Charles and Naka started walking into the town and he tried to coax some answers out of the boy. Eventually he admitted his name – Sadaichi – and his age, four. Naka chattered on about her family and her life. Her family home was a village along the railway between Yokohama and Tokyo. She had entered an arranged marriage with a superintendent at the Yokosuka naval yard. A first son, Shun, soon arrived. Charles would meet him when he returned from school later. The second boy had been given to the husband’s childless elder brother. Soon after the birth of little Sadaichi, the husband had been fatally injured in a fire aboard a ship in dry-dock. Naka was getting by on a small pension.
They went over a level crossing and up narrow lanes at the back of the town, turning into a small house of dark-stained wood with a roof of metal sheets painted an acid green to look like copper. Thick bamboo waved on the hill behind. Toys were scattered across the gravel yard in front. All the sliding doors were open, and a maid was bustling about. Naka evidently wanted no gossip to start about his visit.
They sat on the warm boards of the verandah enjoying the spring sun and sipping green tea. Naka asked him about the decade since he’d set off from Japan on his quest for glory and recognition. He told her about his struggle in Melbourne to turn himself into a British-style officer for the Australian army, the journey across the Indian Ocean protected distantly by the Japanese navy, the nights in tents by the pyramids, the terror of the landing under sniper fire and the scramble up the heights of Gallipoli, the filth and danger of the trenches at Lone Pine. He showed her the scar above his right eye. Then he told her of the attempt to restart a military career in Canton. His developing experiences as a writer and lecturer. There was a lot he didn’t tell her.
‘So Sakai-san,’ she said eventually. ‘It seems like you have tried being a foreigner. Aren’t you going to come back and be a Japanese again?’ He could only smile, and they both started laughing.
Naka disappeared into the kitchen at the side of the house, and with the maid brought out trays of food – rice, grilled fish, some pickles and malt soup. They ate and talked more lightly. The maid coaxed Sadaichi into eating some balls of rice. Then the oldest boy, Shun, swung into the yard in his blue uniform, yelling farewells at some school friends. He looked at Charles with the same slightly hostile scrutiny as his brother had, and bowed. He answered in a perfunctory way when Charles asked about his school and his interests.
After they’d eaten, Naka suggested a walk down to the sea. The water was clear and green and surprisingly deep next to the stone seawall. Launches were cutting across the water in front of Monkey Island’s green cover. Out in the roadstead, some large warships were outlined against a distant haze. They drifted back towards town. He bought some sweets for the boys. Their feet took them back to the station. ‘Come back soon, Sakai-san,’ Naka said. ‘They will get used to you. You belong here, you know, whatever anyone tells you.’
The location of the schools gave him ample excuse to call on Naka without it looking too deliberate. Part of him wanted to keep seeing her. Another part wanted to stand back and keep his hopes of greatness and destiny alive. Even so, the visits became increasingly familiar, and the boys warmed to him and clamoured for the stories he told them about the different countries he had visited, and the strange animals found in the Australian bush or in the food markets of Canton. They took train trips across the peninsula to the beaches of Zushi and Kamakura, where he taught the boys to swim their first strokes and persuaded Naka to wade into the sea to knee depth, still wearing her summer yukata.
Late one afternoon at the end of the summer holiday, the boys were playing in the sand with some school friends under the eye of other parents. Naka and Charles began walking out along the causeway to the small island of Enoshima. They walked past its little shrines and Naka moved ahead, stopping at a railing and looking out to the sea. It had turned to an aquamarine glaze under a deepening orange horizon. But Naka was not looking. She bowed her head and he noticed her shoulders shaking. He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned to him, tears streaming from her eyes. The orange light lit up one side of her face and loosened hair. The pine trees and rocks beyond were etched in fine detail. Naka seemed to shine with all the strength and devotion of the Japanese women. ‘Is this not enough for you?’ she asked, in a choking voice.
Thoughts flashed through his mind. Chika and her brave devotion to Edouard, despite her expulsion from Bavierville. The women, like Miyazaki’s wife, who’d stood by their reckless, spendthrift revolutionary husbands. The contrasting succession of lesser women he’d known, the photographer’s wife, the whores of Shanghai, Melbourne and Cairo. He felt he owed a debt to Chika and all the doggedly loyal women of Japan.
His resistance swirled away. ‘Yes, it’s enough,’ he heard himself say, in a voice that seemed remote.
Naka reached up and pulled his face down against hers, sobbing, then laughing as she realised other people were around, sneaking stares at them. She brushed her eyes with her hands and grabbed his arm, swinging the two of them around, and they set off back across the causeway. A great contentment swelled up inside him.
They told the boys on the train back to Yokosuka. Shun was silent, but Sadaichi seemed to like the thought of having him around more often. He had come to sit with Charles when he came to visit, begging him to tell more stories about great heroes, historical and mythical, and never tired of hearing about his travels in foreign lands.
Charles returned to Yokohama to make preparations. The priests at the Iseyama shrine seemed a little dubious about his approach. But he was able to demonstrate at some length his knowledge of Japanese lore and one of the older attendants remembered Chika. They agreed to perform the marriage ritual.
Three weeks later, on the auspicious day recommended by the priests, Naka and Charles married on the hill above Yokohama from where he had once watched the foreign ships coming in and out of the harbour. Naka wore the white, square bride’s hat and had her face powdered white with a slash of red on her lips, but wore a kimono with more colour than the white more appropriate to a first marriage. Charles had got himself a fine new dark kimono and divided kilt, tied with a new rope. The shrine maidens in their red and white robes passed them the small cups of sake to exchange. To the wailing of the gagaku pipes and beat of a drum, they went into the sanctuary to offer twigs of the sacred tree to the gods. In their eyes, Charles and Naka were now husband and wife.
A lively dinner at a restaurant down in the Noge entertainment precinct followed, with an assortment of Naka’s in-laws from Yokosuka and on Charles’ side, some distant connections of the Bunshiro’s and a group of his old primary school friends headed by Masataro. Their old teachers, Mr Mishima and Mr Maruyama, were given great deference, and asked to give speeches – which they did at some length. Even the Jewetts and the Warmings from Bavier & Co. came down from their houses on the Yamate Bluff.
The party wound up late in the afternoon, with Masataro handing out the small gifts to the departing guests, discreetly totting up the money they’d given in envelopes and settling the account at the restaurant. Naka and Charles changed into normal clothes and took the boys back to Yokosuka along with several of the visiting guests. The evening was spent settling the boys down, and Naka and Charles laid down in separate futons beside them.
Against her hesitation at the extravagance, Charles had persuaded Naka to go away with him for a short honeymoon, which was unusual for Japanese at that time. They took the mainline train out to Odawara and then transferred to the little Swiss-built mountain railway up into the highlands of Hakone, alighting at a tiny station of Tonozawa on a hillside where the track emerged between two tunnels. Down a path shaded by dark green forest was the Kansuiro, the ryokan where 18 years before Charles and his cousin, the other Naka, had slept chastely alongside his stepmother Sakai Chika. It seemed so long ago, a distant childhood in a different and more mannered era.
Naka shy
ly hanging her head, the newlyweds were shown to their room of elegant tatami floors, panelled walls, sliding shoji and a Chinese scroll painting of a mountain. They ate the meal brought in on black lacquer trays, and filled each other’s sake cups. They studied the view of the rushing river and wooded valley from the balcony and admired the trees that were beginning to show some autumnal yellow.
Finally, Naka suggested he should go out to the spring-fed bath in the private courtyard. The evening was setting in, the sky above turning a deep violet. Charles undressed by the pool and inched his way into the hot, gently bubbling water. For some minutes he sat facing away from the room, contemplating the bonsai garden and the sky. There was a ripple behind, and Naka’s hand touched his shoulder. He turned. Her eyes were half closed and she reached forward to him, the water swirling around her breasts. By the time they had lost all shyness in their embraces and dried each other, the servants had laid out the bedding in the room and dimmed the lamps.
And so Charles’ life as head of a Japanese family was started. After their return from Tonozawa, his relationship with Naka quickly settled into a serene and affectionate one, merged into the cycle of school days, household chores and seasonal celebrations. Naka would rise abruptly from sleep at the first hint of dawn and be in the kitchen lighting up the stove to prepare the breakfast soup and rice. Charles would be dispatched to his working duties, waved out of the house by a bowing Naka and maid. In the evening the boys would labour over their homework on the low table and after dinner Naka would heat up the bath for them to take in turns.
The boys slept in the same room as Naka and Charles, often between them, and often, when they saw them talking together, would come and join the conversation as if to stop him taking her attention away. At the end of her long day, Naka quickly fell into an exhausted sleep, so their love-making became occasional, in hastily snatched moments. There was a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, then after two years one that ran its full term. Their first boy, whom they named Edward, was born in February 1923.
On the ship back from Australia, Charles had written a long essay suggesting that Japan should think of new ways to establish itself as a world power and counter the growing hostility in the United States and elsewhere aroused by its policies and actions in China and Korea. Instead of thinking in terms of battleships and armies, Charles urged that Japan needed to educate the Western nations about the depth of its culture and artistic accomplishments. Cultural missions should be the kind of offensive Japan should undertake.
The harshness of Japan’s line on the Asian continent had been reported only sketchily in Australia and was poorly understood, including by Charles himself at the time, so his prescription was undoubtedly naive and perhaps even then, too late a remedy. Yet the article was accepted for publication in the monthly Japan and the Japanese produced by the respected moderate Miyake Setsurei and his Seikyosha followers, who were anguished by the increasing tendency of the Japanese to regard themselves as so unique and selfless in their love of nation that individual rights and constitutional government were unnecessary.
Charles was grateful for the small flurry of press attention and favourable commentary from several politicians that his article attracted. But there was no follow-up and it quickly became clear that no one was going to employ him as cultural ambassador. He needed to find a regular income. He consulted his small circle of friends and contacts.
Masataro hooted with laughter at the idea of him going into business. Charles had told him about how he had given away his inheritance to the self-appointed Chinese revolutionaries in Port Arthur. ‘That could have been your capital,’ Masataro pointed out. ‘You could have multiplied it and then bought a railway or something in Korea or China or somewhere.’ Charles had to agree. And if his own father’s company would not employ him, who else would?
Besides, commerce in Japan had already entered the cycle of market crashes and depression that followed the boom years of the Great War, where it had enjoyed the status of a British ally without being expected to contribute to the bloody fighting in Europe. The climate of speculation had led to inflation; in 1918 women at ports along the Japan Sea had disrupted shipments of rice to Osaka. This had sparked riots all across the country, with mobs breaking into godowns. There had been thousands of arrests and some executions. Then just as Charles landed back in Yokohama, the city’s big silk traders – the companies of Mr Mogi and Mr Hara who’d lived up on the hill behind his last childhood home – were caught by falling prices. The stock exchange in Tokyo closed for two days. Over the next weeks, a bank in Osaka shut its doors and panic deepened. The silk exchange in Yokohama shut down and one of the banks funding Mogi went bankrupt.
Mr Maruyama, the former teacher at his primary school and companion of Mr Mishima the principal with whom Charles had boarded, was now an official close to retirement in the prefectural board of education. ‘English teacher!’ he pronounced, when Charles made a respectful call with a gift of sweets at his home. ‘The foreign expert! Your English must be all right by now and you must look the part! No more Sakai Hachisaburo – at least not on duty in the classroom. Professor Bavier it must be. Dressed in a suit, not a kimono.’
Within three days, messages came from Mr Maruyama telling Charles to arrange interviews with the principals at two middle schools on the Miura Peninsula. These were favourable, and he began shuttling several times a week between the two schools, trying to coax English words from the mouths of deeply shy adolescent boys and girls who had never once spoken with a non-Japanese, let alone a Westerner.
His teaching extended into the Okura Commercial College and the Takushoku University in Tokyo as well as in Yokohama. His articles on Japanese culture appeared every now and then in various newspapers. He even started his own little publication, Bavier’s Monthly, which was presented as an aide to English language study with easy text. It thrived for a few years.
Japan entered the 1920s with great gaiety and optimism, despite the crashes in the stock exchanges. The prosperous years of the world war had spread affluence among the urban middle classes, who were settling in new houses out along the railway lines built by canny new department-store owners. The high schools and universities had produced more graduates than could be inducted into the bureaucracy, so the ideal of government service became reserved for an elite few from one or two faculties of the Imperial universities. The rest found places among the business houses, the newspaper and publishing houses, the transport and telephone enterprises, or the agencies of development in Korea, Formosa and Manchuria.
The demands of the new city created a class of working women, with jobs such as typists, telephonists, shop assistants and tram conductors. Dressed in Western clothes, their hair cut in bobs to reveal the tantalising nape of the neck or kubisuji, these ‘modern girls’ exuded a new style of sexual fascination, incessantly portrayed in picture magazines for the mostly vicarious enjoyment of the readers. A record of a composition called the ‘Tokyo Marching Song’, about a young female office worker sitting in the new Marunouchi Building and thinking of her lover, became one of the first mass-selling hits. A former prostitute, Yamada Waka, began writing an advice column in the magazines.
Beer halls emerged, whose offerings were based on brewing techniques acquired with the former German concession at Tsingtao, and the new coffee shops replaced the tea houses as the locale of a more louche demi-monde. Their young waitresses wore their hair cut short and permed too, and favoured kimonos with coloured under-shifts showing at the neck and ankles, their sashes tied low and loosely, instead of tightly binding the breasts.
Men wore Western clothes and kept their hair long and swept back from the brow. It was not uncommon to see them carrying a translation of a European or American novel or a well-known text on socialism. Japanese everywhere, in the cities at least, became gripped by crazes for cosmopolitan fashion, design, clothes, dances and music. Journals and magazines strove to explain and
introduce it all.
Charles became a person of minor prominence in this era, as a sensei of English and all things foreign. He received invitations to join public discussions, and later when the radio service began in 1925, gave broadcast talks. His role as ‘Professor’ Bavier appeared set.
Chapter 10
SHIFTING GROUND
Among the righteous and the indignant were those who held that it invited destruction, and got what it asked for on September 1, 1923.
— Edward Seidensticker, Low City, High City, on the ‘decadence’ preceding the Great Kanto Earthquake
Yokohama 1923
Is it only in retrospect that this fevered atmosphere was building to such a level of tension that nature itself would let out the pressure through an apocalypse?
The events of that first day in September 1923 in Yokohama and Tokyo are well documented. What Charles did is not. His manuscript does not give us any information. But he was in Yokohama and survived. So let us put him in the thick of it.
Let us suppose that on that Saturday morning, Charles had gone up to Yokohama to farewell a friend or colleague who was sailing off to America. The group of well-wishers had boarded the Canadian Pacific liner, the Empress of Australia, taken a look at the cabins and the various passenger lounges, and then trooped down the gangplank to wait for the ship to cast off. An early typhoon signal had been hoisted, and they joked that their friend was in for a spell of sea-sickness. There was a big crowd on the wharf, including a noisy group of Westerners from the Union Club seeing off a popular member at the end of his posting.
Two minutes before the noonday siren was due, the wharf jolted upwards under their feet, knocking the assembled people over like toy soldiers on a tray that had been shaken. A massive rumble accompanied this shock. The Empress of Australia rose and fell like a small boat, its plates grinding and sparking against the pilings. The decking of the wharf had given way in several places, spilling people down into the water underneath. Their screams were followed by frantic calls for help. Fortunately, the part of the wharf where Charles had been standing held up. With the help of other nearby men and sailors from the ship, he began lowering rescuers down into the gaps.
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