rattled his sabre often enough, but the fact remains that he is a cousin of King George, and the loved grandson of Queen Victoria who insisted on measuring her for her coffin.
John believes the fighting could go on for years and, if it does, this will give Japan her real chance to make herself the dominant power in Asia. No one in the West will have any interest in what is happening out here, particularly on the Chinese mainland, except perhaps the United States, and even with them attention will be the other way, towards Europe. John is pretty cynical about Japan as the gallant ally of Britain and France, saying that if her military bring this country into the conflict it will be to make quite sure that no one makes any protest about Japanese expansion on the Asiatic continent.
I was suddenly very depressed, but John was excited. He sees himself as a man with a role to play all through a time of upheaval and change, and a role he has designed for himself. He sails on Tuesday for the States on the Mongolia without telling Boston he is coming, in this way avoiding a cable ordering him to stay on covering events in the Far East. He plans to get to Europe quickly, if not for the Monitor then some other paper. We said goodbye in the lobby, and he promised to write, but he won’t, and neither will I.
Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
September 17th, 1914
John was right, Japan has come into the war on the side of the British and the French, after three weeks of seeming indecision. Could Kentaro, still in London, have played a part in all this, his despatches convincing Tokyo that the Allies will withstand the Kaiser’s hordes? Anyway, Japan has struck her first blow against Germany by taking Tsingtao.
I have come to hate this flat with its little box rooms and its view of roofs to the horizon. I keep thinking about a house in Yokohama, preferably up on the Bluff, from which you can see both Fuji and the sea. It would mean commuting but the new electric trains do the distance between the two cities in under forty minutes.
I begin to feel like a war profiteer, all the signs point towards no austerity here, quite the reverse, a sudden great enthusiasm for everything British, including clothes from Mary Mackenzie. Western dress is the fashionable thing, though as yet I haven’t read any suggestions in the press for any form of women’s auxiliary service that might require uniforms I could make, this giving me the excuse to expand into a small factory.
At the British Embassy they are having parties to turn sheets into bandages. Alicia has declined, saying she is too old for war work, and I have not been invited. The Ambassadress is said to smoke cigarettes openly at these gatherings. Is Marie doing the same these days?
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Sueyama Apartments, Surugadai, Tokyo
May 28th, 1915
The sinking of the Lusitania, with the drowning of so many Americans on her, seems to have focused all United States attention on Europe, and the militarists here certainly haven’t been slow to take advantage of the situation. Japan’s twenty-one demands on China are outrageous. Issued to any other country they would have meant war, yet it would seem that this clear statement of Japan’s plans with regard to China is going to be allowed to pass almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.
The demands include total territorial rights forever in the Kiaochow peninsula and Tsingtao which Japan took from Germany last year; the exclusive right to colonise South Manchuria, together with total freedom to exploit Inner Mongolia for any mineral resources that may be there. The Port Arthur peninsula, seized from Russia while I was in Peking, but still completely Chinese territory, is to go to Japan on a ninety-nine-year lease and there are to be yet more mining rights granted in central China while at the same time no harbour or any other territory may, from now on, be leased to any other foreign power. To cap all this, as a kind of crowning insult, it is suggested that China would be ‘wise’ to accept Japanese advisers in her government and in her army, this latter with the idea of joint Japanese-Chinese military forces at some time in the near future.
Perhaps my sense of shock from all this is a bit unreasonable since I was born into a country whose king is also Emperor of India, and whose empire was continuing to expand while I was a schoolgirl. I can remember what th
e captain of that ship along the Chinese coast told me about how we acquired Wei-Hai-Wei to which we are no more entitled than the Japanese to Tsingtao, perhaps less so since we didn’t even fight for it. If Kentaro had been out to defend those twenty-one points, which he certainly would never do to me, but may be doing in London, I can imagine what he would say. This would simply echo the views of the ruling caste of which he is a part and it wouldn’t totally surprise me if he got a sympathetic hearing amongst the ruling caste in England. Japan was to become the protector of Asia just as Britain was the protector of India as well as a good half of Africa from Cape Town up to Cairo. He might have added that Japan’s imperial expansion was certainly taking place a little later than the expansion of the other ‘great’ powers, but could scarcely be condemned on this account. I can also see him suggesting politely, over the port at some country-house weekend, that the British were in no position to admonish their Oriental ally in the war against Germany for trying to do in a limited way in the Far East what Britain had done in a huge way throughout the whole world.
I couldn’t have refuted these arguments, at least not from the point of view of someone defending British policy, and perhaps I am being sentimental about those twenty-one demands which I found so detestable, this because I felt a kind of affection for the Chinese that I don’t really feel for the Japanese, or am ever likely to. This is not being rational, I know. When I was in Peking I didn’t speak the language, my contacts very limited from this, and half the foreigners there had recently run the risk of having their heads chopped off and stuck up on staves. My personal life wasn’t exactly glitteringly happy while I was there, either, and yet I believe that if I was now taken from this part of the world for the rest of my days, it is China that would come into my dreams, a procession of camels tinkling through the Hatamen, an old woman with jade in her ears smiling at a new bride, the Summer Palace floating on its hills, a wicked old woman on the dragon throne. I dare say the Chinese need discipline, either from within or without, but I can’t see the Japanese as the right people to administer this. I suspect that as conquerors they go with rock-hard hearts, demanding total submission from those they conquer. Sometimes I feel that the truth about the Japanese is that they have hard hearts for everything that is not contained by these islands and their national ‘way’.