Kurashiki, where we went next, is a jewel, an Oxford or a Bath among Japan’s devastated and rebuilt cities, almost untouched by the war and its old city later spared by developers. I loved the wide, clean canal running through it, the swans and the little bridges. Yoshiko took us to *the old house’, her family’s pre-war residence which is maintained as a traditional Japanese dwelling. She comes from an old and substantial Kurashiki family, and she is proud of her city. The house is beautifril, with internal paper walls and graceful plain rooms furnished sparsely with low tables and hangings. We sat on cushions for the tea ceremony, though I was unable fully to concentrate on the intricate and graceful ritual because it was some time since I had attempted to sit cross-legged. I was struck, though, by the low doors of the tea-house in the yard, built small so that a man wearing a sword could not pass through them. This seemed a civilized precaution.
In the ‘new house’, where the Nagases live, I saw the same chaos of books and papers with which I am surrounded at home. One day I sat unwittingly in his study in the same chair, in almost the same position, in which Nagase had sat for his photograph for the Japan Times and in which I had rediscovered him.
Nagase was determined to show me the cherry blossoms at their finest, and it became a running joke. He would announce each morning that the cherry blossoms were ‘open today 30 per cent’, or 45 per cent, and that soon we would be able to see them as they were meant to be seen. He once took us to a park in Okayama, and was disappointed to find that in that particular garden the blossoms could only be judged to be 40 per cent open.
It was astonishing to be walking around this handsome town: a few years before I could not have imagined meeting a Japanese person voluntarily and now I was strolling in streets full of them, a tourist in my seventies, an honoured guest of two good people. Everyone we met was extremely courteous, and it was wonderful to me to see these crowds of smiling, well-dressed young people who are heirs to an economic superpower that leads the world in electronics, when I remembered my patient explanations of how a radio transmitter works in that wooden room in Siam in 1943!
Their command of engineering skill was displayed most beautifully in the bridges over the inland sea, connecting Honshu and Shikoku. I asked specially to see them, since the marvel of the Forth Bridge was one of my childhood wonders. They form the greatest span of bridges in the world, nine miles long, a sequence of bridges leaping off and disappearing gracefully over the horizon.
So we did what tourists are expected to do in Japan, and it was most enjoyable, but this is not a travel book and all the time I was aware of an unresolved question between Nagase and me. I found it hard to choose the right moment; there were always others around, and Nagase had a tendency to wish to make our encounter public, a symbol of reconciliation, and this gave some of our outings the character of official visits, with Japanese pressmen dogging our footsteps.
Meanwhile, we attended to things that were important to both of us, in different ways. We went to Hiroshima, and Patti and I laid a bunch of mixed flowers on the memorial. A director of the Peace Memorial Museum, himself deformed by radiation, showed us around. Terrible photographs of burnt children, of people with radiation sickness, of obliterated streets; we saw a man pointing out, with the stump of his hand, the image of a human figure preserved as if it had been photographed by the flash of the atomic blast.
The whole atmosphere of Hiroshima is like that of a shrine. Nagase and I were guilty of violating its respectful busy gravity rather disgracefully. We were walking around the museum together, Patti and Yoshiko in firont of us with some of Nagase’s friends. In the background there was a hubbub of chattering and commentary. Suddenly, as Patti later told me, she heard an outburst of unseemly hilarity behind her. There we were, two old gentlemen laughing our heads off in this sanctum of peace.
We had been talking about the last days of the war. Nagase asked me when I had heard about the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. ‘On 8th August,’ I told him. He was astonished: this was at least two days before he and his unit were told about it. He wanted to know how we could possibly have known, locked up as we were in Changi and deprived of contact with the outside world. Ah, I told him, but of course we had a radio. And for some reason that set us off, even in a place of such awful seriousness.
One day, to the surprise of our hosts, I asked to see a memorial of a very different kind, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the centre of Japanese imperial tradition and the chief cult centre of what was once Japan’s state religion, Shinto Buddhism.
Nagase and I had talked about historical truth and he was concerned – almost to the point of obsession – with ensuring that the Japanese should be aware of what their army did in the name of the Emperor before 1945. He believes that there must be a break with all vestiges of the cult of obedience to authority; he is a militant spiritual humanist. He often talked about how there was so little in the way of good history to put into Japanese schoolchildren’s hands; so little encouragement to face up to the past and come to terms with it. Nagase’s crusading spirit, which is courageous and laudable, can become a little wearing, as when he wished to publicize our outings; but the more he talked the more I could understand his zeal. His obsession had become atonement and reconciliation, which need publicity – whereas mine had been with private remembering and revenge. The positions he takes up arouse fierce hostility in Japan. He once said that he would not be surprised ‘to wake up and find myself dead’.
A clearer picture of what he is fighting against cannot be seen than at Yasukuni, to which we were taken by Professor Nakahara, who we had the good fortune to meet again. The shrine is at one level a moving war memorial, dedicated to the worship of those who died for the Emperor, but at another it is an unashamed celebration of militarism. Cherry blossom trees are bedecked with little white ribbons with personal messages and requests. In the grounds you can find a monument to the Kempeitai – it is like seeing a memorial to the Gestapo in a German cathedral. In firont of a museum building next to the shrine, and very much part of it, is parked a field gun, for all the world like the Imperial War Museum in London – except that this is a place of religious worship. And alongside the artillery-piece, there is an immaculate C56 steam locomotive, described by the shrine authorities as the first engine to pass along the Burma Railway. It stands proud, its smoke-deflectors polished and its great wheels pressing down into the gravel, its beauty a monument to barbarism.
Nagase told me how he had protested vigorously when the C56 was installed at Yasukuni in 1979. He wrote to the officials of the shrine, and reminded anyone who would listen that Tojo is reputed to have visited Siam when the construction of the railway was about to start, and said that it must be completed even though one prisoner should die for every sleeper on the line; and Nagase had pointed out that this particular engine demanded a sleeper for every metre of track. Both Tojo, as a soldier of the Emperor, and the machine are worshipped at Yasukuni.
In all the time I spent in Japan I never felt a flash of the anger I had harboured against Nagase all those years, no backwash of that surge of murderous intent I had felt on finding out that one of them was still alive. Indeed Nagase gave me the impression of having been prepared for a much more irritated and difficult encounter than ours turned out to be.