Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [157]
After several months in the Far East the Major had been amazed to find trains running more regularly than they did in Europe: on his way to Harbin from Dairen he had taken the Asia, the 60-m.p.h. luxury express that was the pride of the South Manchuria Railway Company. Why, it had even had a library of books in English for the delectation of its Anglo-Saxon passengers! But you should not, for all that, think that you were in an imitation Western country: if, as the train began to pull out of the station, you happened to look out at the people on the platform who had come to see their friends off, you would see no emotional waving or shouting: you would see instead that they folded themselves to the ground and bowed low to the departing train, all together like a cornfield in a sudden gale. The Major had received a little shock when he had seen that; he had allowed himself to forget just how different the Japanese were from Europeans.
Yes, the Japanese, thought the Major beaming at his friend, Mr Wu (where were they going, by the way?), were an astonishingly determined and disciplined people. They believed in doing things properly, even in Manchukuo. In the barbers’ shops there they even went so far as to wash clients’ ears in eau de Cologne! You only had to see what they had accomplished … the rebuilding of Changchun, for instance, formerly a mere collection of hovels, into a modern city with electric light, drains, parks, hospitals, libraries and even a zoo. There was, besides, that which no civilized modern city could possibly do without: a golf course!
Some young Japanese officers, seeing that the Major, from force of habit, was travelling with his ancient wooden golf clubs in his luggage, had invited him to play a few holes with them at the golf links on the outskirts of the city. He had declined the opportunity to play but had gone along to watch. For half the year, the officers explained, one was obliged to drive off into the teeth of the Siberian winter, for the other half into a Mongolian dust-storm. The Major had watched from the club-house, intrigued, as his new friends, wearing respirators, vanished gamely into the clouds of dust, driven here for hundreds of miles over the plains by the never-ceasing wind. Here and there the Major could see a patch of snow but not a single blade of grass (grass had been imported, he was told, but had not survived). Certainly, the Japanese were determined to do things properly!
In due course the young officers had returned, having surrendered a prodigious number of golf balls to the Mongolian plain, true, but with the obligations to civilized modern living thoroughly satisfied. Next they had whisked the Major, whom they had now identified not only as golfer and gentleman but as a brother officer into the bargain, off to a nearby inn for a meal of raw fish and eggs washed down by gallons of warm saké. With the utmost sincerity and good fellowship they explained to the Major as best they could in a mixture of English, French and German, how distressed they had been by certain apparently anti-Japanese démarches taken by the British in their China policy. They themselves, they explained, did not feel the ill-will towards the British that many of their young comrades felt. No, they felt more sorrow than anger that Britain should support the Nanking Government in its anti-Japanese behaviour and believed it was because the respected British people were so far away that they did not fully understand what the bandit war-lords of the Kuomintang were up to.
The Major, at the best of times, had trouble making up his mind about these perplexing international issues; but squatting on the floor of the inn with his new friends, some of whom wore military uniform,