The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [120]
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.
31. KODACHROME
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