War of Words Read online

  Hamish McDonald is a foreign correspondent focused on Asia, and has lived in Jakarta, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New Delhi and Beijing as well as his home town Sydney. He has been foreign editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and regional editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine. He has won several journalism awards, including a Walkley Award for reporting from China, and had a report on Myanmar in the FEER read into the record of the US Congress. He is the author of Mahabharata in Polyester (NewSouth Books, 2010) about India’s most famous and controversial business family, the Ambanis; (with Desmond Ball) Death in Balibo, Lies in Canberra (Allen & Unwin, 2000) which gave the definitive account of the military, bureaucratic and intelligence manoeuvres around the killing of five Australian newsmen in East Timor; and Demokrasi: Indonesia in the 21st Century (Black Inc. 2014). He is currently Journalist-in-Residence at the Australian National University’s College of Asia & the Pacific, and in early 2014 was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington DC.

  for Penelope

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE, Tokyo 1983

  THE HOUSE OF SILK, Yokohama 1891

  BECOMING HACHISABURO, Yokohama–Tokyo 1891–95

  A MEIJI EDUCATION, Yokohama 1895–1903

  WAR AND BUSINESS, Yokohama 1904

  BITTER VICTORY, Tokyo 1904–05

  SAMURAI AT LARGE, Tokyo 1905–07

  YELLOW REVOLUTION, China 1908–12

  ADVANCE AND RETREAT, Australia and Gallipoli 1912–16

  A MAN OF ENGLISH, Tokyo 1920–23

  SHIFTING GROUND, Yokohama 1923

  BLIND SAMURAI, Yokohama–Tokyo 1923–36

  ISLAND FORTRESS, Hong Kong–Singapore 1936–42

  SWORDS DRAWN, Singapore 1938–42

  PAPER BULLETS, Melbourne 1942

  TERMS OF SURRENDER, Brisbane 1943–45

  END OF EMPIRE, Bougainville 1945

  EDDIE’S WAR, Singapore–Malaya 1942–45

  THE JAPANESE EMBRACE, Singapore–Kyoto 1948–77

  POSTSCRIPT, Sydney 2014

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  Tokyo 1983

  The view from my Tokyo office revealed a treeless corridor between two corporate buildings of identical height and design, a sterile scene of grey metal cladding and glass, ending at a sweep of elevated expressway. My office was one of several rooms off an eighth floor lobby of the Nikkei Biru (Building) – the head office of Japan’s main financial daily newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimburi. The ground level streetscape in which it resided was just as bare of detail. Only underground, in the tunnels of the metro, were there a few canteen-like restaurants serving bowls of udon and ramen to blue-suited businessmen. They would slurp up their noodles quickly, light up a Mild Seven then disappear back into the buildings above.

  Working for a partner newspaper I had been allocated an office on the same floor as a number of foreign correspondents, our hosts taking a peculiar pride in harbouring this strange collection of foreigners, as proof of their internationalism. We tenants called it the ‘Gaijin (Foreigner’s) Ghetto’ and escaped when we could to our club, an occupation relic lodged in a building on the far side of the business quarter where it meets the shopping and entertainment quarters of Ginza and Yurakucho.

  South of the Nikkei Biru stretched the same empty cityscape of newish but nondescript buildings and wide pavements, merging into the Marunouchi district. It became busy during the rush hours and around lunchtime, bustling with more men in blue suits and ‘office ladies’ demurely dressed in an upmarket but dated English fashion. This was the headquarters of what seemed, in the early 1980s, the emerging industrial and financial behemoth of Japan, a rising power destined to sweep aside self-indulgent and obsolescent Europe and America, and achieve by sheer organisational superiority and salesmanship what the Imperial army and navy had failed to carry through four decades earlier.

  The rise was being plotted and guided here in the banks, trading companies and industrial firms of the great keiretsu, or conglomerates, like Mitsui, Sumitomo and Mitsubishi, assisted by the government ministries in the bureaucratic district further around the stone walls and moat forming the outer perimeter of the emperor’s palace. But the city from my vantage was all maddeningly opaque, the colour and drama pushed away, the language circuitous and tentative, as though people were constantly wary of creating alarm or offence. It seemed disconnected from the exquisite fabric of the more traditional Japan I had read about, the violent history of the samurai era and the deliberate barging into the modern world before 1945, or the raucous carousing of the entertainment quarters. All of this was endlessly and lovingly presented in Japanese film and television, but hardly to be seen.

  As I was soon to discover, the fault line between new and old – between the ‘high city’ and ‘low city’ as the American writer Edward Seidensticker categorised the beloved Tokyo he first encountered as a young translator in the Allied occupation – lay closer than I thought.

  My work for a Sydney newspaper often involved days of waiting on unreturned calls, especially during the early spring when teams from the big iron ore and coal mining companies would arrive to negotiate prices for the new financial year with the Japanese steel producers and electricity generators. Both sides maintained high secrecy, the Japanese cannily feeding misleading propaganda about dire market conditions and undercutting bids by Brazilian, Canadian and South African rival miners to rattle their negotiating counterparts. A breakthrough would be big news back in Australia, pushing the share prices of the mining companies up or down. It was tedious work, dealing with the costs and prices of iron ore ‘fines’ and ‘lumps’, of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ coking coal, with the prospect the companies would announce the new prices from their head offices in Melbourne or Brisbane anyway, making my work redundant.

  One afternoon, as a way of relieving the boredom, I walked out of the Nikkei Biru and turned left instead of my usual right. The elevated freeway and canal I could only glimpse from my office window curved around nearby, forming a boundary to the business district. I set out on the street and soon crossed the water over a low bridge. I hadn’t crossed it before. Beyond, the buildings were smaller, less substantial, the signage more garish. Laneways were cluttered with small shops, advertising banners hanging from their eaves and a variety of wares spilling onto the pavement. Pink neon lights beckoned to cheap hotels. The smell of grilling fish came from half-curtained doorways. Red paper lanterns, overwritten with thick black characters, glowed warmly. Crates of empty sake bottles awaited collection, evidence of hard drinking from the previous night. Gaudy-covered manga hung outside news-stands and convenience stores. The people working here had more of a showground raffishness than the blue suits and Burberry crowd across the canal. Some men had permed hair and windcheaters covered in the logos of racing cars. The women favoured tighter clothes and tinted hair.

  This area, Kanda, was the start of the shitamachi, the ‘low city’. It stretched away to the riverside quarters housing great and much loved temples, drinking dens and brothels, and was teeming with a population living in close quarters. The shitamachi reflected a hedonistic Tokyo that neither the great earthquake and fire storm of 1923 nor the American fire-bombing of March 1945 had managed to erase. It always grew back, and always a bit disgracefully – the kimono a little too open at the throat, a wisp of hair escaping the chignon, the rouged lips parted. It challenged the refined in rough Edo-ben, the dialect of old Tokyo (known as Edo in shogunate times): What are you talking about? What are you staring at?

  Wandering further north to Jimbocho, I came across antiquarian bookshops
offering Morocco- and cloth-bound treasures of literature from around the world, old books in calligraphy, maps and ukiyoe (woodblock prints). Further on, the ground rose towards the eastern walls of the palace. Throngs of students moved between the several universities, hanging out at coffee shops or rifling through the parkas and other gear at ski shops. The Nikolai Cathedral, capped with the Russian Orthodox double crucifix, was situated on the left of the road that led up to the intriguingly named Ochanomizu (literally meaning ‘tea water’, so named because the water for the shogun’s tea used to be drawn from a spring in a cliff in the nearby Kanda river). A bridge crossed a deep cutting over a waterway, with two railway lines ingeniously shelved along the sides and somehow not disturbing the ambience. It became my favourite part of Tokyo, where I still go every time I visit.

  Towards the end of my posting, a narrative that weaved into this area and its history came unannounced one afternoon. Sebastian Fraubenius, an intense and reclusive man, was a German correspondent of the serious economic newspaper Handelsblatt – his name, I was later told, indicated an ancestor who was the child of a priest’s housekeeper in pre-Reformation times. With gingery hair and goatee, Fraubenius would write his reports each evening in a fug of French tobacco smoke, a bottle of whisky on the desk, his face flushed. One wall of his office was covered with aviation maps spanning all of East Asia, giving the sense of a panoramic mind ranging over the great issues of the region. We were friendly enough, but he had been in Japan much longer than I had and was older, with a different circle of friends at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. So it was with some surprise when I heard a knock on my office door and saw Fraubenius backing in with a large and evidently heavy cardboard box in his arms.

  He placed the box down and waved towards it, breathing heavily with the exertion. Fraubenius explained that he had studied Japanese in Kyoto when he first came to Japan many years before. He had got to know an elderly Westerner with an uncanny knowledge of the country, Charles Bavier. When the old man died in 1977, at the age of 89, his wife had passed Fraubenius this box of his papers.

  ‘There is an Australian connection in all of this,’ Fraubenius said. ‘Perhaps you can make something of them.’ He left me to look through it. Inside, there was a large bundle of typewritten manuscript, about eight inches thick with over 2,500 pages – scrawled annotations and transpositions covered much of it – that had been tied together with twine. The most obvious Australian reference came in a folder of old photographs. Most of the pictures placed their subjects in Japan, Europe or Southeast Asia – one passport-size photograph showed a young man of part European, part Japanese appearance, wearing glasses, in the distinctive slouch hat of the Australian army.

  The box also contained a sheaf of leaflets and some letters from eminent people, testimonial scrolls from Japanese schools, even a few copies of woodblock prints with views of a trading house in the old foreign settlement of Yokohama, long ago destroyed.

  There was a two-page curriculum vitae in English. It linked the pictures of a young boy and an old man in kimono, and told of the life in the years between those captured images. That life seemed almost impossibly adventurous. Charles Souza Bavier, the note said, had been born in Switzerland, son of the founder of the trading house shown in the woodblock prints, Bavier & Co. But he had been raised as a Japanese. How, and why? I wondered.

  The note went on to say that Charles had been involved in the overthrow of Manchu imperial rule in China, travelled to Australia and enlisted in its expeditionary force to Gallipoli in 1915. Later he had served as instructor in the Canton army of the new Chinese Republic, then returned to Japan as a teacher. The note got vague about the years between 1936 and 1945. Bavier said he had worked in Singapore and Australia trying to ‘bring understanding between Japan and the West’. That this was a gloss for Japanese readers became apparent in the closing sentence: Bavier declared how happy he now felt to be allowed to return to the land of his upbringing. It was a request for a kind of asylum.

  I untied the manuscript bundle, hoping to find detail and corroboration of this unlikely story. The cover sheet had the title Hachisaburo, An Orphan’s Life. But a quick look produced disappointment. It was a rambling, discursive collection of arcane Japanese legend and history. Scraps of biographical anecdote came in no particular order. The story became more and more interrupted by diversions into obscure episodes of ancient history and folklore. Most frustratingly of all, the narrative ended before Bavier had even left his childhood. I continued to turn the pages, scanning for detail. There were some tantalising references to pages that would never be written about the later episodes in Bavier’s life.

  As I looked back through the box for more clues I found a formal letter with the writer’s address simply given as Hong Kong, dated January 1938. It was a typed letter of appointment to an unnamed ‘department’ in Singapore. On the second page it outlined duties that consisted mainly of translations from and into ‘foreign languages’.

  … As above indicated you will be employed in the first instance in Singapore but the Employer shall have the right, at the expense of the Employer, at any time or times to send you to any other place or places for the purpose of performing your duties under the conditions of your employment …

  The new recruit was to devote all his energies to this position, and not take on any other employment.

  … in particular [you] shall not in any case divulge, publish or make known, directly or indirectly, on pain of instant dismissal, any information whatsoever which may come to your knowledge in performing the duties assigned to you …

  The letter was signed in a fine copper-plate script by ‘F. Hayley Bell, Lt. Col, Defence Security Officer, Malaya’. It was counter-signed in agreement to all these terms, in a pen with a finer nib, and in a slightly shakier hand: ‘C.S. Bavier’.

  It was not until many years later that the precise role of Colonel Hayley Bell and his position heading a colonial outpost of MI5 would emerge in declassified security archives. But the clues were there: The life in the two-page biography was not fantasy, or at least not entirely. Bavier had entered the world of secret intelligence, working against the country which had raised him.

  It took work over three decades, which I often put aside for long periods when it seemed the narrative was beyond research or recall. Even now the story that follows remains fragmentary. There are some imagined, even fanciful bridgings of the gaps, which should be obvious to readers. However, Bavier’s account of his life has been shown as essentially true.

  It starts in Yokohama, at the height of that booming encounter between the West and the first emerging industrial power of the Orient …

  Chapter 1

  THE HOUSE OF SILK

  Oh, ragged sparrow without any mother,

  When we are lonely, let’s play with each other!

  — ‘The Orphans’, by Issa

  Yokohama 1891

  He could never remember his father’s face.

  There is a photograph, a studio portrait taken by Fréderick Boissonnas of Geneva, showing a man looking to one side. The man has a high-bridged nose, a commanding look, close-cropped hair, a greying goatee and swept-up moustache. He is wearing evening dress or a dark coat with a white shirt and bow tie. Some kind of order, perhaps his third-class Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Meiji emperor, is pinned to his right lapel. There is a note in French to one side, from the Swiss village of Dully, dated in March 1878, making the man about 38 years old. The portrait is addressed with his affectionate regards to an unknown person, wishing health, happiness and prosperity. It was his father, Edouard de Bavier.

  Taken ten years before his birth, Charles could make no connection between the portrait and his recollection of his father’s physical presence, which were just cloudy memories from infancy, almost mythical but intensely evocative. When he tried to recall certain scenes and figures he found the European faces were blurred. Ab
ove all, he recalled the colours that he would forever associate with his early childhood. On the European side there were grey jackets, tall grey legs, grey whiskers, grey top-hats, vast expanses of pale-coloured skirts, pink faces and hands. On the Japanese side, black kimonos and outer kilts, yellow complexions, black oiled hair, a glossy lacquered setting for the bright floral-patterned kimonos of the women. These were the colours Charles was most familiar with.

  By that stage Charles was living with his mother – his Japanese mother, Chika Sakai. They lived in a two-storey wooden house set behind a thorny hedge by the park that separated the Japanese and European quarters of Yokohama. A contractor named Takashima Kaemon had bought up wasteland, levelled it, filled in its swamps and built an estate for the expanding numbers of prosperous Japanese connected with the foreign settlement.

  The park was surrounded by white-painted pickets. It had an inner fence around a lawn oval where the foreigners played cricket and baseball, applauding each other from the little grandstand, much to the private scorn of the town’s Japanese and its industrious Chinese, the latter who wore their hair in long queues and thought sports were for children. Once, for several days, a balloonist came and set up his equipment in the oval. The park was packed with foreigners, coloured now pink and white because it was summer. The men wore white suits and topees, the women hooped skirts and feathered hats, holding up parasols. The sun shone on brass instruments. The great silk canopy of the hot-air balloon pulsated as it was filled with gas or hot air. The moustachioed young European pilot, also in sporting whites, got into the basket and rose into the sky amid cheers, disappearing into the summer haze over the Kanagawa hills. Several hours later he came back, grinning, in a rickshaw.

  There is a studio portrait of Charles at this time – a little boy in a light coloured kimono with a black coat bearing the Sakai crest of three oak leaves in a circle, his feet in white tabi, traditional socks, and inserted in wooden geta, or clogs, that raised his height by a couple of inches. His mid-brown hair is slicked down and parted in the middle. The backdrop shows a Palladian landscape. The boy is clutching a striped ball in his right hand. He looks with an anxious expression to one side, as if to an adult coaxing him to sit straight and look at the camera.