Someone in the plane to Japan wakes you soon after sunrise so that you will not miss the sight of Mount Fuji, pale, pretty and unreal at dawn. With this in your mind, if you haven't already seen the bombed cities and the destruction of Europe, the first impression of Tokyo is shocking. Driving in from the airport the desolation you see on each side of the street is given pathos—though that is too weak a word—by the little jerry-built shacks which mushroom out of the piles of rubble and the stricken spaces. Here and there, a concrete building freakishly untouched stands out in important isolation. In the industrial sections the blinded warehouses and factories are everywhere surrounded by the little clusters of wooden huts and their small patches of vegetable gardens. The few blocks which surround the Imperial palace are more or less intact. It is the center of town and there you can see that Tokyo must have been built on a gracious plan with its wide avenues, parks and gardens.

In the grilling heat of the summer of 1947, my father—who had just been appointed India's first ambassador to Japan—and I drove into town and gazed entranced at our first evidence of the Military Occupation. Tokyo's street names had been changed. Bright new signs indicated A Avenue or 15th Street; parks and movies were now called Doolittle Field or the Ernie Pyle Theatre; another notice pointed the way to Washington Heights, a housing settlement.

My father, who feels less need to talk than anyone I know, made one of his rare comments.

"Americans," he said, "get homesick so easily."

"And I suppose we don't?" I said. "East is east and. . ."

"It's all very well," he told me, "to be flippant about it, but you have traveled only in the West, and you know nothing about your own continent. Here you now feel a foreigner to the Japanese; soon you will feel increasingly foreign to the Americans and Europeans. After all," he said unemphatically, "you belong to Asia, you know, not just India."

"Yes," I said, not believing him, and concentrating much more on the rather theatrical arrival I had planned for us. We were to sweep up to the beautiful Indian Embassy house, I would nod in a kind and friendly way to the Japanese servants lined up on the front porch, order tea in the drawing room, and set about giving it those little touches that the magazines tell me make a house a home. Actually, however, after steaming hours of muddle in which we discovered that the overcrowding in Tokyo was so acute that it would be impossible for us to have a house just yet, we drove to the Imperial Hotel. There a worried American sergeant who looked at my wilted sari (simple but dignified, I had hoped) and could only consider it some unfortunate form of nightdress, told us that they could allot us two rooms on different floors. He didn't take us up by the service elevator, but he looked as if he would like to. My mother had sent me off to be my father's official hostess, partly because she had too much of her own work at home, and partly, she said, "because it is only a matter of seeing that people don't get orange juice when they want a cocktail at your parties, and in any case I am too old and tired to start dealing with foreigners all over again." At which point she bustled energetically off to one of her endless welfare meetings.

Those first two weeks in Tokyo, among the strangest in my life, almost convinced me that Mother had meant her remarks quite seriously. We were plunged at once into the diplomatic round, and I had the dazed feeling that the foreigners did nothing in Japan except entertain and be entertained. One changed one's clothes half a dozen times a day, arrived breathless at cocktail parties where people were apt to ask in the same tone one uses for commenting on the weather, "And how do you think democratization is coming along?"

My father seemed relatively unimpressed by the curious Occupation dream world in which we saw the Japanese on the streets, requisitioned their houses, used their movies and clubs, but never met them. It was after a remark from a fellow guest at a dinner that I finally decided something must be done about it. I had said by way of conversation that I had never been to so many parties in such a short time. "Oh," she said, "just wait till the winter. That's when the Season starts, and really, I think you see as much jewelry and lavishness as you do at the Paris Opera."

On the way home I announced to my father with some desperation that I thought the whole point of coming to Japan was to get to know the Japanese, and that so far the only Japanese I had met were the room girls at the hotel. I asked him what he suggested I should do.

With his usual brevity, he said, "Anyone of intelligence would get a job."

"What sort of job?"

"Well, the extraordinary education they give you children these days doesn't really equip you to do anything. I suggest you teach English. I understand they are very short of teachers in Japanese schools just now."

"Yes," I said meekly.

"Not," he continued, "that I expect your unfortunate students to learn very much, but I think they should be able to teach you something. The second thing that you might do is go to the theater. It is not, as you know, something that I particularly enjoy, but you will find that it is the quickest way of learning how a nation thinks. None of the Allied personnel is allowed to go to the Japanese theaters, but as a member of the Diplomatic Corps you can get an off-limits pass."

After presentation of Sir Rama Rau's diplomatic credentials to General Headquarters, the question of suitable work for his daughter is next on the agenda.

A few days later my father and I drove out to the Jiyu Gakuyen (Freedom School) which is in one of the Tokyo suburbs. The school grounds are fairly extensive, and scattered through them are the buildings, some Japanese in style, and some of a design I think of, for some reason, as Swedish-big plate-glass picture windows, some of which had been broken and replaced by rice-paper screens; blond wood furniture and walls; flat roofs and terraces. Because the school is not near the industrial section, its buildings were neither bombed nor burned, but there are still the remains of a couple of craters in the grounds.

Old Mrs. Hani, who with her husband runs the school, was waiting to receive us. One of the smallest women I have ever seen, she wore a plain gray kimono, and walked uncertainly down the path toward us. She is nearly blind, and her skin has crumpled, like tissue paper, into a tangle of tiny wrinkles. Her daughter and Mr. Hani walked beside her, watching and guiding her from time to time as though she were a favorite child taking her first steps. Miss Hani, speaking good English, translated her mother's little speech of welcome. We all bowed and smiled. Mrs. Hani raised a tiny trembling hand and touched my sari. In her rather incongruously harsh voice she said something in Japanese. Her daughter translated, "My mother says that she is honored to meet people from the country of Mahatma Gandhi. So late in her life she has not much expectation, but this wish, at least, has come true."

Feeling remarkably silly I replied that I was the one to feel privileged as I had heard a great deal about her valuable work in education in Japan. Then we were formally shown around the school.

Miss Hani, a young woman of considerable charm and a timid manner, told me a little of the history of the Jiyu Gakuyen as we went. Its story is one of great liberalism and equally great hardship. One of the few progressive schools in Japan, it was also the first to introduce co-education. "Of course we had to do that gradually," she said. "To us it is a very foreign idea to have boys and girls in the same school. Even now, they must be in separate classrooms, and during meals they sit on opposite sides of the dining hall. We can only move as fast as our supporters will follow."

Mrs. Hani croaked an interruption, "The only way to learn the pain and the value of labor is to labor yourself."

Out of the window I could see several of the boys working in a vegetable garden. "Food," Miss Hani explained, "is so scarce that we have had to dig up the playing fields and grow vegetables in them. Before the war we used to be very proud of our flowers, but now our girls have to learn to make their flower arrangements at home. It has become too expensive an art for us here."

Other things had to go, too. Benches and chairs were burned during the worst days as firewood for cooking. No longer could all the members of a class go on a field trip, so the one or two who could manage such a luxury returned to lecture to the rest of their class on what they had learned.

On the drive Miss Hani pointed out her children's school to me. It was in pretty bad repair and it had been used as a barracks during the war but the children were helping to reconstruct it and did not seem to mind too much. "Except in winter," she said, "it is very cold and then they have no heat in the school. Some of their classes are given while the children run around in the room to keep warm."

I asked her more about the school, having by now a professional interest. She told me that this used to be the school to which only the children of the aristocracy or people connected with the Imperial household could go. In those days before the war the girls were taught the things correct for the aristocracy to know—Japanese history, painting, music and ladylike arts. With the end of the war this school, along with the others, was "democratized." Anyone can go there now. A change of heart was supposed to accompany a change of textbooks.

I asked her if she approved of the changes. She said carefully that it was too early to judge. "It is like having your entire adolescence crowded into two years. Luckily my children are still very young, only five and eight, so that they have not felt the change as badly. It is the sixteen-year-olds who suffer most for they have had some years of schooling under the old system and a couple under the new. They do not know how to adjust to the changes and they think it simply means that they can go out and generally defy their parents—all these things were strongly disapproved of in my day. I do not think they understand yet what it is all about. They are both too young and too old to be able to assimilate the new—is 'ideology' the word I want?" I could not decide whether she was being sarcastic. "I expect they will calm down after a while when the novelty has worn off but I do not know whether they will adjust to either world."

"Does that mean that you think there is a chance of the old order returning?"

She smiled. "I do not know about these things but I can tell you that for the next few years their parents will worry dreadfully because, like parents all over the world, I suppose, they will feel that their children have not the experience or the firm standards to find their way in the new world and, what is worse, have not the time to learn before they are adults and expected to assume the responsibility for that world. So far they have learned only the easy and superficial things—the impertinence and the dancing."

As we got to the doorway my hostess made a very low ceremonial bow and waited till she was asked to come in. I rather stupidly held out my hand and said, "How do you do!" The sister looked surprised, but took it. The old lady said, "I wanted you to meet my other daughter, the Princess Chichibu."

We all waited for the princess to sit down on the floor and then we sat, too. They treated her with all the formality of royalty and none of the familiarity of a member of the family. She asked me if I minded sitting on the floor. I said, "No, it is our custom in India, too."

She said, "That gives us something in common."

There was a silence and I gathered that nobody spoke until the princess chose a subject. She was about the same height and build as her sister, with the same sort of figure, a prettier face, beautiful hands but less charm, and gracious rather than graceful. Her dress was light-green linen with no style, badly cut, and did not begin to fit her—she wore no make-up.

Finally, "How nice it is to be in Tokyo again!"

I said, "Do you live far from here?"

"We have to stay in our house at the foot of Mount Fuji. You must visit us there sometime. It is quite a pretty place."

"It is supposed to have the best view in Japan," said her sister.

"That sounds beautiful. Do you manage to come in often?—though I cannot imagine why you should want to leave a place like that."

"Not often, sometimes twice a month, traveling is so difficult these days."

"But I have heard it is a heavenly drive."

"We cannot drive," she said, amused. "We have no petrol for our car."

"But your trains," I said, not realizing that I was getting myself in deeper, "I have only been in them once but they were so comfortable and quick."

"Ah, you speak of the Allied Ltd. No, we may not travel on this. We must go by the regular day coach and that means waiting at the station for a ticket for three hours—there are no reservations as you know—and then the coaches are so crowded that we usually have to stand all the way, but everyone must travel that way nowadays."

Her mother joined in, "Last time my husband and I traveled it was quite funny. He is an old man and could not stand in line so I queued up for him: then we got our tickets and rushed for the train, but he is a little slow and got pushed to the outside of the crowd. I was jammed in the middle but managed to get on. Then I noticed that he was not there and had no hope of getting through the crowd around the door before the train started, so I shouted to him and he climbed in through one of the windows. People helped to push him in because he is an old man, but he got stuck in the window, which is small, and the train began to move. I was terrified. Eventually we pried him loose. The crowd was much amused."

I did not know what to say. Fortunately she continued, "That kind of thing is all right for us." And then, with her first sign of anger, and one which I did not think her capable of, "To treat royalty that way is inexcusable."

The princess said, "It is not always quite so bad. When people recognize me they usually clear a seat for me and leave one on each side free. That is not too bad."

Her mother repeated, "They may take away our cars, our houses, whatever they want to, but they should respect royalty. At first, you know, I refused to leave the house when I found that I must travel by bus and train, but how long can that feeling last? Now I do my own marketing with all the other housewives. I bargain at the bazaars along with my servants. For us it does not matter. But for the imperial family. . . . Only in Asia do they understand royalty, even in Europe it is gone."

Clearly the whole family was very proud when the Emperor's brother had chosen to marry one of their girls. Very few families of the aristocracy have the privilege of being so closely connected with the Imperial household.

I have always thought of autumn as a fading, misty time. Damp woods, the smell of dead leaves, the dying season. In Japan it has a flamboyance and a glory that seems to be vaguely improper, mourners in scarlet. We spent a weekend at Nikko, driving there for hours between mountains flaming with autumn. It seemed strange to be surrounded by such extravagance of color; in Bombay, autumn is only a steamy, shabby month between the rains of summer and the equability of winter. In Nikko itself the famous temple came as another surprise—the ornate gold and red arches, the lacquered pavilions. It was extraordinary that the Japanese, who in their manners and their private homes display such elegance and restraint, should have a countryside theatrical to the point of vulgarity.

I said something of the sort to my father who turned and stared at me. "What astonishing things you come out with," he said. "All this talk of vulgarity and good taste. Is it something you have picked up in the West? It seems too elementary to tell you that standards in art, as in food, vary from country to country. The point at which you start to understand the Japanese will be the point at which you find the same things as they do beautiful. By which I do not mean simply recognize what they think beautiful but actually get the same esthetic pleasure from them although. . ." his sentence trailed off, "one has to select—an activity youth is congenitally incapable of. . . ."

Autumn at the Jiyu Gakuyen was beautiful, too, but in a quieter way than the mountains. I found my eyes turning continually to the copper and gold outside the classroom window. Through the paper screens the powdered sunlight slanted more acutely across the floor. The girls seemed interested in Watch on the Rhine. Reading the first act we came to the sentence, "On that day, I see twenty-seven murdered in a Nazi street fight." One of the girls asked, "What does this word mean—'murder'?"

I said, without thinking much, "To kill someone."

"Is it the same thing," the girl asked, "to kill and to murder?"

"Not exactly, murder implies a motive."

The girl did not quite understand that. "If you drive your car and a child runs across the street and is killed, is it murder?"

"No, that would be an accident. You do not wish to kill the child."

She said, "Ah so, a soldier in the war he sees an enemy coming to him he shoots and kills; he wishes very much that man dead, is it a killing?"

I did not quite know how to explain that and fell back on legalisms that I am not sure they understood. I said that would probably be considered manslaughter in a court of law, a killing in self-defense.

"Not in law," she said, "in morals?"

"I cannot tell you," I answered. "Some aspects of that problem are being considered in the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo. Why don't you go and listen sometime? Have any of you ever been?"

None of them had so I told them if they wanted to go I would give them study time off for it. Apparently some of them did go because after class one day one of the girls came up to me. She was a sturdy, quiet girl called Yoko who knew rather more English than the rest of the class because her father had been educated in America. She said, "I speak English badly but would like to ask some questions about the trial."

"Of course," I said, pleased.

She frowned, "Like this. You too are of Asia, otherwise I could not ask." She framed her sentences carefully as though she had been thinking them out. "Our leaders are accused of aggression and imperialism. Is that so?"

"Yes."

"Well, among the judges is a Dutchman, and do the Dutch not conquer and rule Indonesia?"

I nodded feebly.

"Also there is a Frenchman, his country rules Indo-China. The Englishman left your country only in August but stays in Burma and Malaya. The Chinese say they rule Tibet and Sinkiang who do not wish them there."

"Yes," I said, "but those are old conquests. One cannot go back through history righting wrongs—one must begin somewhere."

"The Russian," Yoko asked gently, "the conquests of his country in East Europe, they are old, too?"

"No, listen," I said, "I agree with you. Where conquests are so old that the people themselves have forgotten, one might as well leave those alone. But I think the principle should be that where a nation wants a foreign conqueror to leave their country and yet they remain, that should be remedied." I stopped suddenly wondering if that applied to the Occupation of Japan. "Besides," I said, trying to put myself right, "there were other things, atrocities and so on."

"Ah! those come in any war."

"Well, the Allies did not go around beheading captured airmen," I said on surer ground.

"Yes, those should be punished. But is it worse to behead a man than to shoot him or hang him or kill him with an atom bomb?"

"It seems barbaric to the West or rather," I said, thinking of the far worse atrocities that the West has been guilty of, their concentration camps, and torture chambers, "to the democracies." Then I amended that to, "to Americans," because of the atrocities of the democratic countries in their Asian colonies.

"It is," Yoko said thoughtfully, "the custom of the country. Some foreign customs seem barbaric to us, too." She apologized to me. "You said you wish us to understand these things. I do not criticize. There are many good things, but is confusing. Is it not so?"

In Kobe and Osaka we were conducted by Japanese officials around the industrial and shipping areas. The Kobe docks were like something from one of those photographs of the surface of the moon. It was hard to believe that such destruction was possible. Here, the structures had been of steel, stone and concrete. Some of the bombed areas in Japan looked less frightful because there was relatively little rubble. The wooden houses burned away to ash, and in the two years since the end of the war huts had grown up lining the roads and hiding the vast blank areas behind them. Here, too, they were rebuilding but still the scars were wide and humiliating.

We talked a lot about the war and she told me that she was married when she was nineteen and the war was still in its victorious stages. The next year the air raids started and her baby was born in the middle of one of the worst. “Those were dreadful days and nights after that—the bombing and the fires. Even now I can never listen to the sound of dried autumn leaves blowing along the roads because that was the sound the first made in the wooden houses near the hospital.” She stared down the hill at the gilded trees and the distant glitter of the sea. “After I came home with my baby I used to see very few people. In those days people were so harsh about any foreign ideas that even if I were to read one of my English books on the train, people might denounce me for being a spy. I used to turn the dust covers of the books inside out and write Japanese titles on them so that people would not guess. You see I was already under suspicion because I had several foreign friends.”

We sat on top of the hill in the warm autumn sunshine, looking out at the coast and the little boats. She suddenly sprang up, and smiled at me in a wide friendly way. “After all,” she said, “in the end there is only this—the hills, the sea, and the lovely times of day.”

Isn’t it curious,” she said, “how the customs of different countries can train you to think that this is seductive, or that is immodest. Here for instance, it is the back of a woman’s neck which is considered most seductive. In China, I am told, it is the feet, and a woman will not expose them except in the most intimate times. How is it in India?”

“In some parts it is considered immodest to show your legs, but in other parts you drape your sari in such a way that the backs of your legs all the way to the knee are exposed. The orthodox Muslim women, of course, keep their faces veiled.”

“Then there are some who find a woman’s long hair most seductive. In America it is the breasts, is it not?”

“So one gathers,” I said.

"And in France?”

“Well—“ I began uncertainly.

“But the French, I hear, are very reasonable people,” she interrupted, “perhaps it is by her character that they find a woman attractive?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “I’m sure that’s right.”

My father who, I think, usually felt that chopsticks, raw fish and all this taking off and putting on of shoes was designed only to embarrass the foreigner, seemed interested and amused by a dinner party for the first time that I could remember. We drank to each other, to our respective countries. Sakiko kept filling up the little white porcelain wine cups. Altogether it seemed like the friendliest and easiest evening I had spent in Japan so far. There is a curious solidarity between Asians of which I had never been conscious until I went to Japan, and here I began to notice it in my own attitude, too. It is like having been at the same school with someone, however different your opinions may be. Finally Mr. Kishimoto, in his tired voice, said, “Let us drink to the prosperity and freedom of Asia.” For that toast we all stood up.

Until that time I had had the usual vague ill-informed idea of the geishas and their work. At dinner that evening I found that they were middle-aged women, not particularly beautiful but with a social assurance and dignity that was most unexpected. Mr. Kaku told me that the word "geisha" means literally an "art person." The old tradition of the courtesans from which the present geisha system evolved, placed the emphasis on the art and intelligence of the woman rather than on her sexual appeal. A trained geisha must be proficient in flower arranging, singing, dancing, conversation, the tea ceremony and writing, "which is the same as painting," said Mr. Kaku. "You will notice how often we hang a series of written characters on our walls for the same pleasure as we get from a picture." They received a formal education and sometimes became the valued, behind-the-scenes advisors of statesmen.

"There are subsidiary arts, too," Mr. Kaku explained. "Conversation with men, for instance, is considered a separate art. In the old days, flower, and autumn-leaf viewing was considered most important and indeed a special esthetic knowledge. Sometimes one would have moon-viewing parties and in that, too, a geisha should be proficient."

Since the geishas are mainly entertainers they can choose their lovers to the degree that they are valuable as artists. A very great singer, for instance, cannot be bought because her income from her music, from records, and public or private performances is great enough to give her complete independence. All the great women artists were trained from among the geishas until now. "The system is decaying and so is much of the art," Mr. Kaku said. "It is a tragedy, do you not think? Can this democratic civilization be worth the loss of things that were great in our country? Even if democracy were suitable for Asians—and I am not sure that it is—it ought to be the kind of democracy that would help us to preserve the best in our culture rather than to accept the second-best in somebody else's culture."

During the war the geishas worked in factories, and their hands, famous for their softness and beauty of gesture, became rough and unattractive. They had to sell their hair, so in many cases the elaborate characteristic coiffure of the geishas, with its loops and wings of highly varnished hair, its combs and ornaments, is now replaced by either Western hair styles, by a knot at the nape of the neck, or if the geisha still attempts the traditional, a wig.

Besides the geishas there were four or five maikos brought in to entertain us. The maiko, literally "a dancing child," is twelve to fifteen in age, and there are now only thirty left in Kyoto. There used to be two hundred before the war. They are a sort of apprentice geisha and get their education and training in art in the geisha house and under the protection of the older geishas. It is a system which seems to the Western mind rather shocking, yet compared with what some children can expect should they stay with their very poor families or in the villages, it has its compensations.

In contrast with the simple sober-colored kimonos of the older geisha, the maiko wears brilliant silks with wide elaborate obis in gold and brocade. Her hair style is highly complicated. It takes several hours to dress, then it is decorated with little tinkling ornaments, with silver and tinsel; combs with twisting, flashing sequins dangling from them, little bells, tiny fans and paper flowers can all be used. As I came into the restaurant they giggled and whispered with excitement, and as soon as I sat down all the little girls ignored the men guests and crowded around me to examine my sari and ask whether the jewelry I was wearing was Indian and to find out whether the gold in my brocade choli was real; to open my evening bag and with no embarrassment to examine the contents in great detail. They were called back to their work by the older geishas and, still chattering, picked up the bottles of sake and poured out the wine for the guests. During the evening I noticed that even the older geishas found opportunities to come to where I was sitting and asked me exactly the things that the maikos had wanted to know. "Only the Orient," one of them told me, "really understands materials."

The meal was a rather elaborate version of the usual Japanese dinner—raw fish (tuna fish this time), eels, tempura-style fried prawn, various sorts of pickles, fried mushrooms, two sorts of soup and rice. The geishas unobtrusively but most efficiently helped one to eat, saw that more was brought of any dish you particularly liked, took the bones out of the fish for you, kept your cup full of warmed wine, and made conversation on whatever subject you showed an interest in. Between courses they sang for us and danced the formal, slow-moving Japanese dances. The maikos did rather gayer dances than the geishas and seemed to enjoy themselves enormously. They didn't drink at all, and the geishas drank only if you insisted...

This particular dinner party ended with the recitation of short poems, especially the seventeen syllable haiku. Santha learns from Mr. Kaku that such poems have no rhymes,“connect with the season,” and leave“suitable room for interpretation.” The guests and geisha joined in the recitation of one identified as “the most famous of all poems.” In translation [without comment from Rama Rau]: May the reign of the Emperor continue
For a thousand years and forever
Until the pebbles gather together and become rocks
And until moss grows over the rocks.

.........................

References