HE WORE A thick black suit, a stiff collar, and a felt hat. He was a short, sturdy man, and there was a sort of sulkiness about his face which made it rather attractive. This sulkiness, or truculence, was borne out in the aggressive set of his shoulders and his rather rolling gait. The general effect, however, was disarming rather than formidable. He looked less like a bully than a shy suspicious little boy who cultivated a defensive swagger. You could not help liking him.
He was Mr. H, a prominent Japanese official in Manchukuo. He had announced his attention of accompanying me to Jehol. The Government was displaying a benevolent interest in my activities as a Special Correspondent.
We stood, side by side, in the early sunlight on the Mukden airfield. A military aeroplane, with room for four passengers, stood glittering on the baked and dusty earth. Mr. H eyed it with a certain apprehension.
‘Before now, I never fly,’ he said. There was a wistful note in his voice.
I was feeling rather unkind. Mr. H, fanatically methodical, had got me out of bed an hour earlier than was necessary. Now I told him that before leaving London I had consulted a fortune-teller; the only one of her predictions which I could remember at all distinctly had been to the effect that I would be involved in a flying accident.
‘Yes?’ said Mr. H. He gave a hollow laugh.
Soon we were on board, piled into the stuffy cabin with two Japanese officers, their swords, and their kit. Mr. H clutched to his bosom, with a slightly desperate air, a bottle of whisky which he was bringing for his colleague, the Japanese consul in Jehol City. The engines roared. We bumped away across the airfield.
Our pace quickened. The tempo of the bumps merged into a steady, an almost imperceptible jarring. Then, as the plane prepared to rise, her stride seemed to lengthen. In a series of bounds, each bigger than the last, her wheels spurned the earth. At last she left it altogether. Banking, we circled over the Young Marshal’s gigantic arsenal, which lies on the outskirts of Mukden, and made off southwards.
How neat the Chinese are! The country below us was patterned intricately and with affection, like a patchwork quilt. Here, in the North, the fields are mostly larger than in the rice-growing South. The country is less crowded; there is more elbow-room. Even so, none of it is wasted. Symmetry and economy of space ruled in that meticulously quartered land. The different greens of the different crops were partitioned by paths and dykes which might have been drawn with a ruler. Their nice pattern was a natural growth, the gradual but spontaneous product of many years and long traditions; it did not bore or repel, as does the tailor-made, the rather parvenu regularity of English garden suburbs and small American towns. It lent the land dignity, and made you think of its people with respect.
For three hours we flew South, and presently came in sight of a big, dark-grey, sprawling city. This was Chinchow, and here we landed. The second and longer stage of the flight to Jehol would be completed in another plane.
It was almost immediately apparent that it would not be completed by us on that day. A telegram had gone astray; no reservations had been made. We watched with mortification the second plane make its departure, bursting with officers.
The big aerodrome was a military aerodrome. Chinchow was a garrison-town. Mr. H, though a person of importance, was a civilian. The event of that day gave me a fleeting insight into the cleavage which exists between the civil and the military authorities in Manchukuo.
I am by nature very bad at enduring delay, and Chinchow was in any case a poor place to endure it in. Politely but firmly I pestered Mr. H; I wanted to ensure – what at the moment was by no means certain – that we should leave for Jehol to-morrow. Together we visited a succession of officers. His shoulders defiantly hunched, his felt hat pulled down over one eye like a gangster’s, Mr. H grew more and more to resemble a sulky little boy. I longed to comfort him.
Nobody else did. The officers were indeed extremely polite. Several firkins of tea were consumed. But they could promise nothing. All the seats in to-morrow’s plane were booked; we must live in hopes of an eleventh hour cancellation.
Poor Mr. H. It was painfully evident that he cut no ice. He was losing face, and he was worried. If only, he said, they had sent an officer from Headquarters with me, a special plane would have been forthcoming at once. … We departed sorrowfully in quest of lodging for the night.
This was not easily come by. Chinchow is a purely Chinese city, with no foreign concession. Two Japanese hotels have sprung up there since the occupation of Manchuria, but the larger and more commodious was already full. At the other, a tiny inn in a narrow street, we did however get a room. It was a building of one story, run by a Japanese lady of exquisite affability. We took off our shoes at the door and put on slippers. These in turn were discarded when we came to the threshold of our room. It was a tiny, flimsy room, with matting on the floor but no window. The furniture consisted of two fans, two fly-swatters (very badly needed), and a low table; no chairs. There was a roll of bedding in the corner, ready to be spread out at night. Everything was very bare and clean and close. I felt rather like a beetle in a match-box.
We took off our coats and squatted on the floor. Like most Europeans, I was not very good at squatting. Presently a meal was served by a very pretty girl who knelt and bowed as she offered each dish. There was a kind of intimate formality about her manners which was most agreeable; but the strain of keeping a straight face in my presence was clearly almost unendurable, and I felt sorry for her. The first dish was a bowl of thin soup in which balefully floated the eye of a fish called Tai. Mr. H, consuming his with relish in its entirety, assured me that the eye-ball was peculiarly delicious; this was one of the few statements emanating from a Japanese official source which I did not feel called upon to verify. The rest of the meal consisted of more fish (happily represented by those parts of their anatomy which we are accustomed to associate with the table), some sinewy mushrooms, assorted vegetables, and bean curd. We washed it down with beer. I was glad to find that my pristine skill with the chopsticks had not entirely deserted me, though I was far from expert.
In the afternoon I wandered round Chinchow. A Chinese city is seldom a very beautiful place. The streets are tortuous, narrow, irregular, and dirty. If there are fine houses, they are concealed behind walls, and you cannot see into their courtyards through the gateways, because the gates are masked, on the inside, by another short section of wall, designed to prevent the ingress of evil spirits which (as everybody knows) can only fly in a straight line. In the streets, which in summer are partially roofed over with mat awnings called pengs, the shop-fronts are thickly hung with the long vertical banners and the lacquer signs of the tradesmen. There is always a great noise and a great smell. The shops all open into the streets, and in their dim interiors you can see the owner and his family at work. You get the paradoxical impression of infinite labour and infinite leisure. The Chinese, though they work from dawn to dusk, work as individualists, and in units very rarely bigger than the family. They wisely disdain the clock-punching technique of capitalist industry; there is no lunch-hour, no overtime, no single symptom of rationalization or indeed of any conscious method. They live not only for their work, but in it: lunching on the counter, sleeping on the workbench, stopping to talk and drink tea when they feel inclined.
So as a picture in the grand manner the Chinese city is a disappointment. As a series of curious and intimate sketches it is unforgettable – the fierce argument between an old woman and a coolie with a pig slung from either end of the carrying-pole across his shoulder: a tortoise suspended on a string, spinning as aimlessly as a planet above the counter of a fishmonger’s stall: the click of coppers on the matting tables of the gamblers’ booths: a very old man with a foolish face caressing the smooth wooden flank of a coffin at the undertaker’s: a stout lady with many silver pins in her black hair admiring unreservedly a dreadful American oleograph of Moses in the Bullrushes, late nineteenth century: the little ineffectual, domineering policeman, with his thin legs and his shamefully dirty Mauser: the beggars and the poultry and the children and the fierce cowardly dogs …
Cities in the West may cast on you the same kind of spell that a mountain casts. In China they have the fascination of an ant-heap.
That night a party was given for us by the Japanese Consul. The Japanese are highly insular; temperamentally they are the worst – by which I mean the most reluctant-colonists in the world, the French not excepted. Though the figure has risen by 50 per cent since the invasion of 1931, there are still only 300,000 Japanese residents in Manchuria, of which the total population is over thirty millions.1 This neglect on the part of an overcrowded island to make use of a rich and only partially developed country, lying next door to it, as an outlet for its alarming surplus of population is largely attributable to two basic causes. One is the climate, which in winter is too severe for the Japanese; the other is the fact that Japanese labour cannot compete with the low standard of living set by Chinese labour.
But even if these cogent considerations did not exist, a ‘Come to Manchuria’ movement would not attract the average Japanese. He likes his own place and his own things, and when he finds himself perforce stationed in Manchuria he is more assiduous than any of the other foreigners in transplanting his own amenities and some of his own atmosphere. Exile in the West is more easily endurable, for the West is one of his two spiritual homes. But in Manchuria (unless I am much mistaken) he is afflicted by a sense of superiority amounting almost to disgust. The people he regards as backward to the point of barbarism. The gods which he has learnt to adore with such auspicious results in the last eighty years mean nothing to them, save occasionally as a cue for laughter or a source of profit. He – the representative of a higher type of civilization (but not, remember, its best representative; and remember also that you cannot judge an Empire by her colonial officials) – virtually ignores the barbarians. He mixes with them not much more than he must, though he acquires, at second-hand, a working knowledge of their psychology. He finds it hard to learn their language, though they pick up his very quickly. In their temples and their customs, in their doubts and their beliefs, he rarely displays more than a tourist’s curiosity. Turning his back (except for business purposes) on his thirty million neighbours, he does his best to make Manchuria a Home From Home.
All this, or some of it, explains why there are geisha houses in Chinchow. To the best of these we drove in the car of the Japanese Consul, blasting the inhabitants and their livestock out of our path with a powerful horn. Three younger officials made up the party. We turned up a narrow lane into a courtyard, shed our shoes, and presently were squatting on cushions round two sides of a large airy room of which the floor was matting and the walls movable partitions. One side of the room, opening on to a veranda, let in the rays of the setting sun and the faintly melancholy notes of a bugle.
It was a good party, though very hard work. Mr. H and I were implored to take off our coats and ties, and this we did, for it is a matter of etiquette that the guests should appear as informal and as much at their ease as possible, in order to please the host. The others were all wearing the kimono.
My command of the Japanese language began and ended with the word for Thank You, the word for Bandit, and the expression Hullo. It was in the circumstances fortunate that most of those present could speak some English. The Japanese, though lacking in a sense of humour, are a people very easily merry, and ice was quickly broken by the exchange of rather elementary badinage.
Dinner, a much more elaborate version of the midday meal, but having the same sort of dishes as its basis, was served, and under the influence of sake the atmosphere became rapidly convivial. Sake is a wine made of rice, tasting rather like sherry; it is served warm in little bowls smaller than a coffee cup. On me its effect as an intoxicant was always negligible, however much of it I drank. But the Japanese have weak heads. Everyone toasted each other repeatedly with a cry of ‘Kan pei’, which means in English ‘No heeltaps’ and in American ‘Bottoms up’; and pretty soon even the staid Mr. H could not honestly have described himself as sober.
Meanwhile I observed with interest the activities of the geishas. Their name has a glamorous (to say the least of it) connotation which gives a rather false impression of their function. A geisha falls somewhere midway between a waitress and an American night-club ‘hostess’; though sometimes venal, she is not a professional prostitute. Her duty is to minister to the guests at table and to amuse them. Her face is less likely to be her fortune than a gift for repartee, and the best geishas are not necessarily the youngest and most attractive girls. They wear an elaborate but not, in my opinion, a very becoming costume. Their equally elaborate coiffure is also, to most western eyes, remarkable rather for ingenuity than for beauty.
I imagine that the best type of geisha is rarely found in Manchukuo. The ones at Chinchow, though amiable, seemed to me pudding-faced and foolish. But they had a sort of sparrow-like perkiness, an apparently inexhaustible fund of spontaneous high spirits, which was disarming and enviable. In waiting they showed an unobtrusive solicitude for one’s needs. After dinner they sang and did a static formal dance, partly to a gramophone and partly to an instrument suggesting an elongated banjo, of which the strings were plucked with what looked to me like a shoe-horn. The dance was a traditional one, based on a tragic theme; it was amusing to see their faces, religious and intent during its execution, break into broad smiles and shrill ribald repartee the moment it was over.
After that there was some haphazard dancing in the western style, and various childish games. Everyone shouted and shone with sweat. A keenly contested egg-race took place, the eggs being propelled across the matting floor by blowing on them. The only form of contest in which I showed the least proficiency was that in which the competitors had to balance a sake bottle on their heads, lower themselves into a prone position, drink without handling it a cup of wine placed on the floor, and then stand up again without upsetting the bottle. I beat everybody at this, and acquired a lot of ‘face’.
Presently one of my hosts, a delightfully Falstaffian man, showed signs of giving way to that one of Falstaff’s appetites with which his apologists make the least play. The geishas protested, and, since it was now late, the party broke up.
We went on to a café, pronounced ‘coffee’ by the Japanese in Manchuria. This was a dingy place with a gramophone, a few Chinese girls, and some tipsy Japanese soldiers. Before I knew what was happening, I found myself provided with an enormous beef steak, a glass of whisky, a glass of brandy, and a lady claiming the proud title (so they assured me) of ‘Miss Chinchow’. At the moment I had no use at all for any of these. Miss Chinchow, however, though unable to speak English, turned out to be very hungry. While my hosts were absent on the dancing floor I surreptitiously fed her almost the whole of the beef steak, thus escaping a charge of grave discourtesy. I remember that girl with affection.
It was very late when Mr. H and I lay down on the floor of our little stifling room. Several scores of house-flies, which had been waiting for this moment, settled on us with a contented buzz. If they had been vultures they would not have kept me awake.
1 700,000 Koreans bring the total number of registered Japanese subjects in Manchuria up to a million.