The Ginger Tree (33 page)

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 2nd, 1941

This afternoon, for the first time in months, I walked over to the flats which I now hold only by proxy, since foreigners are no longer allowed to own property in this country. I still collect the rents and pay all the bills for maintenance, though how long this will continue is anyone’s guess. My excuse today was that I wanted to watch the sailing of the
Tatsuta Maru
, the gardens of the flats offering a clear view of the harbour, which my house does not.

What I saw down there looked like the perfectly normal departure of one of Japan’s crack liners for the voyage across the Pacific, except that I couldn’t see any of the usual paper streamers fluttering at this sailing. I hadn’t dared to bring field glasses; in the present tension the police pounce on the least hint of ‘spying’, and for a foreigner to show any curiosity about almost anything is asking for a visit from them, with the very real possibility of arrest on some ridiculous charge.

Harry Nishimoto is on board the
Tatsuta
in a last desperate bid to get out of the country in which he could be called up for national service of some kind, though I told him he is far too old for any risk of that. He has really become rather a pathetic figure, at the end of a decline which goes back a long way, I think right to the Wall Street crash and the departure of his wife not long after it. He never seemed to come to terms with the Depression, or adapt to it, as a man with his legal training should have been able to do, especially a man with his knowledge of the intricacies of Japanese law. He ought to have given up dual nationality long ago,
renouncing the American citizenship he had from being born in Hawaii, to really settle here.

He wanted me to leave on the
Tatsuta
with him, but what on earth would I do arriving in the States as an immigrant at the age of fifty-eight with no money? Everything I have is tied up here. Also, I don’t want to leave Japan. After thirty-five years in one country you don’t have a ‘homeland’ in any other, or even the potential left for making one. I have not become a Japanese subject because that would be play-acting, but experience has made me a kind of Eurasian, as it did with Alicia. She left instructions that she was to be cremated, which is apparently still
anathema
amongst Anglicans, and I am told that the Bishop of Tokyo was seriously worried about her damaged prospects of being resurrected from an incinerated body.

Aiko has also been trying to get me to leave Japan. She has become something of a trial, aging rapidly ever since Katsugi divorced her in favour of that younger woman, now really an old suffragette talking of yesterday’s battles and not much interested in today’s. If I did go she wouldn’t have too many friends left, but I don’t suppose that would worry her, and I have a sneaking feeling that she rather has an eye on this house, very ready to offer to caretake it for me if I decide to flee from the wrath to come. Well, I have not fled, and that ship now sailing out of the bay was probably my last chance to do it.

The publicity machine here growls continuously, like a rabid dog, at America and Britain, with much talk of ABCD encirclement, this standing for America, Britain, China and the Dutch. Since there is nothing I can do in the situation except wait, I am managing what is really a pretty high degree of norm by simply only glancing at the papers and never switching on the radio. A few friends come to see me, but I don’t go to see them. There is hostility to the foreigner again in public transport and even on the streets. I have seen this happen often enough before, waves of anti-Western sentiment, the worst after the American Exclusion Act, which branded the Japanese as yellow Asiatics and not fit to set foot on US soil. At that time I couldn’t blame the people around me for the hard looks I got, and I don’t now either, for this time they are the victims of the
militarist propaganda machine, being groomed to think what the ruling generals, including Kentaro, want them to think.

He has not been to visit me again since he came back from China in 1939 and was scarcely in the house before I asked him what part, if any, he had played in the rape of Nanking. It was something I had to know, but I didn’t find out. He turned in a swish of silks from the Japanese dress he always wore when he came to me, and a moment later his clogs clattered over the flagstones to the gate.

I have never seen Kentaro in uniform, not even in China when his formal dress was always European, with nothing to hint at army
connections
, almost as though he was making a point of pretending not to be a military attaché. I remember a reception at the German Embassy when he turned up in a frock coat that didn’t fit too well, as though mocking all the medalled chests around him of soldiers who had never smelled a battle.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 6th, 1941

I have had a letter from Jane. It is hard to believe, even though the pages sit on the table in front of me. She doesn’t say how she got my address, she must have traced me through the Embassy.

She is a widow. Her husband, a colonel, was killed in the fighting on Crete earlier this year, one of those episodes in the new European war I read about with no sense of it having any possible bearing on my life. At thirty-seven Jane is left with a son of twelve and a daughter of nine. She writes of her marriage as though they had been very happy. Her words seem to come from an understanding I would never have thought possible. She and her husband bought a house in Shropshire ten years ago, a big rambling place with a garden she can no longer keep up since she is working as a driver for civil defence. I am offered a home with her.

This is the child I had always thought would get on perfectly well without me, and who has, but who still seems to want to make contact with a woman she can’t remember having seen. The Collingsworth
influence can’t have been anything like as strong as I was expecting, or she has shaken it off.

How can I write? I never wrote to the child, or the girl, or the woman. What will I say to fill this great gap of years, or at least indicate I would like to attempt to do this? I have hunted for some hint that she wrote out of duty, driven by the mistaken idea that she has obligations to me, perhaps because of the money Mama left her. Yet all I find is an impulse from warmth. This from the baby with the watchful eyes, who never seemed to need me.

I cannot tell her about Tomo, and why I must stay here. If Japan declares war on Britain, how would she feel about a half-brother
belonging
to the enemy? And what is there to tell her anyway about the baby I had for an even shorter time than I had her, except that he has followed his father into the Army. This is the one thing that Kentaro, after two whiskies too many, told me about a Kurihama son put out to foster parents.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
December 9th, 1941

The papers rejoice, but I wonder if the Japanese people really feel that what happened at Pearl Harbor has switched the whole course of history in their favour? I do not believe that the entire American Pacific fleet was destroyed. There have been enough wars in my time for me to be suspicious of all official reports. And in this country we have been lied to by the press and radio ever since the Japanese invaded China in 1937, so the habit is well established. I wonder what will happen to the
Tatsuta Maru
now? After Pearl Harbor it certainly won’t be making towards Hawaii or any American port. It has probably turned and is racing back to Japanese waters, with all those miserable last minute bolters aboard. I will probably meet up with her passengers again when, in due course, I am taken to an internment camp.

Meantime I stay in this house and look at a garden which will be here long after I am gone, that is, unless the Americans manage to do what the
papers say is impossible, bomb Yokohama and Tokyo. The fire bombs used in Europe would find wonderful fuel in these cities. When this war is over, is there going to have to be another huge transplanting of trees?

Last night I didn’t sleep. If Tomo went into the Army at eighteen or nineteen, as I expect he would, then by now he should be an officer of considerable rank, possibly a major. The higher you go the safer you should be. But Jane’s husband was a colonel. If Tomo is wounded or killed I won’t even know. He is such a stranger my heart wouldn’t be able to tell me.

17 Ura Machi, The Bluff, Yokohama
April 11th, 1942

Some days, reading the papers, being forced to accept the truths lying under the exaggerations, I feel like a ghost returned from another age and, as a punishment for distant sins, forced to watch the crumbling away of everything I had once known, and lived in, and believed to be solid forever. Hong Kong has gone, and Malaya, and Singapore. The
Philippines
have collapsed, two days ago Bataan surrendered, and the only Americans still fighting are crowded into the rock fortress of Corregidor which is under constant bombardment.

One of the Tokyo dailies had a gloating piece yesterday about how all over Asia could be heard the marching feet of white prisoners, both soldiers and civilians, all now the slaves of the god-Emperor. Burma is to be next, and after that the armies of the Mikado will march into India. The Japanese flag will, before long, be hoisted in Canberra and over New Zealand, which has already been given its new Japanese name on
Tokyo-printed
maps. Singapore, rechristened Shonan-to, is now the nerve centre for a vast advance in three directions from it, south, east, west. To the north of Malaya the whole of the Orient is already Japanese.

These are the facts. I have to make an effort to stretch my belief in the possible to accept them. The Far East I have known for nearly forty years has been wiped out like chalk marks from a blackboard by a wet cloth, but I can’t really feel it yet, living here as I do, with Toba San still to look
after me, the streets of the Bluff still quiet. Maybe I am waiting for the audible sounds of war to reach us as a convincing argument, but they haven’t come. Behind my high board fence this security doesn’t seem in the least fragile. It is only sometimes, out in the garden, that I feel uneasy, and I wonder if I should have restored it so carefully, whether a lawn with rose beds wouldn’t have been better after all? I am conscious now, too, of a kind of affectation in my life in almost totally Japanese rooms. The ginger tree, grown sizeable again, remains the stubborn stranger.

M/S
Gripsholm
, at sea
August 3rd, 1942

That woman is at last playing bridge, which ought to mean that I have this cabin to myself for a couple of hours. If she tells me just
one
more time how lucky I am to be on this ship instead of being left behind in Japan there will be an explosion. I hope it doesn’t happen in the dining-room. Ever since we sailed she has been complaining about the ghastly mistake the Purser made in assigning her to this cabin down on E Deck with me. She rates
much
higher in the ship than E Deck, because even though she has been working as a typist at the British Embassy, that is not her real status at all, she is the widow of a man who had just been made First Secretary in Kabul when carried off by a heart attack. Since his
appointment
had not actually been confirmed there are some doubts about her rights to a widow’s pension at First Secretary level, which she claims is why she stayed on in Tokyo to work at the Embassy. It is my bet she stayed on in Tokyo because the last thing she wanted was to be returned in a hurry to a London under Nazi air attack.

It is probably the state of shock I am still in which makes me find Mrs Burke’s chatter so excruciatingly difficult to endure. I am
not
lucky to be leaving Japan. I wanted to stay on in my house until they came to take me to a camp for enemy aliens. Well, they came for me, though not as escorts to a camp, four policemen in white uniforms. Toba San had gone grey under a summer tan when she came up to report that we had visitors.

It was all so appallingly polite, as though the four had been given strict instructions to avoid any hint of unpleasantness. The late Countess
Kurihama could not have taken exception to the tone of the language used to me, but a thick layer of courtesy sugar did not disguise the bitter message. I had one hour in which to pack two suitcases, after which I would be driven down to pier number one, where the
Gripsholm
was already embarking enemy diplomats and others entitled, under
international
law, to repatriation. It was no use my pointing out that I had no right to repatriation and did not want it, the spokesman for my visitors bowed and said: ‘Ah, so?’ He then stated that the orders concerning me had come from a very high place. I asked to be allowed to make some phone calls, but this was not permitted. I was reminded that time was getting on and I had my packing to do.

I went upstairs. What do you take in a couple of cases when you are suddenly to be pitchforked out of a world in which you have lived for the greater part of your life? I filled one with clothes, not very well chosen; I find I am short of shoes, only two pairs and no slippers. I shut the lid on that bag and opened the other. Books? Too heavy, and also replaceable, though some of them stared at me from the shelves, including one volume, out of the original six from KYS to PAY, of the Encyclopedia, this for some reason shoved into the household linen basket and taken to Karuizawa in that summer of 1923. Waugh, Linklater, Auden, Isherwood, Waley, all said that they did not want to be left in Japan. I took the Prokosch novel I was reading,
Seven Who Fled
, then poured letters and journals over it, slamming that lid, too.

Toba San arrived too late to help me, red-eyed. I found my bag and wrote her a cheque for two thousand yen. In so far as I knew my account at the Yokohama Specie Bank was still unfrozen, but I told her to get the cash next day. She was to go on living here for as long as she liked, but mustn’t feel that she had to look after my things, which would probably be impossible. She did something then I have read about, but never seen, threw her apron up over her face, making howling noises behind it.

It is something, I suppose, to have the servants you are leaving weep for you. How many other people, when they heard about what had happened to me, would? There is nothing like living in a country as an enemy alien to really thin down the roster of your friends. On the stairs, made less
steep than is usual in Japanese houses, I lugged the heavier case, Toba taking the other, and I thought of what Peter once said about needing no trunks for your travels in living. I was being forced to take his advice this time, for whatever was ahead of me wasn’t going to be much assisted by a great load of experience from the lost years, if only because so much of it was experience totally meaningless in terms of life in the West.

Philosophy got me past the weeping Toba and out to the car all right, and I didn’t look back at the gates in that fencing, or at a curve of tile roof with a hint of pine reaching up to it, but at the end of the road, through the windscreen, was Mount Fuji, snow at the summit still shining in late afternoon sun. Tears reached my eyes then.

There are no tears now. I feel dried out from any kind of grief as we sail south into the tropic sun, our ship glowing with light at night as a proclamation of neutrality, though there are no other lights in these seas that have already seen so much death and will see so much more. The ambassadors on board all stick together, the top aristocrats of our temporary society, a little like deposed monarchs trying to pretend they still have some importance in a crumpled world, surrounded by their courts of wives, secretaries, chancellors, all of them playing yesterday’s protocol games. I rate beneath the governesses kept on because it wouldn’t have been right to send the poor old things home straight into the bombing. The Swedish crew and stewards are slightly aloof, standing back from the violence to which their particular type of civilisation has made them immune. I seem to sense their contempt for all these assorted relics of a wrecked order, though they are very polite, like the four Japanese policemen who called at my house on the Bluff.

Kentaro put me on this ship, the last act in his enduring duty towards a woman he got with child on a Chinese hill thirty-seven years ago. Everything he has done for and to me has had a kind of inevitability in terms of the man himself, though I think he might have managed, after considering the matter very carefully like he did that proposal of marriage, to tell me about Tomo. After all this time it would have been safe enough, our son’s life long since set and remote from us both, but the Count Kurihama confines his risk-taking to his soldiering.

M/S
Gripsholm
, at Singapore
August 19th, 1942

I could be imagining it, but I feel an almost morbid curiosity permeating this ship ever since we came alongside the dock here this morning. It is as though everyone on board wants to see as much as possible of how the great new colonial power is operating here at its southern base. Not that there is much to be seen from the boat or promenade decks, godown roofs separate us from the rest of the dock area, which in turn is like a no man’s land between us and life in the city. We can just see people and traffic in the distance, with the Japanese flag flying on ships and buildings, but not much else, the pier beneath us deserted, though there is a gangway down to it. If there are soldiers or police on guard to prevent anyone approaching the
Gripsholm
they must be stationed beyond the shed, for there is no sign of them. No one really knows why we have stopped here, but it is rumoured that the ship is to take on mail written by prisoners of war and internees. At lunch I heard someone say they had seen what looked like a gang of POWs, naked to the waist under full sun, at work unloading a freighter. Immediately after that a man at the same table told us in a loud voice that he couldn’t wait to get to South Africa for a change from Swedish food.

The almost unbearable heat in this cabin keeps that woman out of it during the day, and I am blessedly alone, if perspiring.

M/S
Gripsholm
, Singapore
August 20th, 1942

It wasn’t the heat that kept me awake last night, I kept thinking about something that happened in Yokohama just before this ship sailed. There was an enormous horde of pressmen and photographers on board, all out to get pictures and, if possible, stories from the departing enemy diplomats. It wasn’t because I thought anyone might want a story from me that I went up to the boat deck, it was cooler up there, and I sat on a bench which did not give me a view of the city or Mount Fuji,
just an off-sea breeze. There were other escapees from the crowds down below and when I saw what was obviously a reporter, with a cameraman in tow, coming from a companionway, I thought someone else was the target, but the young man was after the human interest angle, and must have seen a picture of me somewhere, perhaps in police files.

I was addressed by name, no uncertainty about that, the reporter polite enough at the start – how did I feel about having to leave a country in which I had lived for so long? I said sad to be going in these
circumstances
, and looked at the sea while the cameraman moved around me, clicking away as though I was one of those movie stars on the slide who, before this war, always seemed to come to Japan to help them recover from nervous breakdowns. I suggested that all this was a waste of film in view of the still limited use of pictures in Japanese newspapers, and for some reason this made the reporter turn nasty. Did I have any plans to return here, if permitted to, after the Imperial forces had completely crushed the Allies? I said I had no intention of coming back until Tokyo and Yokohama lay in ruins and the Occupying Forces were in need of a controller of Japanese Customs. I meant to apply for that job since I thought my business experience in this country gave me unique
qualifications
to do it well.

It was a lunatic thing to say, but I was suddenly wildly angry. So was the reporter. He took a step forward and I thought he was going to hit me, but after glaring for a moment he turned away, shouting for the
cameraman
to follow. If that piece of arrogance on my part was reported in the Japanese press I could easily be taken off this ship here in Singapore and put in an internment camp, or much worse.

August 20th, afternoon

The ship has a loudspeaker system to all decks. I was in the cabin wearing very little when I heard my name called, asking me to report to the Purser’s office. I had to dress, and did this, feeling frightened. There was a repeat call before I was out in the corridor.

The Purser didn’t look at me as he said he had received an order from
the port authorities that I was to go to the main lounge and wait there to be interviewed. I asked him what right the port authorities had to give orders to a Swedish ship sailing under the protection of the Red Cross, even though it was tied up in Japanese-conquered Singapore? He stared at a ledger. ‘Madam, they could put a platoon of soldiers on board in five minutes and there is nothing we could do to stop them.’ I didn’t ask if he thought he would soon be removing my name from the
Gripsholm
’s passenger list.

The lounge is air-conditioned which means that it is pretty crowded most of the time. There were three bridge games going and nearly all the chairs occupied, but one alcove near the now closed bar hatch, usually very popular, was empty, almost as though it had been cordoned off. In it was a long corner settee, a table and chairs. A blond steward indicated that I was to wait there. I walked across the room conscious of eyes watching. Whatever was going to happen to me had a capacity audience. I sat down on the settee and looked at people looking at me until, rather sheepishly, they returned to books, or bridge, or chat. There was noise in the lounge again, though not enough to cover the sucking made by a door with rubber sealing as it was pushed open.

A Japanese officer had come in from the foyer. He stood looking about, his head turning quite slowly from right to left, his hand on the hilt of his sword. The blond steward pointed me out. The talk and games and reading had stopped again. The soldier came towards my table, the links on his scabbard chain clinking, his boots heavy on linoleum. I felt just slightly sick.

My visitor didn’t register very clearly in the physical sense, all I really noticed was that he was of about average height for a Japanese, and that under the cap he continued to wear his head was shaven. His ears seemed to stick out more than most Oriental ears and he had heavy dark eyebrows. His uniform was tropic beige colour with an open-necked white shirt. Just beyond the table between us he stopped, brought his heels together, then bowed, still with a hand on the sword hilt. It was the bow of a military man for a civilian woman, the politeness only a little more than minimal. I returned the greeting without rising. This seemed
to surprise him. He said nothing for a moment, then came out, in bad English, with words that at least half the lounge must have heard: ‘You Madam Ma-ken-shi?’ I nodded. He introduced himself: ‘I Major Nobushige Ozaki.’ He pulled out a chair to the full extent of the chain holding it to the floor and, carefully managing his sword, sat. The chill in my heart hadn’t much thawed. I said: ‘It might be well, Major, if we spoke in Japanese. For privacy.’

That made him turn his head to the watching eyes, which at once disengaged their interest. Few of these people would have more than a slight acquaintance with the language of the country in which they had been living. In his own tongue the Major did not shout, for which I was grateful.

He asked if I would like tea, as though this was his ship, which I suppose it could have been if he had wished to make it so. I thanked him, but said no, my politeness careful. I kept glancing at the glass doors to the foyer for any hint of more Japanese soldiers stationed out there, but could see no sign of them. They might be waiting at the gangway. The Major said that it was very comfortable in this lounge after the heat outside, then pulled a handkerchief from an inside pocket of the uniform jacket to dab at the beads of perspiration on his forehead. He seemed to find it hard to look at me directly, surprising in a military man of his rank. It could be that he found this mission distasteful. The four policemen who had put me on this ship hadn’t enjoyed their assignment either.

Our talk languished. I felt an almost ridiculous need to get it going again. Since the information seemed unlikely to be classified as of use to the enemy I asked if he was a regular soldier. He said he was in the Air Force, then added: ‘I come from Lieutenant-General the Count Kurihama.’