What the Traveller Saw (12 page)

E
VEN THE MOST
hardened traveller is likely to experience a feeling of panic on first landing in Japan. From the moment when you are suddenly abandoned by the nannies of the airline you are plunged into a world from which the familiar is almost completely absent.

After the more than normally lengthy procedures of the immigration officials and the equally complex process of changing foreign currency into yen, I was free to go wherever I wished. But as there was an almost total lack of signs in any language but Japanese, this was a serious impediment to going anywhere as I could neither read, write or speak a language which has more than two thousand written characters.

Only the major streets had names which sparked off any recognition signals in the local taxi drivers, and even if they did the street numbering did not follow any system with which I was familiar in the West, the numbers starting with the oldest house and coming to an end with the most modern one. But gradually I began to discover the ability to be able to communicate. From some cumbersome work on how to say it in Japanese I extracted a few phonetic phrases which I needed constantly and copied them down in huge block letters in a notebook. The best way to learn something about the Japanese, I was told, and a lifetime would not be too long as I discovered, was to stay in a
ryokan
, a Japanese inn. They were not necessarily cheap, some of them were as expensive as Western-style hotels; but there were thousands of them which were not on any sort of list (such as those in the Japanese Tourist Organization’s Ryokan Guide) in which the charge for
a night’s lodging was 4000 yen or less. I was told that the best place to stay in a ryokan would be in Kyoto as I had to visit the great Exposition at Osaka and Kyoto was the last stop before Osaka for the Super-Express on its journey from Tokyo to Osaka, only twenty minutes away, so that I would be able to commute between the two. This was much safer than driving, or even being driven. Being driven anywhere in this strange country was an experience I am not likely to forget; driving oneself was utterly terrifying. To hire a car in Japan and attempt to drive it yourself was simply trying to prove that you were as indifferent to death as the Japanese appeared to be. At the last count in 1967, there had been more than 11,500,000 cars in Japan. After that there had been no more counts, so far as I could discover, and by 1970 the number could have been 14 or 15 million. Accidents were described, quaintly, as ‘accidents given’ and ‘accidents received’. Even in the remotest places roads, which were like roads must have been in eighteenth-century England, unmetalled and full of pot-holes, were clogged with vehicles, which was not surprising in a country which had a hundred million inhabitants, which worked out in density (according to who worked it out) as between 1500 and 3000 Japanese to the square kilometre of habitable terrain, which was only one-sixth of the total area of the country. Road maps with the names in Japanese script were unintelligible to the unlettered visitor. Those with place names printed in English were almost equally useless as one could not read the script on sign posts and no one except oneself was able to make anything of a map printed in English.

I took the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, the New Tokaido Line Super-Express. It covered the 350 miles between Tokyo and Osaka in three hours ten minutes. It was the fastest train in the world and it departed 39 times a day in both directions, arriving dead on time – at least it did on the six occasions on which I travelled on it – and was so steady at 100 miles an
hour that a watchmaker could have exercised his craft on board it.

Travelling on it, passengers were supplied with food in delicate wooden boxes, as indeed one was on other main-line trains, the contents of which were as satisfying to look at as a vintage Ben Nicholson abstraction, which they sometimes resembled, but with the added advantage that you could eat them. These boxes of food, which were known as benso and cost only 100 yen, were brought to me by girls who contrived to leave me with the impression that they cared whether I lived or died. If I had felt that by eating from them I might be destroying a work of art, there was a one-class buffet car which made British Rail’s equivalents seem not only barbarous but unimaginably sad.

But one travelled on the Super-Express not to have one’s self-esteem fortified so much as to see Japan, to have unforgettable views of the Japanese landscape – towns with rice fields reaching into them, graveyards of automobiles, shimmering inlets from the Pacific with what one hoped was still edible seaweed growing in them, expanses of water filled with strange industrial chemicals, miniature, undulating forests of tea bushes following the contours of the hills, forests of giant pine, great mountain ranges through which the train burrowed; views of Mount Fuji, that almost too perfect mountain, of the city of Nagoya drenched in smog, of lonely shrines, of a man photographing his motor cycle in the middle of a plain.

Kyoto was a deceptive city. Emerging from the huge railway station and whirled through its streets in a taxi (no tipping – heaven!) all one saw superficially was a grid-iron of streets, but a grid-iron laid out over one thousand years previously. Its beauties were mostly hidden. Its temples and castles and gardens were concealed behind stone walls or in the woods on the nearby mountain sides, in the narrow streets between the grid-iron boulevards, in the district down by the
river devoted to pleasure. The pleasures available to the foreign visitor were, however, mostly beyond his pocket. Visiting Japan, visiting Kyoto, it was cheaper to buy two tickets and take your pleasures with you. Kyoto was the most civilized city in Japan. Its capital for more than ten centuries until 1868, it was the last stronghold of the Japanese way of life, one that the peoples of the West can only dimly apprehend.

At the inn the price was agreed with the proprietress who although not young was disturbingly comely, before one took off one’s shoes and crossed the threshold. The Japanese consider it undignified to argue about a bill once it has been presented, and indeed, for more obvious reasons, the visitor is at a disadvantage in attempting to do so. It is important to make sure that if there are two of you both are included in the quotation.

Inside this particular inn, long, dim, somewhat draughty corridors, their floors covered with straw matting, stretched away into what seemed a far distance. In the room, which was devoid of furniture except for a low table at which on one occasion I knelt typing for eight hours at a stretch because there was no taller one, giggling but utterly fearless maids helped me out of my clothes and into a cotton kimono over which, it being winter, they slipped another heavier one. When it grew even colder a stove was put under the table which warmed your feet and those of whoever happened to be your companion with which they were in intimate conjunction.

When I had drunk tea and eaten sweets that looked like bits of soap I was conducted to ‘the honourable bath’, otherwise the
o’furo
, where I was made to wash and rinse myself thoroughly before getting into it. It was scaldingly hot, only bearable at first if one remained stock still, and resembled an oven-sized, up-ended matchbox.

In an
o’furo
any number could play but limitations were imposed by its size and shape. If you were alone someone
could always be found to scrub your back, just as someone could be found to share your feet under the table. There the matter usually ended, though Japan in general is a good place for bachelors of both sexes, where the unexpected always happens and the expected rarely does.

There was so much to be seen in Japan that could be seen nowhere else: temples with a thousand Buddhas, drawn up like a battalion of grenadiers, except that each one was different; huge whirlpools; the most ancient wooden building in the world; a tomb whose base was bigger than that of the largest of all pyramids; men fishing with cormorants; men diving for pearls; petrified trees and pillars of rock crystal; places where the cuttlefish were phosphorescent …

And the Japanese themselves: pushing, shoving and exquisitely polite by turns, child-loving, gentle, hideously cruel, full of humour, aesthetic, grossly materialistic, ravaging and polluting their country while preserving parts of it so that it appeared to be embalmed in a state of dreamlike beauty – the most energetic, enigmatic people in the world and the most unpopular in the whole of South-east Asia. I am glad that I went to see them and their country when I did. Very soon there will be so many of them that it will be impossible to land.

T
HE BEST TIME
to go to Hong Kong is said to be in early winter – October to December – when there is a cool breeze, the sky is blue, and when the 90 per cent humidity of July and August is forgotten.

We arrived there in what is usually regarded as the no-good season, at the beginning of March. It was cloudy and rainy and cold enough most of the time to wear the great thick tweed suit I had brought, and was very glad I had brought, to wear in wintry Japan.

As we came in to land in cloud on the runway, there was not much to be seen of Hong Kong and its 235 adjacent islands, Kowloon and the New Territories; some bits of rock with surf pounding on them, part of a huge tenement block, a junk making heavy weather of it in the South China Sea.

It must have looked rather like this to the pilot of the aeroplane, too, because, next thing, we found ourselves disembarking hundreds of miles away at Manila in the Philippines, where the temperature was in the eighties, there was a riot in progress, and the local police were bowed down under the weight of endless belts of ammunition. None of the passengers complained much – after all it
was
a free trip and the Philippines were not somewhere you set off for on impulse.

Eventually, we landed at Hong Kong, and at the airport there were something like 12,000 people waiting to welcome our flight. Later, an official told me that this was the entire complement of some dozen Chinese families who had turned up, as apparently Chinese families invariably do,
en masse
to welcome a dozen or so relatives who were disembarking from
our plane. If there had been more locals on board there would have been even more people to meet them.

Then, having told the customs official that we were not importing any liquor, tobacco, hydrocarbon oils, methyl alcohol or table water – I can’t remember the whole lot – which were all dutiable because this was a Free Port in which you were supposed to stock up on such commodities, not spoil the market in them, we were whisked away in a shiny, rather ancient Rolls-Royce, by an equally shiny, equally ancient Chinese driver, the only one who had come to meet us. This machine was equipped with locally built air-conditioning so effective that it was as cold as a haunted house, but fortunately there was a fur rug on the floor in case we had forgotten our boots.

We whirred through Kowloon in the Rolls without stopping in Kowloon City, a weird, six-acre slum, which had walls until the Japanese broke them down during their occupation. The inhabitants of the city have always considered it and themselves part of China proper, and in 1963 Peking made a formal claim for it.

Then we drove on to the
Star
ferry. Ahead rose the fantastic, unforgettable façade of the City of Victoria on Hong Kong Island, full of looming white monoliths, like huge teeth with lots of fillings in them (high-rise buildings, actually), while somewhere above and behind them were the upper parts of the island, now invisible under a thick, lop-sided wig of grey nimbus.

This was not what it had looked like until recently, if one was to believe all those tinted, panoramic photographs to be seen in every second Chinese restaurant in Britain. In these photographs there had been lots of white-washed four- and five-storeyed buildings, with verandas on each storey on which white-suited merchants had taken their ease overlooking the ground of the Hong Kong Cricket Club. When some of those pictures were taken the largest buildings had been those
of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, built in the 1930s, and one or two similarly important ones such as the headquarters of Jardine Matheson, a merchant firm which was functioning before the foundation of Hong Kong but which lost a packet when Red China took over their mainland interests in the 1950s.

Now the houses were gone, no one wore white suits any more, except sailors, the cricket pitch was on the point of being built over, although the Hong Kong Club, the Supreme Court building and Jardine Matheson’s still remained as reminders of the old hierarchical order, while up above, on the Peak, were the lovely homes in which the administrators still lived, as they always had, hidden for months on end, as they currently were, in their own personal cloud, which may have been one of the reasons why policy in this part of the world sometimes seemed a bit obfuscated. There was nothing Eastern about Victoria at all, architecturally speaking.

But on the water this was still the East. There was no doubt about that. Out at the moorings on both sides of the Central Fairway, the deep channel which led out towards the South China Sea, there were dozens of merchant ships with their riding lights just coming on, in what was the Hong Kong winter equivalent of a Scottish gloaming. Cargoes were being put in and out of them, and the harbour was full of lighters and junks and sampans and boats called Walla Wallas, which you rode in after a party when the last ferry had gone; and the air was filled with outlandish cries and the most disturbing sound in all the world, that of ships’ sirens announcing their imminent departure for Port Swettenham, Saigon, Pointe Noire, Okinawa, Lautoka, Khorramshahr, Galveston and the Piraeus, just some of the places that the Hong Kong newspapers listed each day in its shipping news under arrivals and departures.

Then we rolled off the ferry and up to the door of the Mandarin Hotel, one of the larger and taller monoliths. Perhaps it
was usual for the rich to be met at the airport by one of the two hotel Rolls, though what happened when a bevy of rich people arrived on the same flight, all expecting the Rolls treatment, goodness only knows.

There, we were met by a Sikh commissionaire in red boots, who looked as if he could have done with a spell on the barracks square, an immensely tall head porter, who looked rather like a worldly sort of bishop, an assistant manager and The Manager, late of the Savoy, who apologized for the absence of someone else (God, presumably), all of which struck us both as awe-inspiring, indeed.

That is all about the Mandarin. it might not have had the best food in the world, few good hotels do; but it was a lap of luxury and it did have wonderful service, and during our entire stay no one said, ‘You’re welcome!’ If you wanted that there was a Hilton higher up the hillside. In fact although the Mandarin looked rather American, it was strictly Chinese-British.

If you wanted to be even more British at that time, you could stay in Kowloon in a room with a view at the Peninsula Hotel on Tsimshatsui Point, near the place where the
Star
ferry took off for Hong Kong Island. It was built in 1926 to house travellers waiting to set off on, or descending from, the Canton railway on the first stretch of their journey to London.

Installed in a room at the Mandarin sufficiently expensive to make it seem extravagant to take one’s eyes off the unparalleled views, the problem was what to see of the rest of the colony in the time – only five days – at our disposal. We needed this time, and much more, to satisfy our curiosity about the place. For instance, we wanted to admire the view from the top of the Peak. Fortunately, we were saved from having to decide whether it was one of the half dozen greatest views on earth by the cloud that continued to obliterate it; but we still needed time to find out, for example, whether it was true that 80,000 people at that time really did live on the
rooftops of crumbling tenements; what it was like inside one of the vast new resettlement blocks (was there really only one lavatory to each floor, 400 people to a floor, four to a ten-by-ten-foot room?); if coolies, in 1970, were still really getting less than HK$50 a week for a twelve-hour day, when HK$1 was equal to about 1s.2d. (about 6p); whether the prostitutes who operated in the sampans in the typhoon anchorage really were all blind, and why.

We also wanted time to sit on a packing case on the waterfront at Aberdeen and watch the boat people, when the term ‘boat people’ had a happier connotation, living their happier lives on junks and sampans, their small children with a rope round their waists to stop them falling over the side; time to investigate the markets in narrow lanes and eat in restaurants rarely visited by Europeans, but to which they were not refused admission, only admitted with a certain wonderment (Hong Kong had the best Chinese food outside Peking and Taiwan); time to visit the places where they sold Sung dynasty ceramics taken from burial grounds outside China, and the big Chinese republican emporia, communist bastions at the heart of capitalism, and doing so wonder how on earth they could sell hand-crocheted double bedspreads for £6, which would take a young woman with the keenest eyesight a minimum of a month to make.

A lot of time was needed: to have your horoscope cast in a temple; to journey by train – on the hard seats preferably – up towards the frontier, towards the New Territories, parts of which looked as rural as we imagined, without having seen it, rural China must still look; to peer out across the duck ponds towards the watch towers on the border river at Lok Ma Chau, where we were driven nearly nuts by the attentions of beggar ladies of the Hakka tribe (who wear big black hats with deep fringes and look like a get-together of female mutes); time to visit the street where they sold wholesale aphrodisiacs, where it was probably more expensive to buy
the ground-up horns of the animals than the entire beast itself; time to try out the banal nightlife in the girlie bars, dozens and dozens of them; and to visit the film studios where some 120 film companies churned out about 300 films a year in Mandarin and Cantonese.

And at least one day had to be kept for an excursion to Macau, about forty miles away across the mouth of the Pearl River to the west, 75 minutes by hydrofoil. The city itself stands on a peninsula only two miles square, joined to an island, which is part of China, by a narrow isthmus, and there are also a couple of other islands. The whole territory only adds up to six square miles.

Macau, officially, was Portuguese and had its own governor, but its independence from China was, in fact, even more tenuous than that of Hong Kong. Carefully engineered riots at the time of the Cultural Revolution reduced the administration to such a state of sycophancy that anyone the People’s Republic asked for by name was almost certainly handed over without argument. Nevertheless, it was not nearly as dangerous to visit as it sounded as the Chinese had never been known to ask for tourists, and it was still a place with the most attractively decadent air about it, although of what its decadence actually consisted was a bit of a mystery.

Even its principal exports had something exotic about them – Chinese wine and medicines, incense sticks, firecrackers and other fireworks, some of them dangerous, matches, camphor and teakwood chests, and gold ingots which came from God knows where but were then thought to be smuggled to Hong Kong.

Built on seven hills, but otherwise not at all like Rome, except perhaps morally, Macau had the most hideous hotel if not in the world, in the East – built for the comfort of the Japanese who swarmed into Macau at certain seasons, the city and the hotel being famous for their gambling. In the entrance hall there was an immense chandelier that could be
raised and lowered by a mechanism of such complexity that when they needed to clean it they had to get a man out from Germany to work it.

Much nicer was the Bela Vista, a splendidly decrepit place with cast-iron staircases and a wonderful view over a bay crowded with sampans, the Praia Grande, in which I would have been happy to spend the rest of my days, providing I wasn’t forcibly removed to the People’s Republic, drinking the good Portuguese wine. The Bela Vista was a mirror of the whole city, which was indeed almost totally decrepit, with row upon row of lovely old houses painted in faded colours, some equally lovely old churches and a fantastic Renaissance cathedral, at the top of a long flight of steps, of which only the façade remained.

Flying back towards Hong Kong in the hydrofoil across the mouth of the Pearl River, which had eight times the discharge of the Yellow River and was all discoloured with silt, with dozens of junks surging down it from Canton on the wind; and having put our money on zero on the big table in the big hotel and recouped thirty-five times our stake by doing so, and with the islands ahead rushing up out of the sea to meet us, we both felt that this was quite enough for just one short day.