Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

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СКАЧАТЬ universities used textbooks with strong nationalistic overtones, and many foreign academic works were banned. Even children’s hour on the official radio station almost always contained a story about the civilising mission of the brave Japanese soldiers in their struggle with the treacherous Chinese.

      It would have been impossible for a visitor to be untouched by the mood of isolationism and paranoia. Hogg picked up a smattering of spoken Japanese, and his hosts translated press reports for him on a regular basis. He would thus have been aware of the portrayal of China, on radio and in the newspapers, as a nation torn apart by civil strife and liable to follow Russia into a Bolshevik revolution. It was effective propaganda, because it was partially true. The other side of this coin was the message that Japan’s mission in China was a civilising one. The purpose of the military intervention had been to stop a bloody civil war, and to prevent China from going communist. Japan certainly wanted to stop the spread of communism in China, but the propaganda masked Tokyo’s true aim, which was the establishment of regional hegemony, with China in the role of a vassal state.

      Since the early 1930s Japan had been falling under the control of a fanatical wing of the army, bent on imperial expansion. The economic pressures of the Depression had revived age-old dreams of national glory. The war minister General Minami and his senior officers did much to create, and take advantage of, the climate of political extremism. The modest advances towards a parliamentary democracy and the development of pluralist politics in the 1920s were overwhelmed by the wave of nationalism that broke over Japanese politics in the last years of that decade. The civilian politicians in the cabinet provided little opposition as relatively junior officers, none too discreetly backed by their commanders, revived ambitions for Japan to assume its rightful place as ruler of the Asian mainland.

      The apostles of empire were easily able to manipulate a long list of grievances to justify their pursuit of territorial ambition. School history lessons hammered home the message that Japan’s legitimate imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century had been thwarted by the greed of Britain and the other European powers. The list of grievances was long. Australia and America had introduced quotas on Japanese immigration after the First World War. These injected a new racial element into relations, since in their dealings with the Western powers the Japanese had previously sought, and often received, the status of Europeans in Asia due to their perceived social and economic superiority. New trade tariffs designed to protect the US economy from Japanese competition in the twenties only fuelled Tokyo’s resentment towards the West.

      China was easy prey for the militant political class and war-minded army officers in Japan at the start of the 1930s. The Chinese offered only impotent protests as Japanese troops advanced into Manchuria and Tokyo made plain its plans for further territorial conquests. Boycotts of Japanese goods and repeated anti-Japanese demonstrations had had little effect. The social and political chaos in China in the 1920s, as the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek struggled to assert itself over regional warlords and the fast-growing Communist Party, merely accelerated Japan’s ambitions.

      On 18 September 1931, using the flimsy pretext of ‘Chinese provocation’ near the Manchurian town of Mukden, the Japanese began military operations to complete the conquest of Manchuria. The invasion was ordered by the army command, not the cabinet. The government was only consulted when it came to the question of reinforcements. From that moment until the Japanese defeat at the end of the Second World War the military were effectively in charge of the Japanese government.

      The Christian co-op movement in Japan was one of very few voices raised against the government. But it was a weak and muted voice. Christianity had only been made legal in Japan in 1878. Shinto, the state religion, was a traditional set of beliefs rooted in the worship of spirits and of the Emperor, whose divinity was unchallenged. For centuries Shinto had co-existed with Buddhism, and had to some extent incorporated Buddhist beliefs. From the late nineteenth century it was used as a means of rallying the nation against Western imperialism. It focused on emperor-worship, and thus became a more overtly political religion. The core Shinto philosophy held that the Japanese emperor was descended directly from the Sun Goddess; that he was therefore of divine descent; that the Japanese islands and people were also of divine descent; and that Japan was therefore superior to other nations.

      With his strong Baptist upbringing, George Hogg took a keen interest in the travails of the Christian Church in a country dominated by an alien and aggressive religion. There were only 300,000 Christians in a nation of seventy-three million. Persecution in the seventeenth century had wiped out most Christians, and the small community that had emerged after the legalisation of the faith was scattered, frightened and demoralised.

      Fearful that history might repeat itself, Dr Kagawa and other Christian leaders worked hard to find an honourable compromise with the government’s aggressive nationalism. They carefully avoided condemnation of Japan’s military operations in China, causing Hogg to note wryly that at least the Church had not gone so far as to pray for a Japanese victory.

       TWO Shanghai

      ‘No poppa, no momma, no whisky soda.’

      George Hogg left Japan on the French ship Président Doumer, and arrived in Shanghai in February 1938. He only intended to stay for two weeks before rejoining Aunt Muriel in Japan, from where they planned to travel together to India, and then return to England. Since the First World War Shanghai, styling itself ‘the Paris of the East’, or ‘the Pearl of the Orient’, had become a favourite destination for well-heeled international travellers. There were three million Chinese and seventy thousand foreigners in the city, with miles of slums concealed behind a façade of tall and elegant buildings on the north bank of the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtse. Now the tourists, along with the cruise liners that used to tie up at the Bund, had gone, but Shanghai still clung to remnants of its old lifestyle.

      On the eve of the Japanese take-over Shanghai was essentially three cities: the international settlement, under the joint control of the British and the Americans, covered an area of eight square miles on the bank of the Huangpu. The commercial, industrial and shipping businesses were all centred here, as were most of the foreign residents, who lived a life totally divorced from the Chinese population around them. Policing and taxation were controlled by the international powers, and the Chinese contribution to the lifestyle of the expatriates lay largely in the provision of cheap labour and domestic servants. The French concession was smaller, but similarly organised. Beyond that lay the teeming Chinese quarter.

      George Hogg stayed with missionary contacts of Aunt Muriel. Frank and Aimee Millican were American Methodists who had been in China since 1907. The Reverend Millican organised the church and distributed Christian literature in the city, while his wife ran a Christian broadcasting station.

      In Shanghai Hogg received a brutal introduction to what Japan’s civilising mission meant on the ground. Japanese forces had taken all but the international settlements of the city in fighting that summer, while Hogg was mulling over his future in Hertfordshire. He was studying the co-operative movement with his Christian hosts in Japan when Tokyo’s troops stormed the Chinese capital Nanjing in mid-December 1937. The massacres that followed lasted seven weeks, and were still continuing while Hogg began to grapple with what had happened in Shanghai.

      He found a city crowded with refugees and devastated by war. Scores of desolate, ruined villages lay just beyond the city limits. Within the French concession and the international settlement there were sandbags at the entrances of all the main buildings, pillboxes on street corners and sentries with fixed bayonets everywhere. He wrote home remarking on the swarms of urchin children who attached themselves to any foreigner, crying, ‘No poppa, no momma, no whisky soda.’

      Hogg liked Shanghai. He found the city strangely exhilarating. This was no leisurely hitch-hike across СКАЧАТЬ