by Ian Buruma
I walked to the Yamato Hotel, only to be told by the receptionist, Old Chen, whom I had known for years, that there was no more room. The lobby was filled with trunks waiting to be shipped off to Japan. Ozaki, the surgeon, whom I had always detested, was frantically trying to arrange transport for himself and his family. He was screaming at another Japanese, a bureaucrat of some kind, that he, Ozaki, as the chairman of the Japanese-Manchukuo Friendship Association, should be the first in line. Both men fell silent, however, when a Kanto Army colonel pushed them both aside and ordered a soldier to load up his luggage in the car claimed by Ozaki, who, his face turned almost scarlet with anger, sputtered in protest. The colonel turned round and roared: “Don’t you dare address an officer of the Imperial Japanese Army like that, you insolent bastard!” I decided it was time to leave.
The film studios, where I was bound to find some friendly face, seemed my best bet. Great Unity Boulevard was swarming with Japanese civilians, carrying their belongings in pushcarts or on their backs, like a flood tide rolling in the direction of the station. It was no use telling these people that there would be no more trains, at least not for them. Who would have believed me? Even a hopeless task is sometimes better than doing nothing at all. Furious honking sounded from the direction of the army headquarters. The crowd scrambled to make way for a convoy of military trucks and black staff cars racing toward the station. Several people were nearly run over, as the convoy left us choking in a cloud of dust. An elderly man waved his fist at the soldiers and shouted that they were a disgrace to our country. I could have told him so long before this unseemly end to our presence in China.
My clothes, which I had worn since I left Shanghai, were heavy with dirt and perspiration. I longed to take a bath. Normally a place full of hustle and bustle, with costumed extras running to this sound-stage or that, the studio buildings appeared to have been abandoned. One or two nervous-looking clerks scurried down a corridor with bags containing who knows what. I didn’t see anyone I knew, and was about to find a place to lie down and get some rest, when a familiar voice called my name: “Well, well, if it isn’t Sato, coming back to roost in his old nest.”
Amakasu, neatly dressed in his usual green uniform, looked positively friendly. I hadn’t often seen him smile, and certainly wouldn’t have expected to see him doing so at this grim hour. It was as if nothing had ever happened between us. “What about going to the lake for a spot of fishing, eh?” He put his hand on my back and steered me outside. I was so astonished that I followed him, meek as a child. The South Lake looked peaceful in the afternoon sun, like a Chinese painting, with white herons poking about in the bamboo groves, and water gently lapping on the shore. Amakasu gazed fondly at the New Asian–style roofs rising above the trees of the South Lake Park, and said: “Look, Sato, at the sun shining over our beautiful city, radiant as the destiny of this great land.” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “We both loved this country, didn’t we, Sato? Factories, mines, railroads, they were Kishi’s creation, and grand projects they were too, vital to the survival of our empire, no doubt. Our work was different, though, wasn’t it, Sato? But no less important. Not at all. I like to think that our contribution was to put a smile on the faces of the people of Manchukuo. And you know what, Sato? Even as we Japanese fade away from this great land, those smiles will remain as a testament to my work.”
He felt a tug on his fishing rod and gently eased a plump fish out of the water. It was a beautiful white carp with patches of red, glistening in the sunlight. Amakasu turned to me with the look of a proud young boy, joyful and innocent.
I saw him once more, very briefly, on the afternoon of the next day. I don’t know why I was still hanging around the deserted studio. But I had nowhere else to go, and found some comfort in revisiting my memories. As I strolled through the empty soundstages, I recognized bits of old sets from Ri’s first films: the interior of a train from Honeymoon Express, the facade of a Buddhist temple from Suzhou Nights. And I thought of all the great movies, and the labor that went into them, by Japanese, Chinese, Manchus. There is nothing more wonderful than people working together to create a thing of beauty. Here at least, in the Manchuria Motion Pictures Studios, we made no distinctions in race or nationality; only talent counted. I wept as I walked, for the last time, through the door of Stage 3, and entered the hall that led to Amakasu’s office. Perhaps he had heard my footsteps. He emerged from his room, smiling, and stuck out his hand like a Westerner. I was surprised to see him in the full dress uniform of the Concordia Association, with the characters for “harmony among the five races” stitched on his lapels. It was the kind of thing he would only have worn at official functions. I thought it looked clownish. He shook my hand and said: “We had a grand time in Manchukuo, didn’t we, Sato?”
After that, he turned back into his office and softly closed the door. Seconds later I heard a loud bang, which echoed down the corridor. With the shot still ringing in my ear, I knocked on Amakasu’s door, calling his name. I don’t know why I did this. It was absurd, now I think about it. Anyway, the door was locked. When I finally managed to break in, I saw him slumped over his desk, blood dripping onto the Persian carpet. I rather wish that I had had the courage then to follow his example.
Instead, I rushed from the scene to find help. But where? The police stations were abandoned, and the hospitals had their hands full coping with Japanese refugees camping out in every room, terrified of what might be in store for them. Everywhere I went I heard fearful stories of Chinese brigands raping Japanese women and taking the children off as slaves. So I went back to bury Amakasu myself, in the garden of the studio he had built. It was the least I could do for this often misunderstood man, whom history will surely treat more kindly than some of his contemporaries did.
A stroke of luck rescued me from having to share the hospital floor with a mass of filthy, hysterical refugees. On my way back from the studio I ran into Liu, an old Manchu friend. He had worked as an interpreter at the Manchukuo Broadcasting Corporation, first in Mukden, later in Shinkyo. Our friendship went back to the early days of the Manchukuo Rhapsody programs. Unlike all the others, he still valued our friendship and offered to put me up for a few days. I have no way of finding out what has happened to him since, but I wish to pay tribute to his spirit of kindness and courage.
Liu was a learned man, who had studied literature in Peking before the war. Books were his only passion. His small house in Shinkyo, not far from Great Unity Avenue, was like a bookstore, with books piled high in every room. There was nothing he hadn’t read in Japanese as well as Chinese literature. He was certainly much better read than me. But we shared a passion for All Men Are Brothers. So we spent the next few days reciting our favorite stories, Liu in Chinese and me in Japanese. His favorite hero was Wu Song, the drunken hero, who takes revenge for the murder of his brother. My preference went out to Soko, the great leader with the phoenix eyes. “But he betrayed his men in the end,” said Liu, gently mocking me with his laughter. “He joined the government forces,” Liu continued, with feigned indignation. I defended my hero, claiming that this was part of his strategy. Soko was always on the side of justice. On and on we went, arguing back and forth, drinking our way through Liu’s last supply of rice wine. We were like brothers in that small apartment filled with stories. For a few days, amidst the mayhem, I felt as if I were at home.
Perhaps it was on the fourth day of my stay with Liu, or possibly even the fifth, but whichever it was, around noon we heard a tremendous racket going on outside. It came from Great Unity Avenue, the sound of screaming and the music of a brass band. Liu went pale and told me to stay inside and have another drink. But I couldn’t contain my curiosity. I joined the crowd running toward the main street. Army trucks were parked randomly in the middle of the road near the entrance of Mitsukoshi, the department store, which had been abandoned when the Japanese took flight. It was immediately clear that the trucks weren’t ours. They had red stars on the sides. Large
foreign men in untidy military uniforms were rushing in and out of the stores carrying as much as they could: women’s dresses, table lamps, clocks, shoes, curtain materials, brass fittings, chairs, bottles of saké, anything that caught their fancy. I saw a man with four pocketwatches dangling from his neck, and another with a stuffed bird borne on his head like a lady’s hat. Soldiers were not so much marching as roaming along the avenue, staring at the stores, most of which looked as though they had been struck by a hurricane, and at the women, wondering which one to take first. More trucks arrived from the direction of the South Lake. The soldiers, obviously drunk, looked quite insane. They were hollering like beasts and decked out in the strangest assortment of clothes. There were men wearing traditional Chinese robes, and Japanese women’s kimonos, and bowler hats. Two soldiers were fencing, one with a Chinese sword and the other with a fake rifle. Another, tottering on his feet, was wearing a Chinese emperor’s hat and a women’s dress of silk.
It took me a while to make sense of this crazy spectacle. But then I understood. They had looted the film studios and were running amok with our costumes and props. One of those Chinese dresses might actually have been worn by Ri Koran. I thought of poor Ri, waiting for her cruel fate in a Shanghai jail, and Amakasu, buried in the hard Manchurian soil, and Eastern Jewel, forever caught between her native and adopted countries. Our cowardly troops had left us to the mercy of these savages. The barbarians had looted our dreams.
PART TWO
1
WE ALL KNEW the rules back then, in the summer of 1946: NFWIP, No Fraternization with Indigenous Personnel. The penalties for infringements were severe. If you were caught one too many times in an off-limits restaurant, bar, or movie theater, it meant a one-way ticket back home, and “home” was the last place I wanted to be. Fraternization still went on, of course. Most officers had a “kimono girl” tucked away for their own amusement. Not that I was particularly interested in that kind of thing, but a man could pick up a girl behind Yurakucho Station and have his way with her in Hibiya Park for a packet of Camels. However, that same man would be punished for attending a performance at the Kabuki Theater, which was off-limits, and God, or General MacArthur, only knew why.
The good thing was that the U.S. Military Police were rather like modern tourists, parochial and incurious. They watched a few places like hawks, mostly around the Ginza area, but stayed away from lesser known parts of Tokyo, the bombed-out plebeian districts near the Sumida River, where street markets, fairgrounds, burlesque joints, and moviehouses had sprung to life as soon as the war was over. Those were my illicit stamping grounds, where adventure beckoned around every corner, in the grounds of every broken shrine, along every rank-smelling garbage-filled canal, in every movie theater when the lights were dimmed. Ueno was already famous in Hokusai’s days for its boy brothels. Some of them catered to Kabuki actors. Others were said to be frequented by lovers of young monks. For me, the park on the lake, carpeted with water lilies, was the setting for many an unexpected encounter.
Summer, when the cicadas rasp in the steaming heat, is my favorite season in Tokyo. It is then that the Japanese seem most natural, most themselves. In those early, less inhibited days after the war, strong workingmen emerged freshly scrubbed from the public baths, often in nothing but their white fundoshi neatly wrapped around their loins, leaving very little to the imagination. Tokyo, my Tokyo, the Tokyo of the common people, in August, was a banquet of honeyed curves and soft skin, displayed not to show off, but innocently, unself-consciously. I stood and watched the world go by, an invisible observer in the Garden of Eden, entranced by what I saw, even if that garden was still a landscape of ruins stretching all the way to Mount Fuji, whose pale cone is no longer visible now, but still rose in those days majestically over the scorched earth. I wasn’t literally invisible, of course, but as a foreigner I was ignored. The Japanese never see what they choose not to see. So they pretended that I wasn’t there. And that’s just how I liked it.
This feeling was most acute when I entered one of the moviehouses, strictly off-limits, of course, but even the most hawk-eyed MP would never have had the imagination to come and snoop around in the Asakusa Rokko or the Ueno Nikkatsu. Tokyo, in those days, was full of movie theaters, almost as many as there were public baths. Some of them had just about survived the bombings and retained some of their prewar glitter, like old prostitutes with thick layers of makeup, cracking at the edges. Many more were jerry-built, and looked as flimsy as movie sets. There were cinemas in the basements of wrecked department stores, cinemas clustered around the railway stations, and cinemas tucked away in obscure back alleys that were hard even to stumble across by accident. People were just crazy for the movies. Day and night you would see the Japanese lining up for another show. It was as if a kind of movie madness had been dropped into the water supply. The whole nation was seeking to escape into a world of celluloid dreams.
And so, on those hot Tokyo nights, I would slip inside a packed movie theater and stand in the crowd that gave off a sweet smell of rice sweat and camellia oil, flesh pressing against flesh, my eyes trained on the screen in rapture as scene after incomprehensible scene demanded my full attention. I tried to make sense of the family dramas featuring suffering daughters-in-law and war veterans drowning their memories in drink. Even though the stories mostly escaped me, the emotions that swept across the audience like rays from the flickering screen affected me deeply. I wept with the men and women around me, who were so much like the men and women on the screen. The Japanese didn’t want to see movie stars living more glamorous lives than they did; no, they came to see the lives of people just like themselves. Instead of wallowing in their own wretchedness, they cried for the misfortunes of imaginary characters, misery redeemed by art. Odd though it may sound, it was in these cinemas, surrounded by people whose language was still a mystery to me, that I felt totally at home.
2
NOT THAT THE idea of home meant much to me. For where was home? Bowling Green, Ohio, is where I had the misfortune of being born, in a small white suburban house near Route 6, halfway between Napoleon and Venice. My dear mama, Florence, had grown up in a suburb of Chicago and I think she felt trapped in Bowling Green, and even more in her marriage with my father, Richard Vanoven, who hated all the things she loved, like listening to music on the radio or reading books. I was named Sidney, after my father’s elder brother who died in the war in France. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand, it was being called “Sid,” but “Sid” it was, alas, until much later in life, when I was old enough to assert my right to be called by my proper name, and even then the dreadful “Sid” would crop up with annoying regularity.
I can still hear the tick-tock of our Swiss wall clock (yes, it had a cuckoo announcing the time of day with a grating mechanical sound) and the rustling of my father’s newspaper as the only sounds to break the heavy silence in our living room. Mama would be itching to turn on the radio to listen to one of her favorite bands, Ted Weems on the Johnson’s Wax Show, or Paul Whiteman, or her absolute favorite, Ben Bernie and his magic violin. (Classical music had not yet reached Bowling Green, I’m sorry to say.) But she knew that the merest attempt to reach for the radio would be met by a growled order to “leave that damned noise off.”
As long as I can remember, I realized that some awful mistake had been made and that I didn’t belong there. Quite where I did belong was unclear. But in my earliest dreams, inspired by books about Aladdin or Peter Pan, I was forever flying to some Never-Never Land as far away as possible from Bowling Green, Ohio. I often imagined that I could be one of the characters in these stories—Aladdin himself, of course, but I would also have been perfectly content to have been one of the pirates serving under Captain Hook. Indeed, I might have preferred it, for I secretly adored Captain Hook. Aladdin I envied for his jeweled turban and his magic lamp. The idea of calling up miraculous adventures just by rubbing a lamp was too marvelous for words. And there was something about Aladdin’s fairy-
tale world of soukhs and djinns and minarets that held a deep and mysterious allure.
As I grew older, travelling vicariously with Aladdin or Peter Pan no longer sufficed as a viable escape and life became more and more intolerable. Barely on speaking terms with my father, I found it harder to understand Mama’s stoic endurance. The only time I saw her really happy, almost as if she had grown ten years younger by the rub of a magic lamp, was during a visit to the Chicago World’s Fair with her sister, my Aunt Betsy. I must have been about eight or nine at the time. It was as if God had opened up a treasure chest and dropped its contents onto the shores of Lake Michigan just for us: a Moroccan Village, with turbaned sheikhs and wandering nomads in long colorful robes; a Japanese Pavilion, with the Seven Geisha Girls performing arcane ceremonies with a teapot; an Italian Hall shaped like a sleek modern airliner; and a real German Beer Hall, with men in leather shorts. Mama never touched any alcohol at home, since my father disapproved of it. Yet there they were, Mama and Aunt Betsy, lifting huge steins to their lips, giggling like young girls. I asked Mama why we couldn’t stay there forever, if not at the World’s Fair, then at least in Chicago, with Aunt Betsy. She laughed. What about Dad? she said. Well, what about him? I replied.
