by Ian Buruma
The Oriental Peace Studios, located near the Tama River, were the largest in Japan. Men with white kerchiefs wrapped around their heads were running in and out of low gray concrete buildings. Everyone seemed to be in a tremendous rush. It was like watching a speeded-up movie, as though the Japanese couldn’t make films fast enough to still the national craving for motion pictures.
To get to Studio A, where Sounds of Spring was being shot, we had to pass by a remarkable reconstruction of a ruined Tokyo street, set around a bomb crater filled with water. The ruined houses, made of painted wood, looked disturbingly real. A handpump was inserted into the sump to produce noxious-looking bubbles in the slimy surface of the stagnant pool. An old shoe, a discarded doll, a broken umbrella, and other bits of flotsam had been artfully placed in the water. A man was hunched over a guitar. A fire hose was spraying water over the set to simulate a summer rainstorm. A pan-pan girl with piled-up hair, bright red lipstick, and high heels stood outside the facade of a neon-lit dance hall, from the back of which a handsome young man in a Hawaiian shirt and a white plastic belt came rushing in whenever the director cried: “Start!” A popular ballad was playing in the background. Apart from the large old prewar camera, the sound boom dangling from a bamboo pole, the lights, and the director in his floppy white hat, this scene might have been taking place in any backstreet of Tokyo.
Anxious to get inside the studio building, Murphy strode past the set with barely a glance. I made an awkward half bow at the director, whom I recognized as the slim young man at the meeting in GHQ. He smiled and nodded back. But Murphy told me to hurry up, so I was unable to watch any more of this intriguing scene being shot.
Inside Studio A, the air was even more stifling than outside on the open set. When the lights were on, the heat was suffocating. Miyagawa, the director, stood up when he saw us, and ordered an assistant to place two chairs beside his. The set, bathed in bright light, was a small garden outside a wooden Japanese house. The potted tree and bamboo grove were splashed with water to keep them looking fresh. In this artificial garden stood a young man in a white summer suit with rather too much makeup on and a petite young woman in a flowered dress and white ankle socks. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. To prevent the actors’ makeup from running in the heat, a girl was busily dabbing their foreheads with a handkerchief. Miyagawa clapped his hands, called for quiet, and said something to the actors. George whispered that this was a rehearsal. Someone handed us a script in English. The lines went: Man: “I love you. For eternity I love you.” Woman: “You promise me, never let me go.” Man: “We will always be free.”
The actress had remarkably large eyes, which she opened even wider when she spoke her lines, while puckering her lips to receive her lover’s kiss. Miyagawa leaned forward in his chair, his face creased with concentration. He clapped his hands again. A sharp word was addressed to the actress, who nodded vigorously, while apologizing for her clumsiness. George explained that she should close her eyes when they kissed. They went through the scene several more times, the young man stooping to take her into his arms, and the girl closing her eyes in blissful anticipation, though always stopping short of actual contact. I was trying to think where I had seen her face before. I asked George who she was. He told me she was very famous and that her name was Yoshiko Yamaguchi. The name meant nothing to me.
“Okay, let’s go. Honban!” said Miyagawa. This word I knew. It meant something like “the real thing.” The actors received a final dab with the handkerchief. Miss Yamaguchi looked toward Miyagawa, clearly disturbed about something. He made a reassuring gesture and barked an order. The girl with the handkerchief rushed to the stage. In her right hand, now encased in a white glove, she held two tiny pieces of gauze, which had a faint chemical odor. Yamaguchi closed her eyes and offered her mouth to the girl, who carefully inserted the gauze between her lips, as though it were a host.
“Hai starto!” cried Miyagawa. The actor did his best with the lines. They embraced, his lips briefly brushing against her lips wrapped in gauze. Murphy was smiling, like a benevolent priest. I didn’t really appreciate it then, but we were witnesses to a great moment: the first kiss in the history of Japanese cinema.
The release of tension was palpable. Miss Yamaguchi did a little jig on the spot. The actor, whose name was Shiro Okuno, grinned and scratched the back of his neatly coiffed head. Even Miyagawa looked more relaxed, as he introduced us to his stars. “Hi,” said Miss Yamaguchi, as she shook my hand. “Nice to meet you. I like Americans.” “Well,” I replied, slightly taken aback, “I like Japanese.” This elicited a nervous titter. “Nooo,” she said, in protest. Perhaps she thought I was being patronizing. Murphy then took her hand in both of his and said: “It’s sure great to meet you, Yamaguchi-san. Our boys in intelligence know all about you. They all know your song, ‘China Nights,’ from Japanese class. They love it, just love it.”
“Ri Koran!” I said. “You’re Ri Koran. I adored your movie.” There was a moment of silence, as though I had said something gauche. Perhaps I had insulted her by getting it wrong. But I was sure it was her. How could I have forgotten that face, those eyes? Of course, actors always look larger on screen. Like a starstruck fool, I just stood there, staring at her. “Ri Koran,” she said softly, “was indeed my name once, but Ri Koran no longer exists. She died in September 1945. I am Yoshiko Yamaguchi now, and I ask for your kind indulgence.”
So the “Chinese girl” Frank Capra had admired was actually a Japanese. Why would she have had a Chinese name? Like so much in Japan, it was all rather baffling. In fact, to me, before I came to Japan, Asiatics were just Asiatics. I couldn’t really tell the difference between a Chinese, a Korean, or a Japanese. Now I fancied that I could. But Yamaguchi didn’t look typically Japanese. She just looked, well, Asiatic.
7
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me how the Japanese could have changed so suddenly from our most ferocious enemies, ready to fight us to the death, to the friendly, docile, peace-loving people we came across after the war was over. It was as if some magic switch had been pulled to transform a nation of Mr. Hydes into a nation of Dr. Jekylls. We expected to be met with a hundred million poisoned bamboo spears; what we got instead was the Recreation and Amusement Association offering Japanese girls to Allied soldiers—that is, until our own puritans decided to ban that type of intercourse.
There might be a perfectly practical explanation for this kind of behavior. Aware of what their own troops had done to others, the Japanese wanted to make sure we wouldn’t pay them back in kind. To many Westerners this simply confirmed a typically Japanese talent for deception; they were a nation of double-faced liars, thinking one thing and saying the opposite, facing the outside world with masques and phony smiles.
But I don’t think so. I believe the Japanese were honest in their own way. They had genuinely believed in fighting a holy war for their Emperor, and now they believed with equal sincerity in the freedoms we promised after the fighting was over. Westerners, believing in one God, prize logic. We hate contradictions. To be authentic is to be consistent. But the Oriental mind doesn’t work that way; it can happily contain two opposite views at the same time. There are many gods in the Orient, and the Japanese mind is infinitely flexible. Morality is a question of proper behavior at the right time and place. Since the concept of sin simply doesn’t exist in the Japanese mind, it is, in a profound sense, innocent. It was appropriate to die for the Emperor before 1945, and it was just as appropriate to believe in democracy after the war. One form of behavior is no more or less sincere than the other. In this floating world of illusions, everything depends on the circumstances. You might see this as a philosophy of deceit. I prefer to call it wisdom.
None of this came to me at once. It took many stumblings and false steps for me to even begin to penetrate the thickets of the Japanese mind. One thing that struck me almost as soon as I set foot in Japan was the lack of nostalgia, or even regret for the destruction of the visible past. The fo
llowing story might serve as an illustration.
One day I was walking up the steps of Ueno Hill, the highest point in the flatlands bordering the Sumida River. You could see for miles around, a vista of neatly piled up rubble and cheap wooden houses with the occasional temple roof and stone lantern to show what had been there before that night in March 1945, when much of the city was laid to waste by our B-29s.
One of the survivors, right where I was standing, was the bronze statue of Takamori Saigo, the samurai rebel with the bulging eyes and thick eyebrows. He challenged the guns of the Westernized Meiji Army in a heroic and suicidal last stand in 1877. His samurai troops were armed with nothing but spears and swords. A hopeless enterprise, of course. According to legend (and who would wish to challenge that?), Saigo slit his own stomach in an honorable warrior’s death. Japanese still regard their hero with immense affection and respect. He is remembered, among other things, for the extraordinary size of his balls.
So there he was on that cold and blustery day, Saigo of the big balls, standing watch like a sturdy peasant in the short kimono and straw sandals of his native region. At his feet was a swarm of homeless urchins, passing around cigarette butts, and eating whatever scraps of food they had managed to scrounge. The boys were dressed in shorts and tattered T-shirts, despite the cold. A few lucky ones had wooden sandals. And the truly fortunate ones found places to sleep in the warm corridors of the subway station at the bottom of the hill. I saw one little boy, who looked no older than five but might well have been more than ten, hold a rat by its tail, waving it in front of another child’s face, to frighten him, or perhaps to show off what they were going to have for dinner that night.
God only knows how these boys had survived the terrible night of the bombings. People who didn’t melt or burn in the firestorm choked for lack of oxygen. Women tried to protect their faces from the “Flower Baskets,” courtesy of General Curtis LeMay, by wrapping bundles of cloth around their heads. Many of them caught fire and ran around like human torches, their screams muffled by the roaring flames. Others tried to escape by jumping into the river, only to be boiled alive or catch fire as soon as they raised their heads above the scalding water. All that remained of Ueno, or of Asakusa, a few miles farther north, were the concrete remnants of a few large department stores in a vast black hecatomb containing the charred bones of at least a hundred thousand people.
My companion on this walk in Ueno Park was a distinguished old film director, temporarily out of work, because our department didn’t approve of the “feudal” character of his movies. He was a specialist in period pictures set in old Edo, stories of doomed love affairs and fatal loyalties. Kenkichi Hanazono was his name. He spoke a little French, since he had spent some time in France as a young art student, and wore a shabby dark blue kimono with frayed sleeves. As we gazed upon the ruins of Ueno, he pointed out some of his favorite places that had disappeared in the firestorms: the graceful wooden shrines of Yamashita; the Buddhist temples behind Kiyomizu Hall; the Sakuraya teahouse, the scene in happier times of illicit love affairs and legendary samurai battles. All gone up in smoke. Like a melancholy stork, Hanazono observed the wreckage. I felt sadness and shame. Should I apologize for what my country had done? I decided against that. It might embarrass him. But I tried to share his grief over what was lost by looking solemn, when, suddenly, I heard a chuckle, then a loud guffaw, then convulsive laughter. Gripping my arm, Hanazono was almost hysterical, tears of mirth streaming down his face, as though the destruction of his city were a great joke. I didn’t know what to say, or how to look. I couldn’t very well start laughing with him. When the hilarity had subsided somewhat, Hanazono turned to me, and noticed my look of consternation. “Sidney-san,” he said, still chuckling, “c’est pas grave.” He tapped the side of his head: “You cannot destroy my city. It’s all in here.”
I admired this man more than I had ever admired anyone before. I grasped the foolishness of our Western illusions, our idiotic hubris of wanting to build cities to last forever. For everything we do is provisional, everything we build will eventually turn to dust. To believe otherwise is just vanity. The Oriental mind, more sophisticated than ours, has grasped this. This floating world is but an illusion. That is why it was of no consequence to Hanazono that the Tokyo of his youth was no more than a memory. Even if every building had still been there, the city would no longer have been the same. Everything shifts, everything changes. To accept that is to be enlightened. I cannot claim to have reached that stage of wisdom. I still craved permanence of some kind.
I decided to track down some of Hanazono’s prewar films, especially Tales of a Woman of Pleasure, a classic picture admired by all Japanese lovers of the cinema. Like many prewar Japanese classics, Hanazono’s works were hard to find. There were very few copies around. All his films had been made for the same company, called Far Eastern Pictures, whose studios were located in the same western suburbs as Oriental Peace. My contact there was Kashiwara-san, a silver-haired fellow in a blue serge suit. These studio executives always got nervous when they received a call from the Information Bureau, for it could only mean trouble. Censoring any of Hanazono’s films was of course the last thing on my mind, but Kashiwara couldn’t be sure of that, so he was rubbing his hands anxiously as he came out of his office to meet me.
Kashiwara politely inspected my business card and despite the chilly weather broke into a sweat. His cup of tea remained untouched. Sipping from mine, I asked him about Hanazono’s pictures: Tales of a Woman of Pleasure, Weeds East of the River, Yoshiwara Story. Kashiwara hissed through his teeth. “Would I be able to see these films?” I asked. Could he possibly arrange a screening? Kashiwara smiled and asked me why I should have an interest in such worthless old movies.
Although he spoke English, I wondered whether I had heard right. “Worthless? But Hanazono is a great director.” Kashiwara shook his head. “Very old-fashioned,” he said. “Old-fashioned? In what sense old-fashioned?” Kashiwara smiled, with perhaps a hint of triumph. “Not democratic.”
I must confess that at moments like this I felt the power of my position as a representative of the victorious Allied forces. The feeling was not entirely unpleasant. It was, after all, rather amazing that I, Sidney Vanoven, a nobody from Bowling Green, Ohio, would be sitting here at a major movie studio in Tokyo, Japan, ordering up film screenings whenever I wanted. On this occasion it gave me license to vent my displeasure.
“Not democratic?” I cried. “Well, I’ll be the judge of that.” When could Kashiwara-san arrange a screening? Perhaps we should start with Tales of a Woman of Pleasure. He dismissed the thought with a wave of his hands. “Please understand that we are abiding by the new rules. We are now a democratic country, thanks to you.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head, as a token of his gratitude.
I was wondering why he was so eager to hide these movies. Why the hell wouldn’t he show them to me? What was he ashamed of? Was he trying to protect some of Japan’s great masterpieces from an American censor? I felt insulted and wasn’t going to stand for this nonsense any longer. I’m afraid I lost my patience with this oily little man. I behaved like a boorish American. I shouted at him: “Just show me the damned movie!” Kashiwara stared at me, suddenly very calm, his face a blank slate.
He stood up slowly from his desk, smiled, and said: “Please, let me show you something.” At last, I thought, I had got through to him. Now I would be able to see Hanazono’s masterpieces. We walked through the long white corridor, past the open doors of offices where men in suits were working away in clouds of cigarette smoke. We came to the back of the building, where I thought the screening rooms might be. Kashiwara invited me to look out the window. I saw a large open space with low gray buildings and bits and pieces of various film sets scattered about: half a Japanese-style house, a castle wall made of plywood. A handsome young man in a white suit and panama hat was smoking a cigarette while a young woman applied makeup to his face. Then they both disappeared into one
of the buildings. Farther in the distance was the silvery ribbon of the Tama River. There were puffs of smoke rising from a number of large bonfires near the riverbank.
“There,” said Kashiwara, “Yoshiwara Story, Tales of a Woman of Pleasure, all the feudal films.” For the first time he looked perfectly relaxed, even triumphant. He gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Okay,” he said. “A-okay.”
8
THE PREMIERE OF Sounds of Spring, at the Ginza Bunka Theater, was by Hollywood standards a subdued affair. But Major Murphy thought so highly of the first Japanese film to feature a kissing scene that he wished, as a gesture of goodwill, to contribute something to the party afterwards at the Imperial Hotel. Apart from a gift from the Information Bureau of several crates of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Murphy had planned to stage a demonstration of square dancing after the screening. Murphy was an enthusiast of square dancing. A proud son of Idaho, he liked to think that the official dance of his state should be popular, and indeed of great benefit, everywhere. He had tried to introduce square dancing to the citizens of a village in Shikoku, where he had, for a brief time, enjoyed absolute authority as the chief military administrator. Square dancing, in his view, perfectly embodied the new spirit of sexual equality in Japan, and was a fitting expression of democracy. The Japanese movie folks were no doubt somewhat alarmed, but Murphy’s good intentions were so patently clear that no one had the heart to protest.
Many of our top brass turned out in full dress uniform. Not “Susan” himself, of course, for SCAP never descended from the Olympian heights of his residence in the old U.S. Embassy, where, rumor had it, the General spent every night alone watching Hollywood pictures. SCAP liked westerns. Especially westerns with Gary Cooper. I had heard it said that the American Mikado watched The General Died at Dawn more than ten times. But Willoughby, not generally noted for his love of the movies, was there with a dashing young officer in tow.
