by Oswald Wynd
On the third day we went to the tomb of Ieyasu, the dictator who for so long ruled Japan with intelligence and an almost contemporary liberalism but then suddenly, towards the end of his life, turned on the foreigners he had admitted and the religion they had brought with them, starting a wave of massacres that was to end in the martyrdom of thirty thousand Japanese Christians and the closing of the country’s doors to Westerners for two hundred years. I knew that Ieyasu, ever since, has been worshipped as a god, and to the museum-shrine holding relics of his living – some clothes, armour, sword, court dress – I took with me something like the scepticism of the stout Protestant visiting Rome, refusing to be impressed.
We had the place completely to ourselves except for the attendant priests who were not even interested in a Japanese man accompanied by a foreign woman, as though they needed a good few days to recover from that assault by world travellers, curiosity limp meantime. Kentaro walked on slightly ahead past the glass cases, something he does naturally and only checked for a time when I said that he was always on the alert to disown me quickly if a situation arose in which it would embarrass him to be seen in my company. He didn’t like that, and I hadn’t meant him to. This is the first time since we became lovers that we have ever been seen together in a public place, and it looks to me as though he had carefully chosen an almost empty Nikko out of season in which to make the first tentative experiment.
One of the priests followed us from the museum, I thought for a tip, but it wasn’t that; apparently they are supposed to accompany all visitors to Ieyasu’s actual tomb. Kentaro dismissed the man almost angrily, and though in informal Japanese dress, with bare toes thrust into the thongs of low wooden clogs, he looked then very much the general. We were left alone for the climb up what seemed to be a thousand steps, in some places three of these carved out of one piece of rock, all of them worn down by the feet of pilgrims through the centuries, and slippery with green moss. There was nothing but those steps and vast cryptomerias flanking them on both sides. Sound was wind through the tips of the trees and a rushing of invisible water, no bird call or hint of human noise.
It was not because I had slipped on the moss that Kentaro held out his hand and I took it. We went on climbing that way, saying nothing, up and up against the steep face of the mountain into a designed loneliness that after a time began to make me just slightly dizzy and half afraid, but then, beyond this, brought a calm that seemed to seep through veins like a slow-acting drug. I did not look at him or he at me, eyes down to those sloping steps most of the time though at each of the paved landings before another flight we paused to lift our heads and in a complete silence acknowledge a deepening isolation from the rest of the world.
The shrine tomb was in complete contrast to all those glittering temples in the valley, plain wood under plain tiles, the sweep of its roof carried on upwards by trees growing out of a gradient that looked too steep for roothold. Kentaro offered a prayer to the man-god, this almost brief enough to have been a greeting, then turned back to where I was standing by a stone font. With that between us he said: ‘I have a friend, a diplomat, who has an American wife. It has been successful.’ I said nothing. He stared at me. ‘My wife has been dead for two years. You knew?’ ‘Yes.’ He looked at the long-handled dipper on the font. ‘We can now marry.’
It seemed to me then that even the wind over the tops of the tall trees had dropped to leave a clear field for thunder coming down the mountain, Ieyasu’s anger at this deliberate defiance of his proscription on foreigners. What I said was foolish: ‘Have you thought about this carefully?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If we marry, is Tomo then acknowledged as our son?’ ‘No.’ ‘Would I be able to see him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then we won’t marry.’
We didn’t travel back to Tokyo together. Kentaro came with me to the station of the electric railway and at the turnstile for the platform said: ‘I will come to you in Yokohama?’ That was a question, not an announcement. I said: ‘Yes.’
23
17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 2nd, 1941
This afternoon, for the first time in months, I walked over to the flats which I now hold only by proxy, since foreigners are no longer allowed to own property in this country. I still collect the rents and pay all the bills for maintenance, though how long this will continue is anyone’s guess. My excuse today was that I wanted to watch the sailing of the Tatsuta Maru, the gardens of the flats offering a clear view of the harbour, which my house does not.
What I saw down there looked like the perfectly normal departure of one of Japan’s crack liners for the voyage across the Pacific, except that I couldn’t see any of the usual paper streamers fluttering at this sailing. I hadn’t dared to bring field glasses; in the present tension the police pounce on the least hint of ‘spying’, and for a foreigner to show any curiosity about almost anything is asking for a visit from them, with the very real possibility of arrest on some ridiculous charge.
Harry Nishimoto is on board the Tatsuta in a last desperate bid to get out of the country in which he could be called up for national service of some kind, though I told him he is far too old for any risk of that. He has really become rather a pathetic figure, at the end of a decline which goes back a long way, I think right to the Wall Street crash and the departure of his wife not long after it. He never seemed to come to terms with the Depression, or adapt to it, as a man with his legal training should have been able to do, especially a man with his knowledge of the intricacies of Japanese law. He ought to have given up dual nationality long ago, renouncing the American citizenship he had from being born in Hawaii, to really settle here.
He wanted me to leave on the Tatsuta with him, but what on earth would I do arriving in the States as an immigrant at the age of fifty-eight with no money? Everything I have is tied up here. Also, I don’t want to leave Japan. After thirty-five years in one country you don’t have a ‘homeland’ in any other, or even the potential left for making one. I have not become a Japanese subject because that would be play-acting, but experience has made me a kind of Eurasian, as it did with Alicia. She left instructions that she was to be cremated, which is apparently still anathema amongst Anglicans, and I am told that the Bishop of Tokyo was seriously worried about her damaged prospects of being resurrected from an incinerated body.
Aiko has also been trying to get me to leave Japan. She has become something of a trial, aging rapidly ever since Katsugi divorced her in favour of that younger woman, now really an old suffragette talking of yesterday’s battles and not much interested in today’s. If I did go she wouldn’t have too many friends left, but I don’t suppose that would worry her, and I have a sneaking feeling that she rather has an eye on this house, very ready to offer to caretake it for me if I decide to flee from the wrath to come. Well, I have not fled, and that ship now sailing out of the bay was probably my last chance to do it.
The publicity machine here growls continuously, like a rabid dog, at America and Britain, with much talk of ABCD encirclement, this standing for America, Britain, China and the Dutch. Since there is nothing I can do in the situation except wait, I am managing what is really a pretty high degree of norm by simply only glancing at the papers and never switching on the radio. A few friends come to see me, but I don’t go to see them. There is hostility to the foreigner again in public transport and even on the streets. I have seen this happen often enough before, waves of anti-Western sentiment, the worst after the American Exclusion Act, which branded the Japanese as yellow Asiatics and not fit to set foot on US soil. At that time I couldn’t blame the people around me for the hard looks I got, and I don’t now either, for this time they are the victims of the militarist propaganda machine, being groomed to think what the ruling generals, including Kentaro, want them to think.
He has not been to visit me again since he came back from China in 1939 and was scarcely in the house before I asked him what part, if any, he had played in the rape of Nanking. It was something I had to know,
but I didn’t find out. He turned in a swish of silks from the Japanese dress he always wore when he came to me, and a moment later his clogs clattered over the flagstones to the gate.
I have never seen Kentaro in uniform, not even in China when his formal dress was always European, with nothing to hint at army connections, almost as though he was making a point of pretending not to be a military attaché. I remember a reception at the German Embassy when he turned up in a frock coat that didn’t fit too well, as though mocking all the medalled chests around him of soldiers who had never smelled a battle.
17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 6th, 1941
I have had a letter from Jane. It is hard to believe, even though the pages sit on the table in front of me. She doesn’t say how she got my address, she must have traced me through the Embassy.
She is a widow. Her husband, a colonel, was killed in the fighting on Crete earlier this year, one of those episodes in the new European war I read about with no sense of it having any possible bearing on my life. At thirty-seven Jane is left with a son of twelve and a daughter of nine. She writes of her marriage as though they had been very happy. Her words seem to come from an understanding I would never have thought possible. She and her husband bought a house in Shropshire ten years ago, a big rambling place with a garden she can no longer keep up since she is working as a driver for civil defence. I am offered a home with her.
This is the child I had always thought would get on perfectly well without me, and who has, but who still seems to want to make contact with a woman she can’t remember having seen. The Collingsworth influence can’t have been anything like as strong as I was expecting, or she has shaken it off.
How can I write? I never wrote to the child, or the girl, or the woman. What will I say to fill this great gap of years, or at least indicate I would like to attempt to do this? I have hunted for some hint that she wrote out of duty, driven by the mistaken idea that she has obligations to me, perhaps because of the money Mama left her. Yet all I find is an impulse from warmth. This from the baby with the watchful eyes, who never seemed to need me.
I cannot tell her about Tomo, and why I must stay here. If Japan declares war on Britain, how would she feel about a half-brother belonging to the enemy? And what is there to tell her anyway about the baby I had for an even shorter time than I had her, except that he has followed his father into the Army. This is the one thing that Kentaro, after two whiskies too many, told me about a Kurihama son put out to foster parents.
17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 9th, 1941
The papers rejoice, but I wonder if the Japanese people really feel that what happened at Pearl Harbor has switched the whole course of history in their favour? I do not believe that the entire American Pacific fleet was destroyed. There have been enough wars in my time for me to be suspicious of all official reports. And in this country we have been lied to by the press and radio ever since the Japanese invaded China in 1937, so the habit is well established. I wonder what will happen to the Tatsuta Maru now? After Pearl Harbor it certainly won’t be making towards Hawaii or any American port. It has probably turned and is racing back to Japanese waters, with all those miserable last minute bolters aboard. I will probably meet up with her passengers again when, in due course, I am taken to an internment camp.
Meantime I stay in this house and look at a garden which will be here long after I am gone, that is, unless the Americans manage to do what the papers say is impossible, bomb Yokohama and Tokyo. The fire bombs used in Europe would find wonderful fuel in these cities. When this war is over, is there going to have to be another huge transplanting of trees?
Last night I didn’t sleep. If Tomo went into the Army at eighteen or nineteen, as I expect he would, then by now he should be an officer of considerable rank, possibly a major. The higher you go the safer you should be. But Jane’s husband was a colonel. If Tomo is wounded or killed I won’t even know. He is such a stranger my heart wouldn’t be able to tell me.
17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
April 11th, 1942
Some days, reading the papers, being forced to accept the truths lying under the exaggerations, I feel like a ghost returned from another age and, as a punishment for distant sins, forced to watch the crumbling away of everything I had once known, and lived in, and believed to be solid forever. Hong Kong has gone, and Malaya, and Singapore. The Philippines have collapsed, two days ago Bataan surrendered, and the only Americans still fighting are crowded into the rock fortress of Corregidor which is under constant bombardment.
One of the Tokyo dailies had a gloating piece yesterday about how all over Asia could be heard the marching feet of white prisoners, both soldiers and civilians, all now the slaves of the god-Emperor. Burma is to be next, and after that the armies of the Mikado will march into India. The Japanese flag will, before long, be hoisted in Canberra and over New Zealand, which has already been given its new Japanese name on Tokyo-printed maps. Singapore, rechristened Shonan-to, is now the nerve centre for a vast advance in three directions from it, south, east, west. To the north of Malaya the whole of the Orient is already Japanese.
These are the facts. I have to make an effort to stretch my belief in the possible to accept them. The Far East I have known for nearly forty years has been wiped out like chalk marks from a blackboard by a wet cloth, but I can’t really feel it yet, living here as I do, with Toba San still to look after me, the streets of the Bluff still quiet. Maybe I am waiting for the audible sounds of war to reach us as a convincing argument, but they haven’t come. Behind my high board fence this security doesn’t seem in the least fragile. It is only sometimes, out in the garden, that I feel uneasy, and I wonder if I should have restored it so carefully, whether a lawn with rose beds wouldn’t have been better after all? I am conscious now, too, of a kind of affectation in my life in almost totally Japanese rooms. The ginger tree, grown sizeable again, remains the stubborn stranger.
24
M/S Gripsholm, at sea
August 3rd, 1942
That woman is at last playing bridge, which ought to mean that I have this cabin to myself for a couple of hours. If she tells me just one more time how lucky I am to be on this ship instead of being left behind in Japan there will be an explosion. I hope it doesn’t happen in the dining-room. Ever since we sailed she has been complaining about the ghastly mistake the Purser made in assigning her to this cabin down on E Deck with me. She rates much higher in the ship than E Deck, because even though she has been working as a typist at the British Embassy, that is not her real status at all, she is the widow of a man who had just been made First Secretary in Kabul when carried off by a heart attack. Since his appointment had not actually been confirmed there are some doubts about her rights to a widow’s pension at First Secretary level, which she claims is why she stayed on in Tokyo to work at the Embassy. It is my bet she stayed on in Tokyo because the last thing she wanted was to be returned in a hurry to a London under Nazi air attack.
It is probably the state of shock I am still in which makes me find Mrs Burke’s chatter so excruciatingly difficult to endure. I am not lucky to be leaving Japan. I wanted to stay on in my house until they came to take me to a camp for enemy aliens. Well, they came for me, though not as escorts to a camp, four policemen in white uniforms. Toba San had gone grey under a summer tan when she came up to report that we had visitors.
It was all so appallingly polite, as though the four had been given strict instructions to avoid any hint of unpleasantness. The late Countess Kurihama could not have taken exception to the tone of the language used to me, but a thick layer of courtesy sugar did not disguise the bitter message. I had one hour in which to pack two suitcases, after which I would be driven down to pier number one, where the Gripsholm was already embarking enemy diplomats and others entitled, under international law, to repatriation. It was no use my pointing out that I had no right to repatriation and did not want it, the spokes
man for my visitors bowed and said: ‘Ah, so?’ He then stated that the orders concerning me had come from a very high place. I asked to be allowed to make some phone calls, but this was not permitted. I was reminded that time was getting on and I had my packing to do.
I went upstairs. What do you take in a couple of cases when you are suddenly to be pitchforked out of a world in which you have lived for the greater part of your life? I filled one with clothes, not very well chosen; I find I am short of shoes, only two pairs and no slippers. I shut the lid on that bag and opened the other. Books? Too heavy, and also replaceable, though some of them stared at me from the shelves, including one volume, out of the original six from KYS to PAY, of the Encyclopedia, this for some reason shoved into the household linen basket and taken to Karuizawa in that summer of 1923. Waugh, Linklater, Auden, Isherwood, Waley, all said that they did not want to be left in Japan. I took the Prokosch novel I was reading, Seven Who Fled, then poured letters and journals over it, slamming that lid, too.
Toba San arrived too late to help me, red-eyed. I found my bag and wrote her a cheque for two thousand yen. In so far as I knew my account at the Yokohama Specie Bank was still unfrozen, but I told her to get the cash next day. She was to go on living here for as long as she liked, but mustn’t feel that she had to look after my things, which would probably be impossible. She did something then I have read about, but never seen, threw her apron up over her face, making howling noises behind it.
