The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [124]
But music was closest to the heart of their life together. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had become extremely popular during the war. The Ninth – Dai-ku as it was known colloquially – became an entrenched part of New Year, with huge choirs singing the ‘Ode to Joy’. Under the Occupation, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra had been partly sponsored by the authorities with programmes selected from requests by the troops. And now, in the early 1950s, there were regional orchestras across Japan. Schoolchildren with satchels on their backs clutched violin cases. Foreign orchestras started to visit, and Jiro and Iggie would go to one concert after another: Rossini, Wagner and Brahms. They saw Rigoletto together, and Iggie recalled that it was the first opera he had seen with his mother in their box in Vienna during the First World War, and that she had cried at the final curtain.
Iggie and Jiro on a boat in the Inland Sea, Japan, 1954
And so this is the fourth resting-place of the netsuke. It is a vitrine in a sitting-room in post-war Tokyo looking out across a bed of clipped camellias, where the netsuke are washed late at night by waves of Gounod’s Faust, played loud.
32. WHERE DID YOU GET THEM?
The arrival of the Americans meant that Japan had, once again, become a country to plunder, a country full of attractive objects, pairs of Satsuma vases, kimono robes, lacquer and gilt swords, folding screens with peonies, chests with bronze handles. Japanese stuff was so cheap, so abundant. Newsweek’s first report on Occupied Japan on 24th September 1945 was headlined ‘Yanks Start Kimono Hunt, Learn What Geishas Doesn’t’ (sic). That blunt and cryptic headline, joining souvenirs and girls, sums up the Occupation. The New York Times later that year reported ‘A Sailor Goes on a Shopping Spree’: if you were a GI there was very little else to buy, after you had spent what you could on cigarettes, beer and girls.
A successful après-guerre opened a small money-exchange booth on the pier at Yokohama, converting dollars into yen for the first American soldiers. He also bought and resold American cigarettes. But, crucially, the third part of his business was selling ‘cheap Japanese bric-a-brac, such as bronze Buddha images. Brass candleholders, and incense burners, which he had salvaged from bombed-out areas. Being great novelties in those days, these curio items sold like proverbial hotcakes.’
How did you know what to buy? All soldiers ‘had to suffer an hour in combat subjects [such] as Japanese flower arrangement, incense burning, marriage, dress, tea ceremonies, and fishing with cormorants,’ John LaCerda acidly commented in The Conqueror Comes to Tea: Japan under MacArthur, published in 1946. For the more serious there were the new guides to Japanese arts and craft, printed on grey paper so thin that it feels like tissue. The Japan Travel Bureau published its guides ‘to give to the passing tourists and other foreigners interested in Japan a basic knowledge of various phases of Japanese culture’. They included, amongst other subjects: Floral Art of Japan, Hiroshige, Kimono (Japanese Dress), Tea Cult of Japan, Bonsai (Miniature Potted Trees). And, of course, Netsuke: A Miniature Art of Japan.
From the bric-a-brac salesmen on the pier at Yokohama to the men with a handful of lacquers on a white cloth sitting outside a temple, it was difficult not to encounter Japan for sale. Everything was old, or labelled as old. You could buy an ashtray, a lighter or tea towel with images of geisha, Mount Fuji, wisteria. Japan was a series of snapshots, of postcards coloured like brocade, cherry blossom as pink as candy-floss. Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton, cliché jumbled up against cliché. But you could just as easily