The Hare with Amber Eyes (28 page)

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
:

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.

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. Perhaps 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.

After so many years of living with only the contents of a suitcase or two, this was Iggie’s first house. He was forty-two and had lived in Vienna and Frankfurt and Paris and New York and Hollywood, and in army billets across France and Germany – and in Léopoldville – but had never been able to shut a door in his own house until this first liberated, exhilarating spring in Japan.

A summer party in Senzoku, Tokyo, 1951

The house had been built in the 1920s, with an octagonal dining-room and a balcony overlooking the lake, perfect for drinks parties. You stepped out of the sitting-room onto a large, flat boulder and then down into the garden with its clipped pines and azaleas, a terrace of stones arranged in a careful random pattern, and a moss garden. It was the kind of house that the young Japanese diplomat Ichiro Kawasaki described: ‘In pre-war years a university professor or army colonel could afford to build such a house and live there himself. Today the owners find these houses so expensive to maintain that they must either sell them or rent them to foreigners.’

I’m looking at the clutch of small, round-cornered Kodachrome prints of this first house of Iggie’s in Tokyo. ‘Zoning is a subject to which Japanese city planners have given little thought. It is quite common to find a group of slummy wooden shacks of labourers immediately adjacent to the palatial residence of a millionaire.’ That is the case here, though the rebuilding of the shacks to the left and the right is being done in concrete rather than wood and paper. This neighbourhood is starting again: temples and shrines, the local market, the bicycle-repair man and the cluster of shops at the end of the road – more a track than a road – where you can buy fat white daikon radishes laid out in rows, and cabbages, and little else.

We start on the front doorstep with Iggie, hand in pocket, tie clip glinting on a green silk tie. He is a broad man now, given to keeping a handkerchief in his jacket pocket. This is something that the youngsters in his office have started to copy, the coordinating pocket handkerchief–necktie combo. Today he is in brogues. He looks a little squirearchical. He could be in the Cotswolds if it were not for the pruned pines that flank him and the green tiles of the roof. We move inside into a long corridor and turn left, where the cook Mr Haneda is in his whites, eyes closed against the flash, leaning on the new cooker, chef’s hat set jauntily on the back of his head. A bottle of Heinz ketchup is the only food in view, Kodachrome scarlet against all the blindingly clean enamel.

Back in the corridor we move through an open doorway, under a Noh mask and into the sitting-room. The ceiling is of slatted wood. All the lamps are on. Objects are displayed on spare, dark, clean-lined Korean and Chinese furniture alongside comfortable low sofas, occasional tables and lamps, and ashtrays and cigarette boxes. A wooden Buddha from Kyoto sits on a Korean chest, a hand raised in blessing.

The bamboo bar holds an impressive quantity of liquor, none of which I can identify. It is a house made for parties. Parties with small children on their knees, and women in kimonos, and presents. Parties with men in dark suits seated round small tables, loquacious with whisky. Parties at New Year with cut boughs of pine trees hanging from the ceiling, and parties under the cherry trees, and once – in a spirit of poetry – a firefly-viewing party.

There is lots and lots of fraternisation here: Japanese and American and European friends, sushi and beer served by Mrs Kaneko, the maid in her uniform. It is Liberty Hall, again.

It is also a house with panache. There is none of the clutter of his childhood in the Palais: it is a dramatic interior of golden screens and scrolls, paintings and Chinese pots created as a new home for the netsuke.

For right in the centre of this house, in the centre of Iggie’s life, are the netsuke. Iggie designed a glass case for them. It has a patterned paper on the walls behind it, a pale-blue pattern of chrysanthemums. Not only are the 264 netsuke back in Japan, but they are back on show in a salon. They are placed by Iggie on three long glass shelves. There are hidden lights so that at dusk the vitrine glows with all the gradations of cream, bone and ivory. At night they can light the whole room.

Here the netsuke became Japanese again.

They lose their strangeness. They are surprisingly accurate renditions of the food you eat: clams, octopus, peaches, persimmon, bamboo shoots. The bundle of kindling that is kept by the kitchen door is knotted like this netsuke carved by Soko. The slow, emphatic turtles climbing over each other on the edge of the temple pond are your Tomokazu netsuke. You are not, perhaps, meeting monks and pedlars and fishermen, let alone tigers, on the way to your office in Marunouchi, but the man at the noodle-stand at the train station has the same permanent scowl as the disappointed rat-catcher.

The netsuke share their imagery with the Japanese scrolls and gilded screens across the room. They have something to talk with in this room, unlike Charles’s Moreaus and Renoirs, or Emmy’s silver and glass scent bottles on her dressing-table. They have always been objects to be picked up and handled – now they become part of another world of handled objects. Not only are they familiar in material (ivory and boxwood are gripped every day as chopsticks), but their shapes are deeply embedded. One whole type of netsuke, the
manju
netsuke, is named after the small, rounded beancurd sweet cakes eaten daily with tea or given as
o-miyage
, the small gifts you present if you go anywhere in Japan.
Manju
are dense and surprisingly heavy, but they give slightly as you pick them up. When you pick up a
manju
netsuke your thumb expects the same sensation.

Many of Iggie’s Japanese friends had never seen netsuke before, let alone handled them. Jiro just remembered his grandfather, the entrepreneur, dressed in his dark dense grey kimono for weddings and funerals. Five heraldic motifs on neck and cuffs and sleeves, white split-toed socks and
geta
or wooden clogs, the wide obi belt in its stiff knot round his waist, and a netsuke – some animal? a rat? – hanging on its cord. But netsuke had disappeared from daily use eighty years beforehand in the early Meiji period, when kimonos for men had been discouraged. At Iggie’s parties, with glasses of whisky and plates of edamame, crunchy green-bean pods, scattered on the tables, the cases were opened. Netsuke were picked up again, exclaimed over, handed round and enjoyed. And friends explain them to you. As it is 1951, the Year of the Hare in the zodiac, you hold the netsuke made from the clearest ivory in the whole collection, and it is explained that it gleams because it is a lunar hare racing across the waves, illuminated by moonlight.

The last time netsuke had been handled in this social way was in Paris by Edmond de Goncourt, by Degas and Renoir in Charles Ephrussi’s salon of contemporary good taste, a conversation between an eroticised otherness and new art.

Now they are back home in Japan, the netsuke are a memory of conversations with grandparents about calligraphy, or poetry, or the shamisen. For Iggie’s Japanese guests, they are part of a lost world, made more astringent by the bleakness of post-war life. Look, the netsuke reprove, at this wealth of time there used to be.

Here they are also part of a new version of
japonisme
. Iggie’s house has its counterpart in 1950s international-design magazines with their emphasis on the layering of Japanese style into the contemporary home. Japan can be referenced by a signature Buddha, a screen, a rough country jar in the new folk-craft trend.
Architectural Digest
is full of residences in America with these objects alongside the gold leaf in the hall, a wall of mirrors, the use of raw silk on the walls, vast plate-glass windows and abstract paintings.

In this Tokyo house of an adopted American there is a
tokonoma
, the alcove that is so important in traditional houses, a space held apart from the rest of the house by a pillar of untreated timber. Country grasses are arranged in a basket near a scroll painting and a Japanese bowl. Contemporary Japanese pictures of etiolated figures and horses by Fukui, a favourite young painter, hang on the walls. Iggie’s catholic collection of books on Japanese art, Proust up against James Thurber and stacks and stacks of American crime, range the shelves.

But here amongst the Japanese art are also a few paintings from the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, collected by his grandfather in the heady years of the family’s ascendancy during the 1870s. A picture of an Arab boy by a painter whom Ignace supported on his travels around the Middle East. A couple of Austrian landscapes. A little Dutch painting of some contented cows that once hung on a back corridor. In his dining-room, above a sideboard, is a melancholy picture of a soldier with a musket in a penumbrous wood, which used to be in his father’s dressing-room at the end of the corridor alongside the vast
Leda and the Swan
and the bust of Herr Wessel.

Here are the bits of restitution wrung out of Vienna by Elisabeth, hanging alongside Iggie’s Japanese scrolls. This, too, is a bit of fraternisation:
Ringstrassenstil
in Japan.

These photographs are vivid: they radiate happiness. Iggie had a capacity to get along, wherever he was – there are even snaps of him and soldier friends during the war, playing with an adopted puppy in a ruined bunker. In Japan he is expansive to his Japanese and Western friends in this eclectic setting.

His happiness was compounded when he moved to another beautiful house and garden in a more convenient location in Azabu. He hated the idea of this area – a
gaijin
colony full of diplomats – but the house was high up, with a series of interconnecting rooms and with a garden falling away in front of it, full of white camellias.

It was big enough to build a separate apartment for his young friend Jiro Sugiyama. They had met in July 1952. ‘I ran into an old classmate outside the Marunouchi building who introduced me to his boss Leo Ephrussi…Two weeks after that, I had a call from Leo – I always called him Leo – inviting me to have dinner with him. We had lobster thermidor on the roof garden of the Tokyo Kaikan…and through him I got a job at an old Mitsui company, Sumitomo.’ They were to be together for forty-one years.