The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [123]
Here are the bits of restitution wrung out of Vienna by Elisabeth, hanging alongside Iggie’s Japanese scrolls. This, too, is a bit of fraternisation: Ringstrassenstil in Japan.
These photographs are vivid: they radiate happiness. Iggie had a capacity to get along, wherever he was – there are even snaps of him and soldier friends during the war, playing with an adopted puppy in a ruined bunker. In Japan he is expansive to his Japanese and Western friends in this eclectic setting.
His happiness was compounded when he moved to another beautiful house and garden in a more convenient location in Azabu. He hated the idea of this area – a gaijin colony full of diplomats – but the house was high up, with a series of interconnecting rooms and with a garden falling away in front of it, full of white camellias.
It was big enough to build a separate apartment for his young friend Jiro Sugiyama. They had met in July 1952. ‘I ran into an old classmate outside the Marunouchi building who introduced me to his boss Leo Ephrussi . . . Two weeks after that, I had a call from Leo – I always called him Leo – inviting me to have dinner with him. We had lobster thermidor on the roof garden of the Tokyo Kaikan . . . and through him I got a job at an old Mitsui company, Sumitomo.’ They were to be together for forty-one years.
Jiro was twenty-six, slight and handsome, fluent in English and a lover of Fats Waller and Brahms. When they met he had just returned from three years studying at an American university on a scholarship. His passport from the Administration Office Occupation Forces was stamped no. 19. Jiro remembered his anxiety about how he would be treated in America, and how the newspapers wrote it up: ‘a young Japanese boy off to America in a grey flannel suit and white Oxford shirt’.
Jiro had grown up as the middle child of five siblings in a merchant family that made lacquered wooden clogs in Shizuoka, the city between Tokyo and Yokohama: ‘our family made the very best, painted geta with urushi lacquer on them. My grandfather Tokujiro made our fortune out of geta . . . We had a large traditional house with ten people working in the shop, and they all had quarters to live in.’ They were a prosperous and entrepreneurial family, and in 1944 Jiro, aged eighteen, had been sent to the preparatory school for Waseda University in Tokyo and then on to the university itself. Too young to fight, he had seen Tokyo obliterated around him.
Jiro, my Japanese uncle, has been part of my life for as long as Iggie. We sat together in the study of his Tokyo apartment and he talked of those early days together. They would leave the city on Friday nights and ‘have our weekends around Tokyo, in Hakone, Ise, Kyoto, Nikko, or stay in ryokan and onsen and have good food. He had a yellow DeSoto convertible with a black top. The first thing after leaving our luggage at the ryokan Leo always wanted to do, was to go to antique shops – Chinese pots, Japanese pots, furniture . . .’ And during the week they would meet up after work. ‘He’d say “Meet me at the Shiseido restaurant for beef curry rice, or for crabmeat croquette.” Or we’d meet at the bar of the Imperial. There were so many parties at home. We’d have whisky together late at night after everyone had gone, with opera on the gramophone.’
Their life was Kodachrome – I can see that yellow-and-black car glistening like a hornet on a dusty road in the Japanese alps, the pinkness of the croquette framed on white.
They explored Japan together, travelling to an inn that specialised in river trout one weekend; to a town on the coast for an autumn matsuri,