A PROLIFIC writer of history, reportage and cultural commentary on Asia and Europe, Ian Buruma is renowned for his quiet force and levelheaded analysis in a time of clamorous sound-bite punditry. In 2008, Foreign Policy/Prospect named him one of the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals. Awarded the Erasmus Prize for his ‘especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe’, the jury praised him as a ‘new cosmopolitan’.
In his first book, Behind the Mask (1983), Buruma explored the Japanese underworld of transvestites, massage parlours and yakuza. His most recent, The China Lover (2008), is a novel based on the life of Japanese screen star Ri Koran – also known as the actress, journalist and politician Yoshiko Yamaguchi – whose early career in the late 1930s was intertwined with Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and who later took in Hollywood and embraced the likes of Idi Amin and Kim Il-sung. In between, Buruma wrote The Missionary and the Libertine (1996), in which he examines the stereotype of liberated sexuality the West traditionally applies to the Orient, and The Wages of Guilt (1995), which compares German and Japanese memories of their military pasts, arguing that Germans have faced up to their wartime atrocities while the Japanese remain in denial.
Born in The Hague in 1951, Buruma was raised in a post-war bilingual household in a Holland where the British were seen as saviours – experiences contributing to Voltaire’s Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe (1999). In Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006), he examines how the post-war consensus in the Netherlands on multiculturalism, liberal immigration policies and generous welfare services bred a culture of complacency and denial that made it powerless to engage with its new Muslim minority; in a masterful combination of penetrating analysis and gripping narrative, he investigates the causes of Islamic fundamentalism with meticulous sobriety.
In Bad Elements – Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing (2001), he looked at China through the eyes of its dissenters, both the exiled and those working quietly from within.
Now based in New York City, he holds a professorship at Bard College. A contributor for more than two decades to The New York Review of Books, Buruma is tipped to replace editor and co-founder Robert Silvers, who turns eighty in December.
The following is based on a series of interviews with Buruma, the first in New York in November 2008, and his comments at the Beijing Literary Festival in March 2009.
Ben Naparstek
Ian Buruma ...
... on becoming a writer.
I didn’t dream of being a writer at an early age. I was a very late starter. I studied Chinese, not knowing what I was going to do. At the time it was still the Cultural Revolution and very much the Maoist atmosphere. You couldn’t go to China freely, though you could go in a highly organised way. But I was never really a Maoist, or interested in Communist China as such. It didn’t appeal to me. When I was a student I saw a lot of Japanese films and theatre and I went to Japan on a film-school scholarship. I was really most interested in films and photography and made some documentary films and worked as a photographer. Then I realised I didn’t have the patience to be a film-maker. I don’t have the patience to wait until budgets come together, and so on and so forth. I started writing film reviews for The Japan Times and general pieces about life in Japan for a Dutch paper. I found writing more congenial. I was already in my late twenties by then. I started writing more and more and things took off from there.
... on the different challenges of fiction and non-fiction.
Fiction is much harder. It comes out of a different place. When you write an essay or non-fiction book, you have to have a thesis and something of an argument and it has to have a certain logic. That’s the kiss of death for a novel. You don’t write a novel as a thesis. You have to use a different part of your brain. But the main difference, apart from it being harder for me, is that you use your own experiences and memories in a different way. As you write, memories come up and you find a place for them. That doesn’t mean you simply recall them and put them in the story, but they affect the story in an odd way. For me that’s one of the most interesting things about writing fiction.
What interested me in the Yoshiko Yamaguchi story was not so much digging up all the facts I could possibly find that weren’t already on the record, but to get inside the heads of people who were alive in those days. You can imagine an inner life, not only hers but the people who knew her. You can’t do that if you write a non-fiction book, because then you have to stick to facts that you can document.
I first met her when she was a politician – I was living in Hong Kong, writing, so this would have been around 1987, and did a piece on her for Interview magazine in New York. I didn’t get an overwhelming impression of her at the time. The biggest impression came really when I first saw her films, in the 1970s, and the wartime films. That made a big impression on me. She’s given many, many interviews and she’s very polished and she looks like a former actress and doesn’t tell you anything that would be particularly surprising. There’s a musical about her life and there are manga, and a TV soap opera and several memoirs and several movies. She’s a legend.
... on what he likes most about writing.
I think it’s the process of conceiving of a book or a long article in your head, to think of a structure and how to do it. I don’t mind the writing process itself particularly either. A lot of people hate it and agonise over it – I quite enjoy it.
It took me a long time to work out the structure of The China Lover. What interested me was not just [Yamaguchi] and her story, but how people fantasised about her and how that blended with all kinds of political and historical fantasies.
The most difficult part was the pre-war and wartime events, the real historical part, because the great danger with writing any historical novel is that it turns into docu-drama and there’s too much historical detail, too much research. You have to cut down on that a lot. That was more difficult than just imagining people from a different culture. It’s about getting into the mind of a non-western person. I think it has a lot of similarities with my first novel. In that, I used a fictionalised form of my own autobiography. The China Lover is a fictionalised memoir of this real person. I’m interested in life stories and how people make sense of their lives and how they tell their story.
... on being dubbed a 'new cosmopolitan'.
When I grew up in The Hague in Holland, having a British mother and a Dutch father was still relatively unusual. It gave me a double perspective, on nationality and different cultures and so on. It was something that made me feel slightly different from the people I grew up with. It meant that you never took the idea of nationality entirely for granted. You behaved in a certain way in Holland, and a different way in England, and always looked at culture and nationality from a certain angle. And the fact that my mother came from a family of Jewish immigrants added another layer to that. I think it bred in me a certain restlessness – I couldn’t wait to get out of The Hague. I don’t know if that makes me cosmopolitan. One definition of cosmopolitan is that you can see things from different perspectives.
From a very early age, my friends have tended to be people who are outsiders of one kind or another, oddballs, and most of them are not writers or journalists. I have friends who are artists and one close friend is a businessman. I was never very interested in people who conform to a particular norm. I wasn’t very good at it myself.
I don’t know if I was particularly eccentric. As a very small boy I probably stood out because my mother would dress me as an English boy, and in those days I would have looked slightly odd compared to my peers. But I wouldn’t describe myself as eccentric but I was certainly always drawn to people who were on the fringes rather than people who were in the centre of things.
... on liberalism and eschewing absolutist soundbites.
The best way to have a best-seller in non-fiction is to have a title that promises to have all the answers to the question that is very lively at a particular moment, like ‘The End of History’ or ‘The Coming War with …’. Murder in Amsterdam was translated into a lot of languages, but it certainly wasn’t a best-seller. I’m not a showman like [Christopher] Hitchens. He’s a television performer and that’s again a slightly different thing. But I don’t think nuance sells – that’s for sure. If you try to find nuance and weigh different arguments, then you’ll be attacked from both sides. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was Dr Johnson, I think, who said ‘Fame is a shuttlecock . . . To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends’.
I’m a liberal. In politics, there’s always a trade-off. You cannot have total equality and total liberty at the same time, because if you have that, and the United States comes closest, if you give everybody the liberty to make as much money as you want, then you’ll end up with some people who are vastly richer than others. I do believe that a certain distribution of wealth is necessary, but I don’t believe that the state should create maximum equality by enormous taxes for high incomes and so on through coercion either. I’d rather have more freedom and a little less equality, than more equality and less freedom.
... on polemic.
In my non-fiction or journalism, my aim is to understand things better – for myself and the reader – rather than take a position and use a big bat to bang it home. In Bad Elements, my sympathies are very clear. It’s not a question of saying there’s a bit of right on both sides. In the case of the dissidents in China, it may be a little sharper, in the sense that I have very little sympathy for the Communist government and a great deal of sympathy for the dissidents. But again a lot of the dissidents took violently against that book because they felt I wasn’t sympathetic enough.
… on national identity.
Some people, if they’ve come from mixed backgrounds or live in marginal border areas – like Hitler on the border of Austria, or Napoleon from Corsica – compensate for their sense of marginality by being super-patriots. Others see it as an enrichment, which I think applied to me, a lifelong fascination with how people see themselves and how they define themselves. My first book is about how the Japanese imagined themselves to be in terms of heroes and villains. And I think The China Lover comes from the same interest.
Sometimes I feel a little bit dislocated, but not profoundly so. Yes, sometimes I do think how comfortable it must be to grow up in one place with the same people. But it’s not something I regret. I keep going back to Holland; I still speak Dutch. And the same goes for England. I’ve never burned my boats, cut myself off. I’m not one of these expatriates who rejected the world they came from.
... on collective guilt.
What happened in Holland during the Second World War became an issue in the 1960s. The largest percentage of Jews deported from any European country outside Poland came from Holland – seventy-five per cent of Dutch Jews were deported; few came back.
The question, of course, is why? Not because the Dutch were more anti-Semitic than other Europeans; if anything, they were probably a little bit less – there was clearly social anti-Semitism, but it was not especially bad in Holland. There has been a lot of speculation on this issue. One idea relates to the nature of the landscape; it’s hard to hide people if you don’t have mountains.
Most Jews were concentrated in Amsterdam – they either lived there or were driven there by the Germans. To me, the most plausible explanation is that Holland was so bourgeois, and so law-abiding, that people simply were not used to the idea of resisting authority, unlike the French, for example, who had a much more turbulent modern history and were readier to go up against any authority; similarly, the Belgians. But not the Dutch. The Dutch were used to the idea that authority is essentially benign – if you do as you’re told things will sort of be okay. When the Dutch Jews were told to wear the star, they wore the star. This made it, in Eichmann’s words, ‘delightfully easy to operate in Holland’. It still hangs there like a cloud, and people are very prone to use it as a moral yardstick in debates – what would you have done? – even when it doesn’t really apply.
When I grew up in The Hague, it was still very clear where you would do your shopping. One didn’t buy one’s meat at a certain butcher because we knew he’d been bad. One didn’t go and buy sweets at a particular tobacconist because she had been the girlfriend of a German soldier.
... on the differing treatment by Germany and Japan of their war pasts.
There are several things to be said. One is that when people talk about ‘the Germans’, they forget that East Germans have a very different attitude from West Germans. They also forget that the Germans came to this understanding rather late, in the 1960s. Before then it wasn’t much discussed. It was in fact more discussed in Japan, but in Japan the way the war is remembered was politicised from the moment it ended, which didn’t happen in Germany.
In Germany, it was very easy – a gangster regime took power in 1933 and lost it in 1945. Japan didn’t have a Nazi regime. It was the same elite that had been in power all along. There was no Hitler. There was no Holocaust. There were huge numbers of people killed by the Japanese, but there was no extermination programme.
The nature of the past that’s remembered [in Japan] is not the same [as in Germany], and that has to be taken into account.
It wasn’t as clear in Japan, as it was in the German case, what people should make of the war. But one thing that happened in 1945 was that the Americans wrote a constitution for Japan blaming militarism, because they couldn’t blame it on a Nazi party. Most Japanese were perfectly happy with this. They were sick of war; quite content to be pacifists; but there were right-wing nationalists who saw it as robbing Japan of its sovereignty, while the Left defended pacifism along the same lines as an alcoholic who should not be fed with another drink because he’ll go on a bender again.
The war was much discussed [in Japan], especially in the 1950s and 1960s, but the more it was used as a reason for pacifism, the more the nationalist Right would oppose that by saying, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong … it’s all left-wing and foreign propaganda.’ So the debate was really about pacifism instead of being about the political shape of post-war Japan.
It’s not for nothing that Germany, Italy and Japan had the most ferocious left-wing extremism in the 1970s. Partly because some young people felt that they had to sort of make up for what they saw as their parents’ cowardly passivity. They would now be the resisters.
... on Manchukuo and modern parallels.
The whole thing was theatrical with this phoney independent government with Japanese ‘advisors’ behind every public figure, literally like puppet masters, up to the emperor Pu Yi. The aim to create an Asian country with all the different Asian races living in harmony under benevolent Japanese imperial supervision was, of course, fantasy.
But it was a fantasy that people believed in, not always for ignoble reasons. Even though in China it’s still difficult to grasp, there are many, and not just Japanese, who were involved in Japan’s imperial adventure of the 1930s and 1940s who were genuinely idealistic and thought that it was their role to liberate Asia from western imperialism. There were left-wingers who worked in Manchukuo for that reason.
For a writer, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, it’s not very interesting just to look at characters who do bad things because they’re bad people. It’s much more interesting to look at people who lend themselves, for good reasons, to what turns out to be a bad and murderous cause. I think that the tension of the character of Yoshiko Yamaguchi – whether it’s true in real life or not, I don’t know – is that she tries to convince herself that she’s also doing all this for the right reasons, but she’s still an operator.
If you want to think of the role of Japanese intellectuals in the 1930s, their justifications for supporting the Japanese imperial mission in Asia, it’s not entirely unlike the role played by some neocons at the time of the invasion of Iraq. It was not all about oil for them. It was not all about power politics. Many genuinely believed in the American mission to spread democracy, which is a fine ideal, but it can lead to many victims.
The Manchukuo adventure was about resources. It was about realpolitik, about power, and, perversely, a way for Japan to play an international role. After the war, of course, all that collapsed and the new role was ‘de-mokra-si’. And we find Yoshiko Yamaguchi, with the Americans running the occupation period and everything ‘demokrasi, demokrasi’, playing roles in films supporting demokrasi.
The purpose of writing The China Lover was not to teach a history lesson, but history is in the background, so you find characters acting out roles and living up to certain cultural expectations, images, and so on – an entire country was engaged in this enterprise.
... on visiting Manchuria.
Seeing the physical manifestation of history is always interesting – in Manchuria you can see what the Japanese built. They quite consciously tried to build the ideal Asian state, as they saw it at the time. It was a fantasy colony that was, paradoxically, meant to be anti-colonial. The architecture and so on built by the Japanese is a kind of stage set … and colonialism is very much about theatre and theatrical behaviour. The British could never have ruled India if they hadn’t convinced them by their performance that it was natural for a very small number of Europeans, of Brits, to rule over an enormous country. Pomp and ceremony is all performance and theatre. It’s there in film and on the stage, but also in politics and in daily life.
... on the anniversary of Tiananmen and China's rehabilitation.
Officially, I think it already has been rehabilitated, in the sense that the whole world does business with China and, as far as diplomats and governments are concerned, nobody particularly wants to talk about Tiananmen. It’s not so much an international problem, I think, but a domestic problem, even though many young people have only a very vague idea of what happened, and many of them none at all. It still hangs there as a toxic cloud.
... on the fragility of the Chinese Communist Party.
Especially since 1989, the government has, very successfully in my opinion, struck a deal with the urban educated class that is somewhat similar to Singapore, but also to what happened in Europe in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany. The deal is that we will create conditions of order and stability and prosperity so that you can grow richer and richer, and in exchange for that you stay out of politics and you don’t question us. That deal would collapse, I think, in the case of a very serious economic downturn because it means that the legitimacy of the government – and no government can survive forever without legitimacy – rests too much on the promise of continued prosperity.
... on the importance of reflection.
Many people in Japan do feel what Japan did needs to be faced, and in China, too, but a lot of these things are not cultural, they’re political, and you can’t expect the Chinese to face their past entirely honestly if there are too many taboo areas that cannot be faced safely. I don’t think that that is a matter of culture really.
Also I think there’s a difference in facing what people have inflicted on themselves and what they’ve done to others. In Spain, it took quite a long time to get around to really thinking about what happened during the civil war. It’s beginning now. I’m not sure that the Russians are keen to think about what happened under Stalin. There was a little flurry of it just when the thaw began, but there’s not much enthusiasm for it now. I think it’s a question of circumstances. If you have to worry where your next meal is going to come from, you’re not going to be particularly fussed about history, but I think if the Chinese were able to talk and write about all aspects of their history, without fear of trouble, there would be a lot more reflection.
It’s not easy to separate the victims from the perpetrators because many people were both.
