And now Henderson reached under the table and, with a powerful wrench, pulled out the wires and left them hanging. ‘I’ll give that black bastard Melody hell for this when I get around to it,’ he said belligerently. ‘And to think of all I’ve done for the dingo bastard! Used to be a favourite pub of the English Colony and the Press Club layabouts. Had a good restaurant attached to it. That’s gone now. The Eyteye cook trod on the cat and spilled the soup and he picked up the cat and threw it into the cooking stove. Of course that got around pretty quick, and all the animal-lovers and sanctimonious bastards got together and tried to have Melody’s licence taken away. I managed to put in squeeze in the right quarter and saved him, but everyone quit his restaurant and he had to close it. I’m the only regular who’s stuck to him. And now he goes and does this to me! Oh well, he’ll have had the squeeze put on him, I suppose. Anyway, that’s the end of the tape so far as T.T.’s concerned. I’ll give him hell too. He ought to have learned by now that me and my friends don’t want to assassinate the Emperor or blow up the Diet or something.’ Dikko glared around him as if he proposed to do both those things. ‘Now then, James, to business. I’ve fixed up for you to meet Tiger tomorrow morning at eleven. I’ll pick you up and take you there. “The Bureau of All-Asian Folkways.” I won’t describe it to you. It’d spoil it. Now, I don’t really know what you’re here for. Spate of top secret cables from Melbourne. To be deciphered by yours truly in person. Thanks very much! And my Ambassador, Jim Saunderson, good bloke, says he doesn’t want to know anything about it. Thinks it’d be even better if he didn’t meet you at all. Okay with you? No offence, but he’s a wise guy and likes to keep his hands clean. And I don’t want to know anything about your job either. That way, you’re the only one who gets the powdered bamboo in his coffee. But I gather you want to get some high-powered gen out of Tiger without the C.I.A. knowing anything about it. Right? Well that’s going to be a dicey business. Tiger’s a career man with a career mind. Although, on the surface, he’s a hundred per cent demokorasu, he’s a deep one – very deep indeed. The American occupation and the American influence here look like a very solid basis for a total American-Japanese alliance. But once a Jap, always a Jap. It’s the same with all the other great nations – Chinese, Russian, German, English. It’s their bones that matter, not their lying faces. And all those races have got tremendous bones. Compared with the bones, the smiles or scowls don’t mean a thing. And time means nothing for them either. Ten years is the blink of a star for the big ones. Get me? So Tiger, and his superiors, who, I suppose, are the Diet and, in the end, the Emperor, will look at your proposition principally from two angles. Is it immediately desirable, today? Or is it a long-term investment? Something that may pay off for the country in ten, twenty years. And, if I were you, I’d stick to that spiel – the long-term talk. These people, people like Tiger, who’s an absolutely top man in Japan, don’t think in terms of days or months or years. They think in terms of centuries. Quite right, when you come to think of it.’
Dikko Henderson made a wide gesture with his left hand. Bond decided that Dikko was getting cheerfully tight. He had found a Palomar pony to run with. They must be rare enough in Tokyo. They were both past the eighth flask of saké, but Dikko had also laid a foundation of Suntory whisky in the Okura while he’d been waiting for Bond to write out an innocuous cable to Melbourne with the prefix ‘Informationwise’, which meant that it was for Mary Goodnight, to announce his arrival and give his current address. But it was all right with Bond that Dikko should be getting plastered. He would talk better and looser and, in the end, wiser that way. And Bond wanted to pick his brains.
Bond said, ‘But what sort of a chap is this Tanaka? Is he your enemy or your friend?’
‘Both. More of a friend probably. At least I’d guess so. I amuse him. His C.I.A. pals don’t. He loosens up with me. We’ve got things in common. We share a pleasure in the delights of samsara – wine and women. He’s a great cocks-man. I also have ambitions in that direction. I’ve managed to keep him out of two marriages. Trouble with Tiger is he always wants to marry ’em. He’s paying cock-tax, that’s alimony in the Australian vernacular, to three already. So he’s acquired an ON with regard to me. That’s an obligation – lmost as important in the Japanese way of life as “face”. When you have an ON, you’re not very happy until you’ve discharged it honourably, if you’ll pardon the bad pun. And if a man makes you a present of a salmon, you mustn’t repay him with a shrimp. It’s got to be with an equally large salmon – larger if possible, so that then you’ve jumped the man, and now he has an ON with regard to you, and you’re quids in morally, socially and spiritually – and the last one’s the most important. Well now. Tiger’s ON towards me is a very powerful one, very difficult to discharge. He’s paid little slices of it off with various intelligence dope. He’s paid off another big slice by accepting your presence here and giving you an interview so soon after your arrival. If you’d been an ordinary supplicant, it might have taken you weeks. He’d have given you a fat dose of shikiri-naoshi – that’s making you wait, giving you the great stone face. The sumo wrestlers use it in the ring to make an opponent look and feel small in front of the audience. Got it? So you start with that in your favour. He would be predisposed to do what you want because that would remove all his ON towards me and, by his accounting, stick a whole packet of ON on my back towards him. But it’s not so simple as that. All Japanese have permanent ON towards their superiors, the Emperor, their ancestors and the Japanese gods. This they can only discharge by doing “the right thing”. Not easy, you’ll say. Because how can you know what the higher echelon thinks is the right thing? Well, you get out of that by doing what the bottom of the ladder thinks right – i.e. your immediate superiors. That passes the buck, psychologically, on to the Emperor, and he’s got to make his peace with ancestors and gods. But that’s all right with him, because he embodies all the echelons above him, so he can get on with dissecting fish, which is his hobby, with a clear conscience. Got it? It’s not really as mysterious as it sounds. Much the same routine as operates in big corporations, like I.C.I. or Shell, or in the Services, except with them the ladder stops at the Board of Directors or the Chiefs of Staff. It’s easier that way. You don’t have to involve the Almighty and your great-grandfather in a decision to cut the price of aspirin by a penny a bottle.’
‘It doesn’t sound very demokorasu to me.’
‘Of course it isn’t, you dumb bastard. For God’s sake, get it into your head that the Japanese are a separate human species. They’ve only been operating as a civilized people, in the debased sense we talk about it in the West, for fifty, at the most a hundred years. Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar. Scratch a Japanese and you’ll find a samurai–or what he thinks is a samurai. Most of this samurai stuff is a myth, like the Wild West bunk the Americans are brought up on, or your knights in shining armour at King Arthur’s court. Just because people play baseball and wear bowler hats doesn’t mean they’re quote civilized unquote. Just to show you I’m getting rather tight – not drunk, mark you – I’d add that the U.N. are going to reap the father and mother of a whirlwind by quote liberating unquote the colonial peoples. Give ’em a thousand years, yes. But give ’em ten, no. You’re only taking away their blow-pipes and giving them machine guns. Just you wait for the first one to start crying to high heaven for nuclear fission. Because they must have quote parity unquote with the lousy colonial powers. I’ll give you ten years for that to happen, my friend. And when it does, I’ll dig myself a deep hole in the ground and sit in it.’