“Do you have any more surprises?” Yoshitaki asked.
“I hope not.”
“What a disappointment.”
Harry became aware that he was being introduced. The “well-known Western businessman, keen observer of the international scene and longtime friend of Japan,” that was him. He stood to a round of spotty applause. “Like raising Lazarus,” his father used to say about a stiff congregation. But the old man could do it, and if his father was good with a sermon, Harry had perfected the anti-sermon. He put Michiko and Ishigami out of his mind. He walked around the table, made eye contact with Beechum, DeGeorge, Ott, a Mitsui director here, a Datsun manager there, and let the moment draw until the last cough was extinguished.
When Harry had complete silence, he began. “Americans ask me, What does Japan want? Does Japan seek to rule the Asian mainland? Does Japan have a dream of world domination? The answer is of course not. On the other hand, Japan has real needs and real aims. What Japan wants is peace in a world of stability and prosperity. A world divided into three economic spheres with three natural leaders, Germany in Europe, America in the Western Hemisphere and Japan in Asia. The old order is falling. Like any collapsing building, the faster its ruins are swept up and carted away, the safer and better for everyone. The day when the white man ruled in Asia is over. Dying empires must give way to vigorous new ones.”
Harry detected a satisfied Japanese intake of breath, a susurrous pleasure that filled the room. Admittedly, in normal times the association was addressed by Nobel Prize academics, visiting business magnates or international publishers from Fortune or Time, not a moving picture rep. These were not normal times, however. The clever part of having someone like Harry talk was that he could say all those things that no well-brought-up Japanese would say to a Westerner. Harry could be disowned or discredited, but he’d say what he knew the Japanese wished they could.
“Japan has been patient. In the Great War, Japan was the staunch ally of Great Britain and the United States and secured the Pacific for its friends. For which service, all Japan asked was respect. Did Japan receive it? No. Instead, Britain and America did their best to lock the Japanese navy into an inferior status. Britain ended its friendship treaty with Japan, and the United States enacted racist immigration laws meant to insult the Japanese people. Japan had offered its hand in goodwill. In return it was slapped in the face.”
Harry picked out guests he recognized.
“Slapped.” He looked toward Beechum. “Japan has never understood this lack of sympathy from England. The Japanese ask, Why was it proper for one island nation to fatten on the lifeblood of peoples around the world and not proper for another nation to help its close neighbors develop a modern economy? Why is it a Christian duty for England to enslave Africa, India, Burma and Malaysia and not right for Japan to lead the peoples of Asia toward prosperity and independence? Take Hong Kong, for example. The truth is that England has no more legal claim on Hong Kong than Japan has on Scotland or Wales. It has no right, only might, which is why England boasts about the naval guns it has placed in Singapore. England claims to be keeping the peace, when in fact it is ruling the roost with eighteen-inch guns. Or desperately trying to.” The British table traded dark glances. Well, this was probably one of the few speeches in Japan they understood, Harry thought; the British community in Tokyo was famous for its ignorance of Japanese.
By then Harry had moved briskly on to Roy Hooper, the American attaché, a man with all the misplaced faith and optimism of a missionary. “Japan also asks its American friends, Why is a ‘Monroe Doctrine’ reason enough for you to declare an entire hemisphere your own private concern? What gives you the right to rush marines into Mexico or Cuba or the Panama Canal? Who gave you the right to seize Hawaii, thousands of miles away from the American mainland? How is it you can claim the right for all these invasions, but let Japan respond to provocations from a neighbor or help the people of Manchukuo liberate themselves from centuries of ignorance and exploitation and Japan is pilloried for so-called aggression and driven from the League of Nations? Why? Because there is one law for white men and another law for Japanese.”
Delivering this sort of speech was like grilling steak, Harry thought. You did one side, then the other. The main thing was to keep the coals hot.
“Nowhere is this lack of honesty or fairness more clear than in China. England says it is only protecting the rights of the Chinese. Is that so? Is this the same China that England conquered with repeating rifles, the same Chinese it slaughtered in Peking? The China that Britain enslaved to opium? The China that all of Europe carved up into colonies? The China of a very few rich and hundreds of millions wearing rags and surviving on scraps from the European table?” When Beechum’s pinkness darkened to red, Harry returned to Hooper. “Then there are the protests from America. America is different, America doesn’t want an empire, it only wants markets. America claims no properties in China, all it wants is free trade, an Open Door for export and import, a level playing field for innocent commercial interests. Which means different things in different places. In China it means that the banks of New York can buy Chinese war bonds and subsidize year after year of conflict and misery. In China it means a market for the cotton mills of South Carolina and Alabama. But in the United States it means a closed market to Japanese cotton, not to mention Japanese silk. Again, one law for the white man, another law for the Japanese.”
Hooper smiled sorrowfully and shook his head. His father had indeed been a missionary, and Hooper Jr. had banged a drum for the Salvation Army in the streets of Tokyo only to be attacked by the Buddhist Salvation Army, which young Harry had joined for the fights. Harry went on to list the resources and materials held back or embargoed from Japan by the United States and Britain: rubber, scrap iron, steel, aluminum, magnesium, copper, brass, zinc, nickel, tin, lead, wolfram, airplane parts and, foremost, oil. All in an attempt to starve the hardworking people of an island with no natural resources. Even in rice. The British held back jute so the Japanese couldn’t bag their own rice! As he rattled off statistics, Harry did sneak a sympathetic look at a pair of businessmen from Standard Oil and National City, marooned in Tokyo as first Washington froze Japanese assets and then Japan froze American. Whenever the two visited the Happy Paris, Harry stood them their first round of drinks.
“Japan may be the most beautiful and serene of nations, but it has virtually no natural resources. Its economy is based entirely on hard work and discipline. Facing a hostile encirclement by America, the British Empire and their allies in the Dutch East Indies, what choice does Japan have but to search for raw materials in its own natural sphere of Asia? Not to exploit its neighbors but to bring them the modernization, education, industry and medicine the West never did. That’s why when fellow Americans ask me what the Japanese want, I tell them that Japan wants justice and peace. I tell them that Japan wants Asia for Asians, and that it’s about time.”
Mission accomplished. The British and Americans sat silent and aghast while the Japanese broke into the most sincere applause Harry had ever received. After he finished and the meeting was declared over, a banker from Yasuda purred like an old cat. “A very interesting talk, very forceful but not necessarily inaccurate.”
“Not totally inaccurate, I hope,” Harry said. “Just a few thoughts that I wanted to share.”
Others at the table, however, hung back to gauge Yoshitaki’s reaction. The silence grew while the shipping magnate studied Harry up and down. Yoshitaki was so dark his eyebrows looked singed, and his concentration was so complete that he and Harry might have been the only two men in the hall.