by Ian Buruma
From the very start, Murphy had taken a personal interest in the picture, to the point of going in to see the rushes and suggesting improvements. I’m not sure these suggestions were always welcomed, but the Japanese at least pretended to be grateful for his interventions. Hotta was a thinker, Murphy not at all. But somehow the two managed to get along. They were both idealists. Although their ultimate notions of the ideal society may not have been the same, a shared commitment to democracy was enough to paper over their differences. Seeing Murphy thump his frail Japanese friend on the back always made me wince, but Hotta didn’t seem to mind this at all. He liked the Americans for their “frankness,” a word that I always suspected could also be taken to mean a lack of subtlety, or good manners. To be frank was to be unsophisticated.
Murphy was certainly frank. One small matter of dispute still sticks in my mind. Murphy thought the title of the movie was too gloomy. “Sure,” he said, “there were dark pages in all our history books, but shouldn’t we include something about the present, offer some hope for the future?” His face took on the beatific glow of a visionary. “What about Light After Darkness, or After Darkness, Liberation, or”—he had to think hard here—“A Hard Lesson Learnt?” But Hotta resisted these suggestions, very politely, always making sure to thank Murphy for his excellent advice. He had not resisted the Japanese militarists only to become a toady to the Americans. “Do you know how I got this scar?” he asked us one afternoon, as he pushed out the left side of his face for our inspection. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I saw it clearly, a pinkish stripe running from the corner of his left eye to his jawline. “A little present from our Special Higher Police, just because I wouldn’t trample on my deepest convictions.” So Time of Darkness it was.
Time of Darkness was in fact a documentary picture constructed very much like Capra’s Know Your Enemy, except that this was even harder-hitting. Using some of the same footage that we selected for our movie—the Nanking Massacre, the bombing of Shanghai, the kamikaze attacks—Time of Darkness went much further than we did in blaming the Japanese Emperor himself for the war. In one extraordinary sequence, a photograph of the Emperor in military uniform slowly dissolves into a postwar portrait of him in a suit and tie, looking into the camera a bit sheepishly, like a timid bureaucrat, even as the narrator informs us that the Japanese people want to put their war criminals on trial.
I mentioned Hotta to Yoshiko one night in Tokyo. It was after her concert for Allied troops at the Hibiya Theater. The place was packed, of course. In the first half of her show, Yoshiko was dressed in a red, white, and blue kimono, and sang Japanese numbers like “The Apple Song,” then a popular hit, and “Tokyo Boogie-Woogie.” But she brought the house down when she appeared after the intermission in a clinging silk dress imprinted with pink cherry blossoms, and sang “I Get a Kick Out of You.” The guys just adored her and shouted back: “We get a kick out of you too, baby!” I wasn’t too sure about her choice of music, nor did I feel comfortable in a hall full of hollering GIs; mob emotion always makes me feel ill at ease. But the evening was clearly a triumph for Yoshiko, and I was proud to be her friend.
I was invited, as the only foreigner, to join her for dinner at the Imperial Hotel after the show. Kawamura was there, as usual, but there was no sign of Madame Kawamura. Several others, all Japanese, sat around the table, including a well-known and very handsome movie star named Ryo Ikebe. Before we sat down for dinner—Ikebe and myself, that is—we found ourselves standing side-by-side in the men’s room, and I couldn’t resist a peek. I cannot be entirely sure of this, but I do believe that he was aware of my interest, for he spent an inordinate amount of time shaking his rather formidable member with a trace of a smile on his lips. I found it a little hard after this revelation to concentrate on the dinner conversation. But this is by the by.
“Ah, yes, Hotta-san,” exclaimed Yoshiko, when I mentioned his name. “You know we made a film in Russian during the war, a musical. It was never shown. Our military censors wouldn’t allow it.”
“Frightful vulgarians,” muttered Kawamura.
“We had such a lovely time shooting that picture,” Yoshiko recalled with a chuckle. “All the men working on the film were in love with me, you know, Sid-san, the Russians as well as the Japanese, the stars, the director. Ooh, it was a new drama every day. But I call it our phantom picture. Do you know, I’ve never seen it myself. Poor Hotta-san was devastated. He had put so much time and effort into it. Did you know he was beaten by the Special Police?” A frown appeared on her forehead. “The militarists treated him abominably, abominably!”
It is an unworthy sentiment, I know, but I sometimes wished the folks in Bowling Green could have seen me, at the Imperial Hotel, in the company of my Japanese friends. You might well ask why I should wish to impress people I was so eager to leave behind. Perhaps it was my small vengeance for being made to feel like a freak. I was with real friends now, on a much more glamorous stage.
Not that all my friends were so glamorous. Some of my most intimate moments were shared with people who didn’t even know my name. In the dark of a Tokyo movie theater I was just like everybody else. If I ate enough rice, I often mused, I might even start smelling like everybody else. It was the smell of the Japanese, that sweet combination of rice-sweat and pomade, that intoxicated me more than anything. It was so good I could almost taste it. Every time I fell to my knees in worship, no matter how squalid the shrine of the moment, a public toilet, the park, the dank room of a short-time hotel, I did so hoping I could possess something of the Japanese; the act of love as a route to transfiguration. But I digress again.
To celebrate the release of Time of Darkness, we organized a small party, Murphy and myself, for Hotta and the crew. It took place at Tony’s, the first pizza restaurant in Tokyo. The owner was a large New Yorker named Tony Lucca, who had quit his job for SCAP and made a killing on the black markets. Legend had it that he needed a forklift to transport his cash. Tony liked to be driven around Tokyo in the back of his cream-colored Cadillac convertible with his pal, Kohei Ando, boss of the Ando gang, while being entertained by several young women at a time. Rumor also had it that Tony maintained warm relations with the Luchese family in New York, a rumor Tony himself did nothing to dispel. A somewhat dubious character, then, but his pizzas were delicious (and even if they hadn’t been, they were the only ones in Tokyo), and Tony, despite his booming voice and crude jokes, had a knack with the Japanese; he knew how to make them feel at ease. Movie stars ate pizzas at Tony’s, and so did politicians, businessmen, and, naturally, Tony’s gangster friends, the yakuza, who were given pizzas for free.
So there we were, with great slabs of melted cheese and pepperoni laid out in front of us: Hotta, Murphy, the movie’s director Shimada, the cameraman, the editor, various others whose names I’ve forgotten, and me. Murphy, who didn’t drink alcohol, raised his glass of orange juice and made a toast “to the success of this great democratic motion picture,” and to “my good friend, Nobu-san, if I may be permitted to call you that.” Hotta rose to thank him for the kind words. He found it impossible to call Murphy “Dick,” no matter how often Murphy invited him to do so, or even “Dick-san,” so he compromised, and left it at “Mr. Richard.” But he didn’t seem in a particularly festive mood that night. In fact, his face looked tight as a clenched fist. Hotta was a fastidious man, and at first I thought that Tony’s faintly louche ambiance didn’t agree with him. But there was another, more compelling reason for his unease. Although Time of Darkness had opened in a small artsy cinema in Shinjuku, the main Japanese film distributors had refused to touch the movie. “Too complicated” was the stated reason; or “Confusing to the general audience.” Worse, Hotta had been receiving threats to his life if he didn’t withdraw the film.
Murphy dismissed the whole thing as a silly joke: “Now, why would anybody want to kill you? It’s a great movie.” Hotta thanked Murphy for his support, and said: “Japan is hopeless, Mr. Richard, hopeless.”<
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“What do you mean, hopeless? We’re at the beginning of a new era, Nobu. The Japanese want to be free like everybody else, be free to say what they think, free to vote the rascals out, free to go where they please. That’s why we fought this damned war, isn’t it? And you fought for it too, right? That’s why they roughed you up in prison. But those dark days are over now, my friend. We’re building a democracy, and it’ll work, Nobu, you’ll see, it’ll work out just fine.”
Hotta took a sip of his red wine and said that Japan was “too complicated.”
“Nothing we can’t fix,” said Murphy, at which point Tony, who fancied himself as an entertainer, gave us his rather Neapolitan rendering of “Slow Boat to China.” Murphy led the applause. Hotta’s mood did not visibly improve.
11
YOSHIKO HAD NOT kept her word. She did return to the movies. I can’t say I was surprised. The reason she gave was that she had to support her family. I’m sure this was true, but I suspect that she had caught the movie bug too badly to stay away from the camera for long. It was all very well singing to a hall full of horny American soldiers, but immortality could only be achieved on the silver screen. To be sure, our dreams are made of flammable material. I remember Kurosawa once saying: “Castles in the sand, Sidney-san, that’s all we’re doing, building castles in the sand. One single wave is all it takes to make everything disappear forever.” Nonetheless . . .
I went to see Yoshiko on the set of her latest film, this time without Murphy, which was a relief. “It’s very anti-war,” she assured me, “and very romantic. Lots of love scenes, Sid-san. In Japan we call them ‘wet scenes.’” This made us both laugh. Escape at Dawn was the title. Yoshiko played a prostitute, or as they called them in wartime Japan, a “comfort girl.” This had caused some commotion in our Information Bureau. We encouraged love stories, of course, but an admiring portrait of a prostitute came as rather a shock to the Christians in our office. The specter of “feudalism” also hovered dangerously over the project. Questions were asked whether a love story of a soldier and a prostitute really encouraged healthy relations between men and women. The Japanese argument that stories about prostitutes were part of Japanese culture didn’t cut much ice with Murphy, whose respect for cultural tradition ran out when tradition clashed with the policies of his department—or indeed with the convictions that came with his upbringing in rural Idaho. But a compromise was found. The script was revised. The girl was no longer identified as a prostitute but as a “singer,” sent to comfort the soldiers on the battlefront. This way, everyone was satisfied.
The singer is in fact forced to comfort a sadistic officer, but falls madly in love with a soldier, played by the gorgeous Ryo Ikebe. The soldier disgraced himself by being captured alive by the Chinese. That he managed to escape made no difference at all. His first duty was to die. Being in love with his superior officer’s special girl only made things worse. So he becomes the sadistic officer’s whipping boy; every day another torment. Until, one day, he cannot stand it any longer, and the soldier and the singer decide to choose love rather than war—a sentiment that did much to mollify Murphy’s initial reservations— and plan their escape. The scene to be shot on the day of my visit, of the escapees falling to the machine gun of the sadistic officer, was the film’s concluding image.
“The role was written specially for me,” Yoshiko said, as the camera was being set up in a kind of sandpit, meant to represent the flat landscape of China’s central plains. The director, Taniguchi, told the soldiers to line up. “Everyone in position?” he shouted. “Prepare! Start!” The sadist, played by a brutally good-looking actor who went on to have a long career in yakuza pictures, ordered his men to shoot poor Ikebe. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to execute a fellow soldier. So the brute, quivering with rage, murders the hero himself with his machine gun. Yoshiko, wild with grief, screams the name of her lover and throws herself on his dying body. The sadist then shoots her, too. In the last close-up shot, which for some reason took ages to prepare, the twitching hands of the dying lovers come together in the sand.
It was not the greatest film ever made. But it was a success, not so much because of its anti-war message but more on account of the “wet scenes,” which were somewhat bolder than audiences were used to. There is a lot of kissing and thrashing about on army bunks, scenes, by the way, that would never have passed our own Hays Code back home, but with all the absurdities emanating from our office, we were at least spared the censorious eyes of Presbyterian busybodies in Tokyo. I saw Escape at Dawn several times in ordinary moviehouses, and was delighted to see that Yoshiko’s hot kisses were met with loud cheers and much applause. There were rumors that Ikebe’s passion for Yoshiko was not confined to the motion picture screen. If so, she never revealed anything of the kind to me.
Which was a good reason to doubt such rumors. For she did in fact confide much of her private life to me. It wasn’t long after my visit to the set of Escape at Dawn that she invited me for dinner at Iceland, a fancy French restaurant near the Imperial Palace, one of those dark, oak-paneled places with ancient white-gloved waiters and alarming violinists hovering around the tables. I never found out why it was called Iceland, but such linguistic mysteries abound in Japan. There cannot have been many instances of Japanese ladies paying for the dinners of young American men; but Yoshiko was a movie star, after all, and I was happy to be her adoring acolyte.
The conversation was somewhat stiff in the beginning. She toyed with her food, refused to drink wine, but insisted that I try the red Bordeaux. Perhaps she was self-conscious about the looks we invited. Most people recognized her instantly. Being Japanese, they were too polite to point, or whisper, or come over to ask for her autograph, but the quick glances, designed to go unremarked, made us feel conspicuous.
“Mama and Papa are well,” she replied, when I asked after Mr. and Mrs. Kawamura, “but it is time for me to move on.” She had found an apartment in Asagaya. And what about Ikebe-san, I enquired, trying not to seem prurient, and perhaps not entirely succeeding, since she gave me a funny look and said, with the hint of a smile, “Ikebe-san, marvelous actor.”
I probed no further. We talked about the weather, which had been quite chilly for this time of year, and about films we had seen, or rather, I had seen, for she never had time to see movies. “I wish I did, but it’s just work, work, work.”
It was, I think, only when we got to the dessert, a baked French custard, that she looked at me intently with those large, luminous, irresistible eyes, and said: “Sid-san, I want to ask you something.”
“Of course, anything.”
“I feel that I can trust you.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to look too eager.
“Promise you won’t tell.”
Of course I wouldn’t.
“Sid-san, I want to go to America. Do you think that sounds crazy?”
“No, no, but why? Can’t you go on holiday in Japan?”
“I can’t take a holiday. I have to work.”
“All the more reason not to go to America.”
She shook her head impatiently. “You don’t understand. I want to work in the USA. You see, there is so much good I can still do in this crazy world. I was deceived once by the militarists, so when Ri Koran died, I made a promise to myself that I would never let something like that happen again. Never again would I lend myself to making propaganda for war. It is my duty to work for peace, and for friendship between our countries.” She looked very serious when she said this, like a child concentrating hard on a drawing.
“But, honey,” I said, “your public is here.”
Yes, she said, “but Japan is very small. You know what we Japanese say: to know only your own little world is like being a frog in a well.”
I nodded. I had heard the expression before. Since Nobu first told me about it, I kept on hearing it. “Perhaps I can help with some of my Hollywood contacts.”
“Oh,” she purred, “I was hop
ing you would say that. I knew I could depend on you.” She bowed her head to the crisp white linen tablecloth, almost upsetting the empty crystal wine glass. “Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu,” she said, her eyes cast on her plate, meaning something like “I’m humbly asking for your kind help.”
A mere two years ago I had been kicking my heels in Ohio, hoping to find some adventure at the Luxor, and here I was, in the best French restaurant in Tokyo, boasting of my Hollywood contacts to a world-famous movie star. I was bluffing, of course, careless of the consequences. But I was young, which, I guess, is a lousy excuse.
“I was thinking,” Yoshiko continued, “perhaps you could go back to America as well, to study Japanese, isn’t that what you wanted? And then you could be my guide.”
I was so astonished that I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, and just stared at her with my mouth open, no doubt looking rather stupid.
“Think about it, Sidney-san. There is no need to say yes now.”
I promised that I would, of course, think about it.
