Life Among the Scorpions Read online

  During the day, while my Japanese friends were at a local Japanese school, I was driven miles away to the International Sacred Heart Convent where I studied in English. Apart from studying hard, I collected cheap tin medallions on flimsy chains with the image of the Virgin Mary embossed on them to wear around my neck, and learned to sing hymns in the big school chapel. I also recall being curious to know what the flat, white biscuit that the catholic children ate at Holy Communion, tasted like. I had an American-style education but using typical Japanese stationery such as copy books with cherry blossoms painted on them, fluorescent pink plastic pencil boxes, bright green, sickly sweet-scented erasers, and long pencils with tiny wooden Kokeshi dolls wobbling at the ends. I had a set of American friends at school but when I returned home I would ask the maids to order two bowls of Soba from the nearby shop and telephone Kiko-chan to join me. She would arrive before the food, which was sent through a delivery boy on a cycle. The ordinary working class lunch there consisted of eating a big bowl of Soba—buckwheat noodles in a steaming clear soup, with vegetables and small pieces of meat thrown in. Delivery boys would cruise through the crazy Tokyo traffic balancing a pillar of up to ten bowls of steaming noodle soup dishes, somehow fitting one on top of the other in one hand, while holding the handlebar of the bicycle with the other. Thousands of people—officegoers, shopkeepers and school children like me—ordered wholesome, delicious, steaming bowls of Soba across the length and breadth of the city. Those talented bowl-balancers are no longer a part of the Tokyo traffic, but the bowls of Soba are still the cheapest and most nourishing meal for the working man. The poor, and there were many in those days after the War, ate rice mixed with shoyu, nori, the flaky dried seaweed, and a raw egg broken into the middle of it all. Sometimes I would sit with the maids and share their lunch.

  One evening, during the Korean War, as my mother was returning from the hospital, she spotted a man lying unconscious and cold on the road. She ordered the chauffeur to stop, put him in the car and drove him to the hospital. She even borrowed all the money the chauffeur had in his pocket to leave with the derelict man. The Japanese are undemonstrative and outwardly unemotional people, but the news of this little act of kindness spread like wildfire and earned my mother a special place in the hearts of the people we knew in Japan.

  The same short-statured chauffeur, Ikeda San, was nicknamed Chukri by my mother; ‘chukri’ was slang for ‘titch’ or ‘tiny’ in Malayalam. He proudly went about telling everyone that Madame San had given him this special name, without knowing what it meant. Ikeda San was brought by a big Japanese television network all the way to Delhi to meet her again in the mid-nineties. They had thought that their reunion would make a great story. They were both in their late seventies by then. My mother had been widowed for almost forty years. His arrival at my mother’s home at Sujan Singh Park one sunny pre-winter morning and her hugging him with great excitement at her doorway after forty years was seen by millions on television all over Japan. My mother wore her favourite black and red sari when my daughter and I took them out to lunch at the India International Centre (IIC). After exchanging gifts and old memories and seeing a bit of Delhi, Ikeda San was flown back to Japan. We waited for a letter from him on his arrival back home. Nothing came for over four months. Finally, one day, an embarrassed and penitent Ikeda San wrote:

  Honorable Madame San, I very happy to meet you and June-san again, and your beautiful granddaughter Aditi-san also. It was after very long time. But very sad to inform you when I reach home my wife very angry. She very, very jealous because I go so far away to see another lady. She saw Madame San and me on television and after that no talk to me very long time. Only now she is talking to me again. Till then I very lonely, go alone for fishing every day nearby to my house. Sometimes I play golf. But I never forget Madame San and my visit to India, Yours affectionately, Chukri.

  I don’t blame his wife. My mother was so excited to see her dear Chukri after so long that she was beaming and looked quite beautiful that day, re-living her years as the gracious wife of an Ambassador. In fact, it was this image of hers with Japanese subtitles at the bottom as it appeared on Japanese television, that all the Malayalis saw in the Malayalam Manorama and on Kerala’s Asianet TV when she passed away in January 2000. I did not inform Chukri of her death. Somehow, such situations have always left me paralysed.

  These were small personal incidents, but there is much more that links the friendship between India and Japan at extraordinary times. With Japan crushed and demoralized after the Second World War, it stood friendless and condemned for Pearl Harbour, and deeply damaged after Hiroshima. India’s Justice Radha Binod Pal was a member of the International Tribunal in Tokyo that was set up to assess the extent of Japanese war crimes and those responsible for it in the War. Much to the eternal gratitude of the Japanese, Justice Pal wrote a note of dissent in his report and boldly went against the view held by the majority.

  Fifty years later, the small but beautiful Pal-Shimonaka Memorial Hall stands in Hakone, a few hours outside of Tokyo, dedicated to the friendship between India and Japan. Yasaburo Shimonaka began life as a potter and went through life as a philanthropist and a widely respected leader of the publishing world. Justice Pal was a firm believer in Vedanta and resolutely upheld the integrity of the law. Along with Shimonaka he did much to bring to bear on Japan the teachings of Gandhi. So influenced was Shimonaka that at the age of eighty-two, he went back to making pottery, believing this was the way to re-establish ‘the dignity of the Eastern Mind’*.

  Prime Minister Nehru also committed India to extending a friendly hand to Japan after the War. He did this in a rather large and visible way by gifting Japan with a baby elephant, which he named Indira after his daughter. Maybe he had her in mind for big things even then. It was made into quite an event. The elephant was handed over to Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo at an impressive ceremony attended by the royalty. Since I spoke Japanese like the locals, I was asked to address the children of Japan over the NHK radio network. A speech was drafted and I read it, presenting little Indira to them as a symbol of the strong and undying friendship between our two countries. As was the rather charming practice in those days, the radio station made a 78 rpm record of the speech to present to the speech-maker as a souvenir of the occasion. The record is warped and its plastic-coating flaking off, but the last time it could be played on those now-defunct old record players, you could hear a nine-year-old Indian girl ending her ten-minute speech with words of spontaneous congratulations, said with gusto, ‘Mina sama no honto ni omedeto gozaimasu!’ (I truly congratulate you all.)

  Even fifty years later, the people of Japan remember the elephant that symbolized so much. Whenever I am introduced to a person from Japan, the elephant connection evokes an extra warm ‘Ah so!’ and a deeper, more respectful bow. Indira, the elephant, died of old age. Another elephant was sent by Indira Gandhi, when she was the prime minister, but it was not highlighted with as much enthusiasm because by then India’s initial policy of friendship with Japan had turned cold. Despite protestations of non-alignment, the Cold War was at its height and India was firmly in the Russian camp while Japan went under the US umbrella into the other camp.

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  Relations with Japan remained frozen until post Pokhran II when it took a further dive. India needed to woo Japan away from its hostile response to the nuclear tests conducted by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in May 1998. Many friends in the political spectrum of Japan who had remained close to the socialists, particularly George Fernandes, the Defence Minister of India, took it upon themselves to make Herculean efforts to build new understanding. Among them was Senator Hosei Norota who was later honoured with a Padma Vibhushan by India.

  In 1999, I suggested that a new elephant be sent to Japan to celebrate fifty years of Japan-India relations. George Fernandes, who had maintained excellent personal relations with many socialists in Japan, thought it was a good idea and arranged for an elephant. A youn
g she-elephant was transported in a truck from the forests of Assam by its chief minister, Prafulla Mahanta, who wanted it to be named after his wife Jayashree. Tragically, the elephant was injured in the truck during the bumpy journey and had to be off-loaded at the Lucknow zoo for treatment. I was miserable about her plight and kept urging everyone quietly behind the scenes to do more to save her. Expert veterinarians were brought from Karnataka to treat her paralysed right leg. They struggled with her for over three months, but, unfortunately, she died.

  George Fernandes became the first Indian defence minister to visit Japan in fifty years. In a happy coincidence, his only son who was working in New York was engaged to a Japanese girl. It delighted the Japanese that the defence minister of India—whose office was adorned with pictures only of the president and prime minister of India, an oil painting of Mahatma Gandhi painted by a refugee Burmese artist fighting for democracy in Burma, and a woven textile picture of the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima—was to be the father-in-law of a Japanese girl.

  In 2002, another elephant was arranged, as the Japanese were by then very keen and enthusiastic about this symbolic renewal of ties. Friendship had blossomed again between the two countries. The celebration of fifty years of friendship between India and Japan was approaching. This time, George Fernandes spoke to the chief minister of Karnataka about providing another elephant. It was organized with better transportation and care, and the elephant reached Tokyo safely in time for the official visit of India’s Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. She was named Surya, since Japan was the land of the Rising Sun. Some snide commentators had already begun to spread the word that the elephant was going to be named Jaya, after me. So neither did I make known my role in initiating the idea of sending an elephant to renew old friendships, nor did I voice in the open my desire to accompany the prime minister’s entourage. The whole event was more than extremely significant to me because of the old connection with elephant Indira and my father’s unique role in the formulation of the India-Japan Peace Treaty fifty years ago. No one had discovered my ability to still manage a speech in Japanese with a bit of practice, but I kept silent because I was a woman in politics, and I did not want to give the scorpions an opportunity to stir any further rumours.

  After 1952, I returned to Japan only in 1990 for an international conference on Tibet where I also met the Hollywood actor Richard Gere. This led to a warm and lasting friendship between us. At that time, I had no idea that he was such a popular star since I had not watched any movies for some time and did not tune in to the goings-on in Hollywood much. I treated him rather casually but the girls in Tokyo were going crazy and kept telephoning my hotel room constantly mistaking it for his. They refused to believe he was not there. Banners were strung up all over saying WELCOME RICHARD GEAR [sic]. He came up to speak to me after my speech was over and complimented me for what I had said. We became comrades in solidarity for the cause of the freedom of Tibet. I invited him to visit us in Delhi. When he finally did come to Delhi, George Fernandes had become defence minister and the NDA Government had just completed the nuclear tests in Pokhran. Pakistan had followed with its first test two weeks later. George Fernandes, who was also returning from a trip to Nagaland, had invited Gere to dinner. A large posse of the press, Gere and some Tibetan friends, and the three large dogs that lived with Fernandes, were all waiting to greet him as he arrived from Kohima carrying ceremonial spears, shawls, flamboyant head-gears and other gifts. However, the television channels and print media were so anxious to get Fernandes’s comments on Pakistan’s nuclear tests that they paid no attention to the handsome and popular Hollywood star and attacked Fernandes with a barrage of questions in the midst of which Fernandes was compelled to pay attention to the dogs jumping all over him in delight. An impromptu press conference took place right there on the back verandah of the large bungalow. Richard Gere was completely bemused at the whole affair. When we all sat down to dinner, he admitted that Fernandes’s was a most unusual and eccentric political personality, but that he felt much more at home that way.

  The next time Gere came to the same establishment, Fernandes was about to have a press conference on the eve of a historic visit to Vietnam. Again, Richard Gere was relegated to the background and had to spend some time sitting on the garden steps with some of us before he could get the attention due to him. The best part was that it was the passion and commitment to significant issues that enabled our friendship, rather than formalities common to being known personalities. It was also funny how Japan had brought me in contact with Hollywood again.

  On my 1990 visit, I also met my childhood friend Noriko-san after thirty-eight years. In the lobby of our hotel she produced all the letters I had written to her after I had left in 1952, wrapped in a pale pink satin furoshiki cloth along with some of the small gifts I had sent her. We hugged each other, laughed and cried and talked in my room for hours in broken English and rusty Japanese. On a subsequent trip to attend the wedding of a young man who had lived in India for some months I accompanied Noriko-san to her dance class where she was learning Bharatnatyam. It was partly therapeutic, she explained. She told me she had cancer.

  From age eight to ten, Japan for me was reading Popeye and Dagwood and Blondie comic books, dressing up with Noriko-san in kimonos and saris, learning Japanese songs and dances, listening to 45 rpm records of the latest hits by Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day played on the Victrola, attending very solemn tea ceremonies and Noh dances with my parents, skiing at the Akakura resort, driving to Mount Fuji or to Nikko on weekends and shopping for American goodies at the PX where only Americans and diplomats could enter. I was particularly drawn to the simple aesthetics of Japan’s crafts. They had a minimal and stark quality quite similar to that of Kerala and other parts of India. The finely crafted bamboo vases; the tatamis (mats)—like the grass metthapayas we slept on in Kollengode—covering the floors in the rooms separated by paper doors that moved with a soft shushing sound; the exquisite kakemono (scroll painting); indigo coloured shibori textiles; lacquered and painted music boxes; and the tinkling of handcrafted wind chimes—all laid the foundations for my understanding of aesthetics. It also helped in engaging with the economics and politics of all things handmade by skilled craftspersons who I believe to be the true repositories of a culture particular to my country.

  Sometimes, there was a stir among the maids and I would discover that famous American violinist Yehudi Menuhin was coming to lunch at our home. There was also the excitement over going to see Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Betty Hutton, Danny Kaye and other famous Hollywood stars at a special variety performance after returning from entertaining the US troops at the Korean front. There were so many of these ‘stars’ who I had come across in my life in those days that my autograph book never left my side. My mother would return from glittering functions hosted by General Douglas J. Macarthur and his gorgeous wife Penny, and later by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Mamie, in which all these movie stars would be present. She told me and our excited young maids how their heartthrob Errol Flynn had got so drunk at the reception that he fell into the fountain in the lobby and had to be helped off the scene! An autographed photograph, giving me his love, is still firmly stuck in my photo album.

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  I discovered my father’s contribution towards establishing truly significant bonds with Japan much later through a paper presented at a seminar in Delhi by Hiroshi Sato, a Japanese scholar. By chance, veteran journalist Inder Malhotra told me at a book release function in early 2003 that this paper had mentioned my father in very interesting terms. He sent me a copy the following day. It was a revelation that most Japanese were not aware of, which India never bothered about and I would never have known about, if Inder Malhotra had not cared to respect history.

  The sources for this paper titled ‘ “Courted Friendship”: How Japan Negotiated with India for India-Japan Peace Treaty, 1952’, are mostly from official Japanese records and the papers of two Indian scholars, Kesavan (1972) and
Narasimhamurthy (1986). The paper examines the links between the San Francisco Peace Treaty (SFPT) and the Indo-Japan Peace Treaty (IJPT) and post-War Japan’s Asia policies. In Clause 4 of the Indo-Japan Peace Treaty, the most significant aspect was India’s waiving all claims to reparation of properties seized before the War. This gesture by India contributed greatly to the favourable progress of Japan’s reparation talks with Burma, Philippines and Indonesia. Sato’s paper tells us that although India did not agree to sign a peace treaty supported by the US and UK, Prime Minister Nehru intended to enter into a negotiation with Japan for a peace treaty.

  A draft was sent by India on 22 December 1951 borrowing in most part from relevant portions in the SFPT and reserving the right to the same claims as made by the Allied powers. Sato writes:

  Three rounds of preliminary negotiation participated by Mr. K.K. Chettur, the Representative of the Indian Liaison Office, Tokyo and Mr. V.C. Trivedi [later Ambassador to Japan], the Office Secretary was held and the differences were sorted out. It is noteworthy that the two Indian representatives stood firm with the line of the draft, probably without the mandate of the home office. Nevertheless, as we will demonstrate, their discussions with their Japanese counterparts were well indicative of what Indian side could have legitimately claimed. ….Then for five long months, ball was in the court of Indian Government in New Delhi, and finally on June 3, 1952, New Delhi Government sent a final draft, conceding nearly all the amendments proposed by Japan, including contentious issues of Japanese properties in India. Meanwhile, India and Japan established formal diplomatic relations on April 28, 1952 when SFPT came into force and Liaison chief, K.K.Chettur assumed office of the first post-war ambassador of India to Japan. Indian Government, with notification, declared the end of the war with Japan. (p. 3)