The worst thing was to look like a schoolboy late for class. Harry forced himself to slowly enter a dining room of a few hundred diners who fell silent at the sight of him. Palpable opprobrium and curiosity took aim, but Harry made a ninety-degree bow of apology and moved toward a head table where a conspicuously empty chair awaited him. Only when he had seated himself, made more apologies and drawn himself up to the table did he dare take in the room itself, its panels of precious woods, black persimmon and pale Yaku cedar, the blaze of chandeliers, the ornamental fires in the fireplaces at each end. The Chrysanthemum Club was the club of international trade, and it was, to some degree, an imitation of a London gentlemen’s club, yet unmistakably Japanese. Chrysanthemums stood in crystal vases, staff in swallow-tailed suits shuffled softly around with coffee and green tea, always bowing when they passed a larger than life-size oil portrait of the club’s royal sponsor, the emperor himself, a stooped, scholarly man regarding a globe with great intensity.
The diners had fallen on the last of their kippers and eggs. There were close to three hundred guests, Harry thought, not a bad muster considering how many foreigners had fled Tokyo. The Americans were an embassy attaché, a couple of Rotarians, a pair of forlorn managers from Standard Oil of New York and National City Bank, and Al DeGeorge, who never missed a free meal. The British side was led by First Secretary Arnold Beechum, a beefy sportsman with small eyes stuck on a dome of freckles. A blockade-runner must have come in, because the Germans were well represented. Naval officers in roguishly handsome sweaters and dress blues shared a table with beaming executives from Siemens and I. G. Farben who were already anticipating a vigorous postwar economy. Willie Staub had been seated at a second table with Ambassador Ott, who had looked sick since the recent arrest of his best friend as a Russian spy, and Meisinger, a Gestapo colonel with thinning hair and greasy jowls. Meisinger’s nickname was “The Butcher of Warsaw.” Willie appeared distressed, though how anyone could be unhappy schmoozing with the Butcher of Warsaw, Harry couldn’t imagine. Sharing a table, the Italians and Vichy French appeared locked in mutual Mediterranean contempt. Other Europeans and tame Chinese were scattered around the room, but most of Harry’s audience consisted of Japanese executives sweaty around the collar because they were misunderstood. Misunderstood at home by an army just as happy to gun down capitalists as Communists and misunderstood abroad by their former friends and trading partners. Hence the breakfast address by Harry Niles.
Harry felt like a burglar allowed to work with the lights on. He didn’t mind missing the eggs and toast; he preferred the unsullied chrysanthemum motif of the plate, the same design woven into the linen, engraved on water glasses, etched in silverware. His breakfast buddies at the head table were directors from IHI Engineering and NYK Shipping, the president of Nippon Air, an elderly chairman from the Yasuda Bank, all stiff as a row of bamboo sticks. On Harry’s left was the last empty chair, on his right a young vice president from Yoshitaki Lines so scared of Harry that he spilled his coffee. Members rose to make announcements; the club’s language was English as a nod to its international bent. Someone from the back of the room reported with regret the cancelation of a joint lunch with the American Club.
Harry was fine until the last chair was taken by a small man whose elegant pin-striped suit was contradicted by his cropped white hair, dark face and thick hands toughened with brine. It was Yoshitaki himself. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo had begun as samurai. Starting as a poor seaman, Yoshitaki had opened the Pacific for Japan shipping fifty years before by re-outfitting side-wheelers sold for scrap and facing down Chinese pirates and British gunboats. Now he was one of the wealthiest men in Japan and one of the best informed. If he didn’t know exactly where the Combined Fleet was, he certainly knew in what direction it sailed. He had eyes that seemed set on a far horizon or deep into another man’s soul, and he offered an expression of contempt so polite that Harry felt like a rotting fish.
Yoshitaki asked his vice president, “Do you observe the wall panels?”
“The wood is beautiful.”
“Without imperfection. Such trees must be pruned for two hundred years or more,” Yoshitaki said. “They must be diligently pruned and cleansed of alien infection. Allowing an alien infestation, a canker or a worm, is the greatest mistake a forester can make.”
Fuck you, too, Harry thought. As he reached for the water, he noticed the two directors abruptly sit up, their eyes wide. On Harry’s jacket sleeve was a large black beetle. Harry felt in his pocket and found a perforated cardboard box, wood shavings and string. The tailor’s son had slipped him a beetle. That was why the boy had said, “For you.”
It was a jet-black rhinoceros beetle with a sweeping upcurved horn. The beetle stepped from the sleeve to the table, shuffled its wing covers and started climbing a starched white napkin. One by one, the other guests at the head table focused on its progress, on Harry, back on the beetle. There weren’t many places in the world, he thought, where dropping big insects on the table was socially acceptable, and the Chrysanthemum Club probably wasn’t one of them. He felt Yoshitaki’s amusement in particular.
The beetle was a robust Minotaur, with no ill effects from the fire that Harry could see. While another report from the back of the room droned on, the beast conquered the napkin and went from guest to guest examining the silverware, chinning itself on the plates as the diners drew back. Finally, as if confused by freedom, the beetle wandered back within reach of Harry, who scooped up the insect gently, let it have a little exercise from hand to hand, placed it in the box with shavings and tied the box shut tight.
“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.