6:
It was the week before Christmas 1972, and the life I had painstakingly built for myself and my young family had fallen apart overnight, thanks to a Mr Schwartz. I had never set eyes on this man until twelve hours earlier, and now he was threatening to arrange for me to have an “accident” unless I signed everything I owned in Japan over to my partner. Unfortunately, I had to trust that he meant it, because Schwartz was not some small-time criminal or would-be gangster attempting to muscle in on our business. He was, he led me to believe, the head of the Tokyo CIA station, and he gave every impression that he was perfectly prepared to put his threat into action.
How different everything had seemed the previous evening, when I had been celebrating my good fortune in life with an English friend at a downtown restaurant. We had been living in Japan for five years. Marie-Thérèse spoke the language well and was as fascinated by the country and its culture as I was. We had a large rented home in Tokyo, as well as a beautiful country cabin which we had built for our small but growing family. We were already the proud parents of a strapping young toddler, Julien, and a few days earlier Marie-Thérèse had given birth to a baby daughter, Justine. My mother-in-law was over from France to help with the children, because I was up to my eyes in the biggest business venture of my career so far, which on paper would make me worth millions of dollars. I was permitting myself this celebratory night out because I reckoned I was allowed a moment of satisfaction.
Relations with my business partner Bob Strickland had had their ups and downs. Marie-Thérèse decided he was a bad lot on her first meeting, and she had not altered her opinion. He and I now had a number of arms to our business, some of them very profitable, others costing us money. But I had recently had a brainwave that would raise us into a new league.
Because Bob had a passion for fast cars, one of our businesses was a garage which carried out repair work on top-of-the-range vehicles. We did bespoke jobs, and had recently made a replica delivery tanker, the size of a Mini Cooper, for Mobil Oil to use for advertising purposes. Mobil was very pleased with the result and we now had good contacts in the company, including its number two man in Japan, because he was French and Marie-Thérèse knew his wife socially.
The company happened to have a petrol station on a major intersection, Akebanebashi, about ten blocks from our house. It was an ordinary petrol station, but the location was a highly strategic one and, to me, the site was ripe for redevelopment – not just at ground level, but above it. I went to see Mobil’s American executive called Lou Noto, who would later head the whole company worldwide and would steward its merger with Exxon.
“Why don’t we put a building on this corner?” I said. “If you sell us the air rights to build vertically above your property, we’ll construct it. On the ground and first floors we’ll give you a showcase petrol station and diagnostic repair centre. Then we can add six floors of offices above it.”
I explained that we could put a garage on the floor above the petrol station, with a state-of-the-art testing and tuning centre, which would satisfy Bob. To make a feature of the place, we would have a café behind a window so that people could have a coffee while they watched their car being tuned up. And above it we would have the office floors, with a headquarters for our small group of companies at the very top.
Our pitch to Lou went well. I talked to my bank manager at Standard Chartered into lending us the money we needed to build an eight-storey tower, and our central Tokyo real-estate project was on. I looked after the whole process as the building went up. I had some major fights with Bob, who had an equal fifty percent stake, yet seemed to resent the fact that he was sharing the ownership of this prime site with me. But my legal ownership status was completely watertight, so these tiresome arguments were not worth losing sleep over. I also found all the tenants except one: for some reason Bob was keen to persuade the Libyan Embassy to open their commercial section on the fourth floor. It seemed important to him, and I saw no reason to object as long as they paid the rent.
It was a major coup for two foreigners to pull off something like this in Japan at the time. I was thirty-one years old, and my half share would be worth a small fortune, so I could be forgiven for feeling pleased with myself, as I told my English pal about the project.
But pride comes before a fall, as I was about to find out.
I suggested to my friend at the end of our celebratory evening that he come and see the building, which was nearly ready, so I was keen to show it off. He agreed and we took a taxi to the interchange. It was nearly midnight when we got there, and I expected the building to be deserted. Instead, to my amazement, it was a hive of activity – particularly on the fourth floor, where a group of technicians, including some Westerners, seemed to be wiring up the ceiling.
One of these Westerners was wearing a suit and seemed to be giving out orders.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
He squared up and said: “I could ask you the same question. Who the hell are you?” His accent was American.
“I’m the co-owner of this building and I’m going to call the police,” I said.
At this point, his attitude changed dramatically
“Hang on a second,” he said. “Let me call my boss.”
He picked up one of the few phones that was already connected, and started dialling. I tried to listen in but he was speaking softly with his back to me, so I could not make out a word. I had to wait until he replaced the receiver and turned back to me.
“They’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”
“They? Who are ‘they’?”
“My boss and your partner,” he said.
My partner? So this was something to do with Bob!
I waited, trembling with fury, until Bob turned up with another American – sharper-suited and better spoken than Bob, although that was not difficult – who introduced himself as Schwartz. At this point he simply said he was from the US Embassy. He and my partner were both looking flustered.
“Tell me what’s going on, Bob,” I demanded.
The pair of them urged me to calm down and asked if we could sort it out tomorrow. By this time I had asked my English friend to go – he was hopefully too drunk to remember much of what he had seen – and I reluctantly agreed.
I did not get a lot of sleep. I had a bad feeling about what I had seen, and I was consumed with anger at my partner. I did not want to trouble Marie-Thérèse yet; she had enough to worry about with the new baby. But I had a feeling of dread when I left home the next morning for my meeting with Bob and Schwartz.
They were both already there, waiting for me. They asked me to join them in Bob’s office on the top floor of the tower. As my partner closed the door, Schwartz said: “You shouldn’t have seen what you saw last night. But you did, and as you’re clearly not stupid, you will have realised we were bugging the office.”
He was right. I had worked this much out on my own.
“What the hell do you think gives you the right…?” I began.
“Please, let me finish,” he said.
I looked at Bob, but he was staring intently at the floor rather than look me in the eye.
“Go on,” I said.
“We always want to know what the Libyans are up to. They do a lot of smuggling and false destination shipments. You and your partner didn’t arrange it. I did, because I’m the station chief of the CIA in Japan – as Bob here knows, because he has been assisting us with various projects for a number of years.”
My partner was still avoiding my eye. This explained any number of strange disappearances or responses on his part over the years we had worked together. But what the hell had he got me into?
I tried to stay calm.
“You don’t want me to say anything about it? Fine—I won’t say anything about it,” I said.
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” said Schwartz. “You know what we’d really like? Come and join us. You’re a British citizen, and you could be very useful to us.”
“How so?”
“A variety of ways.”
“Spying for you”?
He shrugged.
“There’s also Philippe,” he said.
Philippe was a Frenchman we had working with us in our small consulting company, fresh from a year in Beijing.
“We have a hunch he’s with French intelligence, and we know his wife likes you. If you could tape her on video in…shall we say…a compromising situation, it could be of great assistance to us…”
What kind of person did he think I was?
“I wouldn’t do that to my wife. She’s just had a baby! And I wouldn’t do it to his wife,” I said.
He put his hands up to calm me down.
“Alright, but we’d still like you to join us,” he said.
“I’m not interested.”
He looked me in the eye and his tone changed. “In that case we’ll need you to come to Yokosuka airbase every month for a lie detector test, to prove you haven’t talked.”
“I don’t think I want to do that,” I said. “I don’t see why I should.”
If I agreed to this, there was no knowing what else they would demand. It was a sure path to enslavement.
“It’s your call,” said Schwartz. “The only other two options are much less attractive.”
“Namely?”
“You sign over everything to us and leave Japan in the next two weeks. And that will be an end to it.”
I wanted to pinch myself. This was the kind of thing one expected in the movies, not in real life.
“And the last option?” I said.
“Let’s not go into the details. But it’s quite likely you’ll have an accident of some kind. A bad accident.”
So that was the choice. I was faced with handing over everything I had worked for or being found dead in a hit-and-run accident, or pushed in front of a train, or…
We had had such hopes for our life in this country. On our arrival in 1967, we had managed to secure an unusually large house in a central district of Tokyo. It was owned by an elderly woman who ran a small export business with her son. She had promised it to another foreigner but he did not speak Japanese. I fell to my knees on her tatami matting and beseeched her to let us have the house instead. My command of the language paid off, and she decided she would prefer us as tenants.
Marie-Thérèse started her language studies. We deliberately lived apart so that she could be immersed in the language, as I had been, and I arranged for her to stay in a series of homes in Kyoto and in the countryside. Her hosts included a leading antiques dealer, an old aristocrat lady with a husband who spent virtually every night at Gion’s Geisha houses and an elderly oil painter of some distinction, who had studied in France as a disciple of Matisse, and now lived in slightly scandalous circumstances with the daughter of the head priest of one of the most important Shinto shrines in Japan. All this gave Marie-Thérèse a good exposure to traditional Japan, starting her on her own voyage of discovery into this fascinating country.
Meanwhile I set to work with Bob, selling Western tour services to the Japanese market. He proved to be highly erratic, of limited intellectual capability and strategic vision, and with a huge ego, which was why Marie-Thérèse had disliked him from the day she met him. Unfortunately, she is rarely wrong in her judgement of people. But, for the moment, I countered that he was never meant to be a bosom buddy: he simply provided a decent vehicle for me to set up in business and establish some of my own ideas for what I was going to do with my life.
I was initially vindicated, as the business grew well. We secured the agency for Holiday Inn, striking the deal in person with Kemmons Wilson, the legendary founder of the chain. A famous blunt-speaker, he always flew economy despite his great wealth, saying: “The ass of the plane gets to the other end just as fast as the front, so why pay extra?” That exemplified his no-nonsense business philosophy. We also started representing Avianca Airlines, the Latin American carrier, which was associated with Pan Am. Bob made a big effort to befriend the head of Pan Am in Tokyo, although I thought him a bit of an idiot. But cultivating him served its purpose because we were able to get standby first-class tickets virtually whenever we needed them.
At the end of our year apart, Marie-Thérèse passed her exams, fulfilling her side of the marital bargain. Now it was up to me to honour mine. I had already got hold of the appropriate paperwork from the mayor’s office. By some quirk of Japanese law, for a civil wedding, as long as the bridegroom had the signature of the woman he was going to marry on the relevant application form, the bride herself did not need to present herself. In an attempt at a prank, I told Marie-Thérèse the form was for a bank account. Only after she had signed it did I break the news that I could now get us married and she need not attend. I thought this was hilarious, but it was not quite the marriage ceremony that she had envisaged. To say that she did not see the funny side would be an understatement.
She eventually forgave me, and we went together to the mayor’s office. We were given a tag with a number 32 on it and told to sit on a bench with several other couples and wait to be called. It was not a romantic environment, even by registry office standards, and my joke about doing the whole thing on my own, which a few days earlier had seemed brutally unromantic, no longer seemed so unreasonable. After a long wait, we were eventually summoned to one of the counters, where we were offered a choice of marriage licences. One was a rubber-stamped printed form, the other a handwritten document in beautiful calligraphy. The second option was five times the price, but having blotted my copybook once, I knew better than to skimp at this stage, and we finally emerged as husband and wife with the deluxe licence. It was just as well: we later found out that most foreign embassies would not recognise the cheaper version. This had become a notorious scam, with unscrupulous Western men using the cheaper licence to lure unworldly Japanese girls into relationships, knowing full well they would not be recognised by any foreign government.
We went back to France that Christmas. Marie-Thérèse wanted to have a proper ceremony which her family and friends could attend – after all, many of them did not expect to see her ever again once we returned to Japan. We went to see the priest in charge of the main Catholic church in Romans, who said he would be delighted to conduct a wedding for Marie-Thérèse, but since I was not a Catholic he would need permission from the Pope. Just as we were losing heart, we met the priest from a small village called Mours about ten miles from Romans, whom we both liked immensely and who was much more sympathetic. His church was a lovely little medieval one, which in its size and modesty suited us perfectly. With a little persuasion, he managed to get over the fact that I was a Buddhist. More troubling for him was my request for the last passage of Fauré’s Requiem, In Paradisum, to accompany the service.
“Why in heaven’s name do you want that?” he asked.
“Don’t you know it? It’s ethereally beautiful,” I said.
“But it’s a requiem,” he rejoined. “It is highly unusual to have it at a wedding!”
“Well in a sense I’m dying and I’m being reborn as a married man,” I said, clutching at straws.
Somehow it worked.
“Just don’t tell any of your guests where it comes from,” he sighed.
Incredibly kind and modest, he perfectly embodied the best of the Christian faith. He went on to baptise all our children and he became a real fixture in our lives.
We had the ceremony between Christmas and New Year. All Marie-Thérèse’s family was there, while my younger brother Brian made the long journey via boat and train from London, as did Kevin, who was my best man. Ann, my younger sister, who lived in Calgary, could not make it. We then embarked on a magnificent honeymoon in Mexico and Tahiti, enjoying our first-class perks with Pan Am to the full. The only dampener was on our last stop in Sydney, where all our luggage was stolen, including every one of our wedding presents. I was not too concerned, but for Marie-Thérèse it was a cruel blow.
In the second year of our business operations, I managed to secure all the bulk travel from the four top agencies in Japan. I was a good salesman, we had a good product and we had a complete lock on the bulk travel business, to the irritation of would-be competitors like Kuoni. To complete the mood of optimism, Marie-Thérèse discovered she was expecting our first child. I was so busy running the travel business that I did not envisage being a hands-on father, but I was excited at the prospect of starting a family, and particularly at doing so in Japan. All being well, our children would be as comfortable in Japanese as they would be in English or French, which could bring them untold benefits, both cultural and professional, in later life.
As we looked forward to the birth, we were also conscious that city living in Japan is dense and crowded. It is particularly unpleasant in the summer when the climate is hot and sticky. We began looking for a plot of land in the countryside, somewhere high enough to escape the heat, for a weekend retreat. We concluded that the best area was just below the mountain resort of Karuizawa, the smart getaway destination for wealthy Tokyo people; if we looked a little further down, we might be able to afford it. We made several research trips, with an increasingly pregnant Marie-Thérèse being bumped up and down on the rough country roads, until we found the perfect spot: an area of rice fields with a huge stone outcrop as a backdrop, a small pine forest on one side, and a slope down to a stream in the middle of a bamboo grove on the other. As well as money, we offered to provide the owner of the land, who was the village headman, a litre of second-class saké every month for the rest of our lives, in recognition of his advice and guidance. It was an eccentric gesture, but it seemed to go down well and we reached a deal, whereupon we set about designing a simple cabin. Since the costs were rising we found another couple to go in with us. By doubling the size of the house to make a semi-detached cabin and then splitting the cost of construction and of the land, the project would become much more affordable. Marie-Thérèse had a bad feeling about the husband, but I persuaded her that the benefits outweighed her doubts.
The country retreat proved every bit as idyllic for the three of us as we had hoped. We put in a small swimming pool, fed at one end by the stream, and a sandpit which Julien adored. The village headman would leave a basket of vegetables on our doorstep every Friday when we arrived after three or four hours on the road. We were looking forward to many years of happiness there – as a family of four, because by the time the house was due to be finished, we were also looking forward to the arrival of our second child, who would be called Justine if a girl, which I very much wanted.
On the business side of things, Bob and I were getting more ambitious, which in hindsight was the root of my downfall. We wanted to be more than just a wholesale travel company, because Japanese travel companies would eventually expand into Europe and the US, at which point they would no longer need our services. In order to diversify, we set up a small export company; it was not particularly active but it added another arrow to our quiver. Then I suggested we start a business consulting company, for which we had brought on board the Frenchman, Philippe. And Bob pushed for his garage. He found another American hillbilly type who could do the engineering work for him, so we went ahead with that venture too.
Bob was obsessed with this side of the business. He insisted we needed more space, so he rented and built another much bigger workshop. But I was worried. While the other companies, led by the travel business, were all making a good profit, the car company haemorrhaged cash and took up a huge amount of time. At one point, Bob had a huge fight with his hillbilly engineer and tried to beat him up with a baseball bat. It was so bad that the police were called. They eventually chose not to get involved, because foreigners in Japan were regarded as a breed apart, and nobody cared if they beat each other up, so long as the dispute did not involve Japanese citizens. But the episode was an example of how tense things were getting.
It was while I was fretting about the amount of money we were spending compared to the revenue coming in that I had my brilliant idea of building a tower above a petrol station. And that was what had got me into my present nightmare situation.
I did not want to tell Marie-Thérèse that I was facing an implicit, unashamed death threat from the station chief of the CIA until I absolutely had to. First I went to the British Embassy, where I knew the ambassador’s deputy, Peter Wakefield, very well.
He listened to my story with a grim expression, then said: “I’m afraid these people don’t muck around, old man. But let me talk to our people in London to see what they advise, and I’ll get back to you.”
I waited for an agonising day and night. On Christmas Eve, he called me back.
“This isn’t what you want to hear,” he said. “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to help. My colleagues in London say their best advice is leave Japan, no matter what the personal economic damage. At least you’ll save yourself. Otherwise you’re in great danger. These people play very rough if you don’t go along with them. If he has threatened you with an accident, you have to assume he means it.”
I have never felt so crushed. I was being robbed blind, by an official government agency, acting entirely unscrupulously, and even though my own government agreed it was entirely unjust, there was not a damn thing I could do about it. My monastic training helped me fend off complete despair, but it could not stop me feeling utter fury at the blatant injustice, and frustration at my powerlessness.
Finally I went back to Marie-Thérèse and told her why I had looked so distracted for the past two days and nights. I felt sick at having to tell her about it, because the news was about to destroy her world as well as mine. But the calm with which she took it was a reminder, if any were needed, of why I had married her. She was upset, of course, and angry with my treacherous partner, about whom her instinct had been entirely justified. But she also buoyed me up, and told me that if leaving Japan was the price to keep our whole family safe, then we must do it, and we would rebuild our lives elsewhere. Bad as things looked, she said, we would find the strength to get through it.
After doing our best to put on a show of Christmas for the sake of my son and mother-in-law, I went back to Bob and Schwartz five days later and duly signed away everything I had in Japan to Bob. As the CIA effectively already owned him, they would now own all of a plum piece of Tokyo real-estate in the shape of our tower block.
Having reinvested almost all my earnings in our group of companies, my only other asset was my small, museum-quality antique art collection, which I took to one of our closest friends, a dealer called Mitsuru Tajima, who went on to become one of the world’s top dealers in Japanese, Chinese and Korean antique art. Generous, with impeccable taste, and a true gentleman in the old sense of the word, he and his mother had shared our Tokyo house for a couple of years. He would go all over Japan on antiques-buying trips and I always looked forward to his return to see what treasures he had unearthed. Thanks to his generous tutelage and pricing, we had been able to build up a small collection of museum-quality pieces. When I explained our predicament, he said he was willing to give me a reasonable price, but he had to discuss it with his English business partner. Unfortunately, the latter scented an opportunity, and I was forced to part with everything at a substantial mark-down. It was the only cash we had.
We had no choice but to leave the house in the country, plus a stock of wine we had bought, left over from the Expo ’70 World’s Fair in Osaka. Marie-Thérèse had been right again, and our co-owner proved to be another greedy opportunist, who saw a chance and grabbed it, knowing there was nothing I could do. I signed my half of the place over to him, along with the obligation to provide the monthly bottle of saké; I hope the villager continued to receive it, but I would not stake money on it. I know that my co-owner later sold the house to HSBC to use as a countryside retreat for their staff; for whatever reason, they stopped doing so, and the last I heard, the place was a ruin.
We left Japan in the first week of January. Marie-Thérèse, our two-year-old son Julien and I flew to New York. At least the flights on Pan Am were free. My mother-in-law took Justine back via Moscow to France. As we had no idea what we were going to do, she had very courageously offered to keep our four-week-old daughter with her in Romans-sur-Isère until we had found somewhere to live in London, and preferably a job for me, as well.