The Hare with Amber Eyes (30 page)

By the early 1960s Iggie was a ‘long-term Tokyo resident’. European and American friends came on three-year postings and were gone. Iggie had seen off the Occupation. He was still in Tokyo.

He had a tutor for Japanese and now spoke it beautifully, with fluency and subtlety. Every foreigner who can stammer a few apologetic phrases in Japanese is complimented on their extraordinary skills.
Jozu desu ne?
: My, but how skilled you are! My own Japanese, wrenchingly clumsy, full of strange longueurs and rushed ascents, has been praised enough for me to know how this works. But I heard Iggie in deep conversation and know he could speak Japanese well.

He loved Tokyo. He loved the way the skyline changed, the rust-red Tokyo Tower built at the end of the 1950s to emulate the Eiffel Tower; the new apartment blocks hard against the smoky yakitori booths. He identified with the city’s capacity for reinvention. The chance to reinvent himself was one that seemed godsent. There was a strange correlation between Vienna in 1919 and Tokyo in 1947, he said. If you haven’t been so low, you don’t know how you can build something, you can’t measure what you’ve built. You will always think it is due to someone else.

How can you bear to stay in this place? Iggie was asked repeatedly by expatriates. Don’t you get bored doing the same old things?

Iggie told me what qualified as expatriate Tokyo life, the eight brittle hours held between your orders to the maid and cook after breakfast and the first cocktail at half-past five. If you were a man of business in Japan, you had your office and then you socialised. Sometimes there would be geisha parties of such length and tediousness and cost that Iggie cursed leaving Léopoldville. Every night, cleanly shaven, he had drinks with clients. The first bar was at the Imperial, dark mahogany and velvet, whisky sours, a pianist. Drinks at the American Club, the Press Club, International House. Then, perhaps, another bar. D. J. Enright, a visiting English poet, listed his favourites: the Bar Renoir, Bar Rimbaud, La Vie en Rose, Sous les Toits de Tokyo and, best of all, La Peste.

If you had no work, you had those eight hours to fill. What could you do? Go to Kikokuniya in the Ginza to see if they have any new Western novels and magazines or to Maruzen bookshop with its pre-war stock of lives of clerics, which have been on their shelves for thirty years? Or to one of the cafés on the top floors of the department stores?

You have visitors. But how many times do you take visitors to see the great Buddha at Kamakura, or to the shrines for the Tokugawa Shoguns at Nikko – red lacquer and gold climbing up a hillside of cryptomeria? Outside the temples in Kyoto, or the shrine at Nikko, or the steps up to the Buddha at Kamakura are the kiosks of souvenir-sellers, the prayer-hawkers, the
o-miyage
-pushers. There are the ‘take your photograph’ merchants under a red umbrella, by the lacquer bridge, next to the Golden Pavilion, by the side of a simpering girl dressed in an ersatz costume with white make-up and a comb in her hair.

How often can your bear kabuki? Or, worse, three hours of the Noh drama? How often do you go to an
onsen
, the hot-water springs, before the prospect of relaxing chest-high in a pool comes to be one of horror?

You can go to the lectures at the British Council by visiting poets, or to an exhibition at the department stores of ceramics, or you can learn flower-arranging – ikebana. To be a woman in this expatriate environment is to be made aware of your fragile status. You are encouraged to learn what Enright wrote was one of the ‘humiliatingly “simplified” art-crafty cults’ like the tea-ceremony, newly resurgent in Japan.

Because this is what it was about: Getting to the Real Japan. ‘I must try to see something in the country that was whole and untouched,’ writes one desperate traveller after a month of Tokyo in 1955. Getting to the whole and untouched means getting out of Tokyo: Japan starts where the sounds of the city end. Ideally it means going to a place where no Westerner has visited before. This makes it increasingly competitive to find authentic experiences. It is cultural one-upmanship, this sensitivity in comparison with others. Do you write haiku? Do brush-painting? Make pots? Meditate? Do you drink green tea from choice?

Getting to the real Japan depends on your schedule. If you have a fortnight, this would mean Kyoto and a day-trip to see some cormorant fishermen, maybe a day-trip to a pottery village, a tea-ceremony with its attendant longueurs. A month would mean a visit to Kyushu in the south of the country. A year and you could write a book. Dozens did. Japan – my, what an odd country! A country in transition. Vanishing traditions. Enduring traditions. Essential verities. Seasons in. Myopia of the Japanese. Love of detail of. Dexterity. Self-sufficiency of. Childishness of. Inscrutability of.

Elizabeth Gray Vining, the American tutor to the Crown Prince for four years and author of
Windows for the Crown Prince
, wrote in a sequel of the ‘many books about Japan written by Americans who have lost their hearts to their former foes’. There were travelogues by the English too: William Empson, Sacheverell Sitwell, Bernard Leach, William Plomer.
It’s Better With Your Shoes Off
– cartoons telling what it’s really like to live in Japan –
The Japanese Are Like That
,
An Introduction to Japan
,
This Scorching Earth
,
A Potter in Japan
,
Four Gentlemen of Japan
. A gush of books interchangeably called
Japan Behind the Fan
,
Behind the Screens
,
Behind the Mask
,
Bridge of the Brocade Sash
. There is Honor Tracy’s
Kakemono: A Sketch Book of Post-War Japan
, with its dislike of ‘young men with their stickily pomaded hair and girls with garish make-up circling the floor, an expression of near imbecility on their faces…’ Enright wryly remarked that he harboured an ambition to belong to that small and select band of people who have lived in Japan without writing a book about it, in his introduction to his own book on the subject,
The World of Dew.

Writing about Japan means that you have to show a visceral dislike of (Western) lipstick smeared across a beautiful (oriental) cheek, the ways in which modernisation disfigures the country. Or you try to make it funny, like the special issue of
Life
on Japan for 11th September 1964, with a geisha in full get-up launching a bowling ball on the cover. The new Americanised country tastes like the flatness of
pan
, the doughy white bread that had been made in Japan since the end of the nineteenth century, and a sort of processed cheese of incomparable soapiness, yellower than a marigold. This you compare to the spikiness of Japanese pickles, radishes, the bite of wasabi in a piece of sushi. In doing so you are mirroring the views of travellers eighty years before. You all share in Lafcadio Hearn’s lyrical falling lament.

And this is where Iggie was different. He might open a black lacquer bento box, with its rice and pickled plums and fish neatly arranged on vermilion for lunch. But it would be Chateaubriand with Jiro and his Japanese friends in the evening at a restaurant near the Ginza Crossing where the new neon signs flashed Toshiba, Sony, Honda. And on to a film by Teshigahara and then back home for a whisky, with the netsuke cabinet open and Stan Getz on the gramophone. Iggie and Jiro’s life was lived in another kind of Real Japan.

After twenty years of false starts and comparative hardship in Paris, New York, Hollywood and the army, Iggie had now lived in Tokyo longer than he had in Vienna: he was starting to belong. He had competence in the world, he was making something of himself, earning enough to support himself and his friends. He helped his siblings and his nephews and nieces.

By the mid-1960s Rudolf was married with five young children. Gisela was flourishing in Mexico. And Elisabeth in Tunbridge Wells, walking to 9.30 matins at the parish church on Sundays in her sensible coat, seemed completely English. Henk is retired and reads the
Financial Times
, hopefully. Their two sons are doing well. My father has been ordained as a priest in the Church of England, has married a vicar’s daughter, a historian, and has become a university chaplain in Nottingham. They have four sons – including me. My uncle Constant Hendrik (Henry), a successful barrister in London, has joined the Parliamentary Counsel Office and is married with two sons. The Reverend Victor de Waal and his brother Henry are professional Englishmen, speaking English at home, continental only in the slight roll to their Rs.

Iggie had turned himself into a businessman, becoming the kind of man, he said once, poignantly, that his father would recognise. Partly because I don’t understand money, I see him in a similar way to Viktor, the great man of business hiding slightly behind his desk, a book of poetry surreptitiously hidden amongst the ledgers, looking forward to his release of the end of the day. In fact, unlike his father, who had presided over a spectacular series of downfalls, Iggie proved to be good with money. ‘Suffice it to say,’ he types in a copy of a 1964 Private & Confidential letter to the General Manager of Swiss Bank Corp, Zurich – used as a bookmark in his copy of
Our Man in Havana
– ‘that I started in Japan from scratch and have been able over the years to build up an organisation with a yearly turnover of over 100 million yen. We maintain two offices in Japan, in Tokyo and Osaka, employing some 45 people and I am Vice President and Japan manager…’ A hundred million yen was a fair amount.

Iggie became a banker after all, a hundred years after his grandfather Ignace opened the bank in Vienna off the Schottengasse. He became the representative of Swiss Bank in Tokyo – the
ne plus ultra
of banks, he explained to me. He acquired a bigger office – this one with a secretary behind a desk in the reception area, with an ikebana arrangement of a pine branch and iris. From the sixth-floor windows he could look west across the blocky new landscape of cranes and aerials of Tokyo, and east to the pines of the Imperial Palace and down to the streams of yellow taxis below in Ōtemachi.

He was growing into himself, too. In 1964 he was fifty-eight, with a firmly knotted tie under a dark-grey suit, a hand in a pocket as in his Viennese graduation photograph. His hair was receding, but Iggie knew enough about himself to avoid a comb-over.

Jiro, a handsome thirty-eight, had a new career working for CBS negotiating to bring American TV programmes into Japan. ‘And,’ said Jiro, ‘I was responsible for bringing the Viennese concert for New Year to Japan for NHK. No one wanted it! The wild reaction! You know the adoration of Japanese for Viennese music, for Strauss? They asked Iggie in the taxi “Where are you from?” He’d reply “Wien, Austria” and then they start la-la-la-ing the “Blue Danube Waltz”.’

In 1970 the couple bought some land on the Izu Peninsula, seventy miles south of Tokyo, enough space for a cottage. In a photograph there is a veranda for evening drinks. The ground falls away in front of you and, framed by bamboos, there is a glimpse of sea.

And they bought a plot for a grave in the grounds of the temple where one of their closest friends had his family tomb. Iggie was here to stay.

And then in 1972 they moved to Takanawa, to apartments in a new building in a good location. ‘Higashi-Ginza, Shimbashi, Daimon, Mita’ sings the voice on the subway, and then ‘Sengakuji’, and you alight and walk up the hill to home, on this quiet street next to the walls of the palace of Prince Takamatsu. Tokyo can be very quiet. I once sat waiting for them to come home, sitting on the low green railing opposite, and in an hour only two old ladies came past and a hopeful yellow taxi.

They were not large apartments, but very convenient: they were thinking ahead. Separate front doors, but adjoining, with a door from one dressing-room to another. Iggie put one mirrored wall in his hall and lined the other with squares of gold leaf. There was a little stool on which you could sit to slip your shoes off, and a tutelary Buddha from some long-forgotten raid in Kyoto. Some of the Vienna pictures migrated to Jiro’s side, and some of Jiro’s Japanese porcelain ended up on Iggie’s shelves. A photograph of Emmy stood next to a photograph of Jiro’s mother on the little shrine. From Iggie’s dressing-room, with its library of jackets, you looked over the Prince’s gardens. From the drawing-room with its vitrine you could see all the way to Tokyo Bay.

Iggie and Jiro went on holidays together. Venice, Florence, Paris, London, Honolulu. And in 1973 they went to Vienna. It was the first time Iggie had been back since 1936.

Iggie takes Jiro to stand outside the Palais where he had been born. They go to the Burgtheater, to the Sacher, to his father’s old café. And when they return, Iggie makes two decisions. They are connected. The first is to adopt Jiro as his son. Jiro becomes Jiro Ephrussi Sugiyama. The second is to revoke his American citizenship. I asked him about this return to Vienna, and his return to becoming an Austrian citizen, thinking of Elisabeth’s journey round the Ring from the station to find the broken lindens outside their childhood house. ‘I couldn’t bear Nixon’ was all he said, catching Jiro’s eye, changing the subject, moving the conversation as far away as he could.

It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.

You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.