The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

by Edmund de Waal

  It was a family that could not put itself back together. Elisabeth provided a kind of centre in Tunbridge Wells, writing and relating news, sending on photographs of nieces and nephews. After the war Henk started a good job in London working for the UN relief association and they were more comfortably off. Gisela was in Mexico. She had lean times and worked as a cleaner to support the family. Rudolf was demobbed and living in Virginia. And fashion had ‘given up’ on Iggie – as he put it. He could not face working on gowns again: the thread from Vienna to Paris to New York had been broken by his battle experiences in 1944 in France.

  He was now working for Bunge, an international grain exporter, an unintentional return to the patriarch’s roots in Odessa. His first assignment had been a long year in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo, hated for both its heat and its brutality.

  In October 1947 Iggie visited England between postings. He had been offered placements back in the Congo or in Japan, neither of which appealed. He travelled to Tunbridge Wells to see Elisabeth and Henk and his nephews, and to visit his father’s grave for the first time. Then he planned to make a decision about his future.

  It was after supper. The boys had done their homework and were in bed. Elisabeth opened the attaché case and showed him the netsuke.

  A melee of rats. The fox with inlaid eyes. The monkey wrapped around the gourd. His brindled wolf. They take a few out and put them on the kitchen table of the suburban house.

  We didn’t say anything, Iggie told me. We had last looked at them together in our mother’s dressing-room, thirty years before, sitting on the yellow carpet.

  It’s Japan, he said. I’ll take them back.

  Part Four

  TOKYO 1947–2001

  30. TAKENOKO

  On 1st December 1947 Iggie received Military Permit no. 4351 for entry to Japan G1 GHQ FEC, Tokyo. Six days later he arrived in the occupied city.

  Coming in from Haneda airport, the taxi swerved around the worst of the potholes in the roads, swerved to avoid the children, the bicyclists and the women in their baggy patterned trousers trudging towards the city. Tokyo was a strange landscape. The first thing to notice were the looping calligraphies of telephone wires and power cables stretching in every featureless direction over the red of the rusted iron roofing on the shacks. Then, in the winter light, Mount Fuji rose up in the south-west.

  The Americans had bombed Tokyo for three years, but the raids of 10th March 1945 were cataclysmic. There were walls of flame from the incendiary bombs, ‘sowing the sky with fire’: 100,000 people were killed and sixteen square miles of the city were destroyed.

  All but a handful of buildings were flattened or incinerated. Those that survived included the Imperial Palace behind its grey ramparts of boulders and its wide moats, the few built from stone or concrete, the odd kura, the storehouse in which merchant families kept their treasures, and the Imperial Hotel. This had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1923, a fantastic, brash confection of concrete temples around a series of pools, a slightly Aztec version of japonisme. It had also survived the earthquake of 1923 and was grazed, but mostly intact. So were the Japanese parliament building, the Diet, some government ministries, the American Embassy and office buildings in the Marunouchi business district opposite the palace.

  All had been requisitioned for the Occupation authorities. The journalist James Morris, later Jan Morris, wrote of this strange area in his 1946 travelogue The Phoenix Cup: ‘Marunouchi is a small American island surrounded by a Japanese sea of ashes, rubble and rusted cans. Walking around the blocks, discordant music, from the Armed Forces Radio Station, batters on the eardrums, and ruminating G.I.s off duty stand propped against the nearest convenient wall…one might be in Denver…’

  It was here, in the grandest of these buildings, the Dai-Ichi (Number One) Building, that General MacArthur had his headquarters. The Supreme Commander Allied Powers (SCAP). The Yankee daimyo.

  Iggie arrived two years after the Emperor had broadcast his declaration of defeat in his high falsetto, using a diction and locution unknown outside the court, warning that ‘the hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected will be great…’ In the months since, Tokyo had become used to its army of occupation. The Americans had declared that they would rule with sensitivity.

  In the photograph of the General and the Emperor in the US Embassy in Tokyo the relationship was made clear. MacArthur is in khaki uniform, an open-necked shirt and boots. He has his hands on his hips, a ‘big, ribbonless American soldier’, as Life puts it. The Emperor is alongside. He is slight, immaculate, in a black suit with his wing collar and striped tie, caught in convention. Sensitivity and manners, states the photograph, are up for negotiation now. The Japanese press refuse to publish the picture. SCAP makes sure it is published. The day after the photograph is taken, the Empress sends Mrs MacArthur a bouquet of flowers grown in the palace grounds. And a few days later a lacquer box with the imperial crest. Cautious, anxious communications are started with gifts.

  Iggie’s taxi took him to the Teito Hotel opposite the Palace. It was not only difficult to get papers to get into Japan and permission to stay; it was then difficult to get lodgings when you arrived, because the Teito was one of only two hotels standing. The non-military expatriate community was tiny. Apart from the diplomatic corps and the press, there were only a handful of businessmen like Iggie and a scattering of academics. He had arrived as the trials of war criminals, including Hideki Tj and Rykichi Tanaka, head of the secret police, were just starting at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Tojo, according to the Western press, had ‘the unearthly smugness of the samurai’.

  There were constant edicts from SCAP concerning everything from the minutiae of civic life to how Japan was to be ruled, and these often reflected American sensitivities. MacArthur had decided that there was to be a separation between the Shinto religion – deeply implicated in the rise of nationalism of the last fifteen years – and the government. He also wanted the great industrial and commercial conglomerates broken up:

  The emperor is the head of the state…his duties and powers will be exercised in accordance with the new constitution and responsible to the basic will of the people as provided therein…War as a sovereign right of the nation is abolished…The feudal system of Japan will cease…No patent of nobility will from this time forth embody within itself any national or civic power of government.

  MacArthur had also decided that women should get the vote for the first time in Japan’s history and that the twelve-hour day in factories should be reduced to eight. Democracy had come to Japan, SCAP announced. The local and foreign press were censored.

  The American army in Tokyo had their newspapers and magazines, as well as their radio blaring out from sentry boxes. They had their brothels (the RAA, or Recreation and Amusement Association) and their sanctioned pick-up joints (the Oasis of Ginza, with girls dressed in ‘shoddy imitations of long, afternoon frocks’, in the words of one American commentator). There were special carriages on trains reserved for members of the Occupation Army. A theatre had been requisitioned and had become the ‘Ernie Pyle’, where soldiers could see films or revues, go to a library or to one of ‘several large lounges’. And there were the Occupation-only stores, the OSS (Overseas Supply Store) and the PX, which stocked American and European food, cigarettes, household utensils and liquor. They accepted only dollars or MFC: military payment certificates, military scrip.

  As this was an occupied country, everything had an acronym – opaque to both the defeated and to newcomers.

  In this strange defeated city, street names had been removed, so that there was now an A Avenue and a 10th Street. Alongside the military jeeps and General MacArthur’s 1941 black Cadillac, with a master sergeant at the wheel and an escort of white MP jeeps sweeping through the streets en route to his office, were Japanese vans and trucks burning coal or wood for propulsion, spewing out smoke, and three-wheeler taxis, the bata-bata, getting st
uck in the cavernous potholes. There were still notices up outside Ueno station asking for information on lost relatives, soldiers returning from abroad.

  The poverty of those years was extreme. The destruction of 60 per cent of the city meant overcrowding in the ramshackle houses that had been rebuilt out of any materials to hand. The American army had commandeered most building materials in the first eighteen months. But it also meant that workers had to struggle for hours to get in from countryside billets on horrific trains. New clothing was very difficult to buy, and it was common for years after the war to see decommissioned men still in their uniforms, stripped of their badges, and women in mompei, the baggy trousers that used to be worn in the fields.

  There was not enough fuel. Everyone was cold. The baths charged black-market rates for the first hour before the water temperature dropped. Offices were barely heated, but workers were ‘not in a hurry to leave the office, since they have nothing much else to do. Most of the offices have some sort of heating in winter, and the workers can keep warm as long as they stay there.’ In one bad winter, train officials said that they would silence the whistles of locomotives to save coal.

  Above all, there simply was not enough food. This meant leaving before dawn on crowded trains to barter in the country for rice. There were rumours that farmers had stacks of money a foot high. Or it meant going to the blue-sky black markets that had sprung up near the railway stations in Tokyo, where you could buy and sell and barter anything in the open air under the disinterested eyes of the army. There was an American Lane in the market near the Ueno station to cater for goods that had been appropriated or bartered from Occupation forces. American army blankets were particularly sought after. ‘As the trees shed their leaves, Japanese shed their kimonos, one by one, to sell for food. They even devised an ironic name for their wretched existence: takenoko, after the bamboo sprout which peels, layer after layer.’ Faced with this hardship, the phrase of the moment was shikata ga nai. It means ‘nothing can be done about it’, with a strong undercurrent of ‘and don’t complain’.

  Many of these American goods, the spam and the Ritz crackers and the Lucky Strikes, were taken to the black market by the pan-pan girls, the ‘squalid tribe of harpies…girls who go with soldiers for food…In the daytime, they stroll about in cheap, smart dresses from the PX, noisily talking and laughing, almost invariably chewing gum, or enraging hungry citizens in trains and buses by a display of their ill-gotten gains.’

  There was much discussion of these girls and what they meant for Japan. There had been so much fear about the American army that the pan-pan were seen as a sacrificial way of preserving the decency of the majority of Japanese women. This was allied to horror at their lipstick, their clothes and the way they kissed in public. Kissing became symbolic of the release from conventions that the Occupation had brought.

  There were also gay parties – what Yukio Mishima called gei pāti in his novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colours), serialised in the early 1950s. Gei was written in roman script, indicating that it was already in common usage. Hibiya Park was a popular pick-up spot. I only have the unreliable Mishima as a guide: ‘He entered the dim, clammy lamplight of the rest room, and saw what is called an “office” among the fellowship. (There are four or five such important places in Tokyo.) It was an office where the tacit procedure is based on winks instead of documents, tiny gestures instead of print, code communication in place of a telephone.’

  There was a need to be entrepreneurial. This young generation was known colloquially as apure, ‘après-guerre’. An apure is a ‘college student who frequents dance-halls, passes examinations by hiring a proxy, and may engage in un-orthodox money-making activities’. The key was their unorthodox way of surviving, as much as their aspirations to achieve an American standard of life. They had managed to disrupt norms concerning how to work. ‘Since the war tardiness has become the norm,’ wrote one Japanese commentator of these apure. They might be late to work, dishonest in exams, yet they were also known as hustlers, able to make money out of nothing. Hustling meant being able to wear aloha shirts, nylon belts or even rubber-soled shoes, called the ‘three sacred regalia’ in an ironic reference to the three sacred symbols associated with the Emperor. In the years after the defeat there was a slew of new magazines aimed at young men, with articles on ‘How to Save Y1,000,000’ or ‘How to Become a Millionaire from Scratch’.

  In Tokyo in the summer of 1948 the hit song was ‘Tokyo Boogie-woogie’. It blared out from loudspeakers on the streets and from nightclubs advertising themselves. ‘Tokyo boogie-woogie/Rhythm ookie-ookie/Kokoro zookie-zookie/Waku-waku.’ This is the start, says the press, of kasutori, pulp culture: it will overwhelm us. Vulgar and brash, hedonistic, limitless.

  Shops spill into the streets. There are white-robed veterans begging on the streets, unscrewed tin legs or arms in front of them, a sign out with a list of the campaigns they had fought in. Children roam everywhere. War orphans with stories of parents dead of typhus in Manchuria, begging, stealing, feral. School kids shouting out for chocoretto or cigarettes, or the phrases they have learnt from page one of the Japanese–English Conversation Manual:

  Thank you!

  Thank you, awfully!

  How do you do?

  Or, as they have learnt it in phonetic form: San kyu! San kyu ofuri! Hau dei dou?

  The sounds of the pachinko parlours, the cacophonous cascading din of thousands of small metal balls ricocheting around the machines. You could buy twenty-five for the equivalent of a shilling and, with dexterity, could sit for several hours under the strip-lights feeding them in. The prizes – cigarettes, razor blades, soap and canned food – can be sold back to the owner for another cupful of balls, another few hours of oblivion.

  Street life, the sprawl on the pavement outside a bar of drunken salarymen in their thin black suits with their thin ties over woollen overshirts. The peeing in the streets, the spitting. The comments as to your height, or hair colour. The everyday litany of the kids calling gai-jin, gai-jin, ‘foreigner, foreigner’ after you. Then there is the other Tokyo street life: the blind masseuses, tatami-mat makers, pickle-sellers, the crippled elderly women, the monks. Then the sellers of skewers of pork and pepper, ochrous tea, fat chestnut sweets, salted fish and seaweed snacks, the smells of grilling fish over charcoal braziers. Street life means being accosted by shoe-shine boys, flower-sellers, itinerant artists, bar touts, as well as smells and noise.

  If you were a foreigner, you were not allowed to fraternise. You were not allowed to enter the homes of Japanese, or to go to a Japanese restaurant. But in the streets, you were part of a noisy, jostling world.

  Iggie had a small attaché case filled with ivory monks, craftsmen and beggars, but he knew nothing about this country.

  31. KODACHROME

  Iggie told me that before he arrived he had read only one book on Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, bought en route in Honolulu. It was written by the ethnographer Ruth Benedict at the invitation of the American Office of War Information, pieced together through research into press clippings, literature in translation and interviews with internees. Its clarity is due, perhaps, to the fact that Benedict had no direct experience of Japan. There is a pleasingly simple polarity in the book between the samurai sword of self-responsibility and the chrysanthemum, trained into its aesthetic shape only by means of hidden wires. Her famous thesis that the Japanese had a culture of shame rather than a culture of guilt was hugely influential amongst the American officers in central Tokyo planning the shape of Japanese education, law and political life. Benedict’s book was translated into Japanese in 1948 and was enormously popular. Of course it was. What could be more intriguing than to see how the Americans saw Japan? And how a woman saw Japan at that.

  Iggie’s copy of Benedict is in front of me as I write. His meticulous pencil notes – mostly exclamation marks – stop seventy pages before the end and the final chapters on self-discipline and childhood. Perha
ps his plane had landed.

  Iggie’s first office was in the business district of Marunouchi, with its dull, wide streets. In summer it became impossibly hot, but his memories were of the cold of that first winter of 1947. There was a little hibachi, the stove fed by charcoal, in each office, but these only give a vague impression of heat. They acknowledge the possibility, but without warming you properly. You would need to put one under your jacket to make any difference.

  It is night outside. The offices are lit up beyond the fire escape. Heads down over the typewriters, the arms of their white shirts folded back twice, these young men are busy with the Japanese miracle. Cigarettes and abacuses lie amongst their papers. They have swivel chairs. Iggie is partly out of view, standing with a sheaf of papers, in an office with opaque glass and a telephone (rare).

  The office knows it is the end of the day when Iggie disappears down the corridor just before five o clock. To shave you need hot water, so he would heat up the kettle on the office hibachi. And he must shave before going out.

  Iggie hated living in the hotel in the Denver-like part of Tokyo and within weeks had moved to his first house. It was in Senzoku, on the edge of Senzoku Lake, in the south-eastern part of the city. It was more of a pond, he told me – and, anxious to make it clear, a large Thoreau pond, not a small English pond. He moved in winter, and had been told about the cherry trees that grew in the garden and round the water, but was still unprepared for the effect when spring came. The drama built over the weeks in front of him, until there was such abundance of blossom that he said it was like a blinding white cloud across your retina. You lost foreground or background or distance and floated.