MY DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

As a card-carrying member of the XY chromosome set for many years, I have been carrying about a rather heavy, perhaps even shameful burden in the course of my life. I’m sure most of you at this point might entertain vague visions of some horridly detestable condition, such as having a dirty sox fetish…or perhaps a being a closet nose-picker, a pocket-pool player or something of that sort. Nothing as interesting as that, I’m afraid.

Nope. Truth be told, I’m a romantic. That’s right, a romantic. Moreover, not just a romantic, but an old fashioned romantic. Oh, it’s certainly true that I am a romantic in the sense that, as a keen student of history, I look fondly (perhaps too fondly) at the past. As most can tell you, the past we recall or dream of was certainly not the rosy past we all too often look back upon in our daydreams with wistful sighs, which is of course a mostly unrealistic construct of overactive imaginings and convenient oversights of hard, cold (often brutal) fact. The factual past was, as circumstance has demonstrated over and over again throughout the ages, a nasty, dirty, often squalid and unpleasant time, with just as much human grief, unhappiness, desperation and sickness as our modern contemporary equivalent. Perhaps the only real difference between the classical ‘past’ and our modern present is the fact that in the past several hundred years science and technology have arisen exponentially, their combined effect typically being merely that they have somewhat softened the hard edges of a universal human experience that has essentially remained otherwise unchanging since the dawn of recorded history.

It is also a well-known and acknowledged fact that, due to a quirk of human nature, we tend to sublimate or to entirely forget the less pleasant details of former experiences whilst simultaneously enhancing recollected events and experiences to the extent that they almost become fairytale-like in our recall. A most interesting quirk, that, and one cannot help but wonder what it is in our brain’s complex biochemical matrix that prompts that response to past adversity, misfortune and discouragement…a primeval survival mechanism, perhaps?

So, what is a romantic, exactly? Classically described, a romantic is someone who looks at the past through rose-colored glasses. Someone who feels that somehow, some way the past was far preferable to the present. Author James Thurber’s ‘Walter Mitty’, in Thurber’s 1939 satirical work The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, was a classic romantic, among his other grandiose attributes. A person who, as he sits at his dusty desk in the accounting section of a large business firm, dreams of riding off on a white charger to rescue the royal princess instead of concerning himself with more practical ‘accounting’ matters, of ascending Himalayan summits and single-handedly defeating a hoard of savage, blood-thirsty pirates

Many romantics are natural-born dreamers, or daydreamers, individuals who secretly feel convinced that they were ‘born before their time’, that they somehow should have lived in an earlier time or be capable of superhuman, heroic feats denied to the typical, average man. And of course, the syndrome is not the special franchise of males alone, since there are likely also a good number of women who probably have wished they were far more exceptional than they actually are. Sadly enough, most of us are completely ordinary in the expression of our lives, perhaps even drab, boring, timid and/or totally forgettable in the minds of others.

As most of us quickly learn, fate and fortune have a disturbing and unpredictable way of altering our individual life circumstances as we grow out of infancy. Certainly, there are identifiable factors such as basic intelligence and exceptional beauty that heavily sway the odds one way or another towards being perceived as unique or not. It is certainly true that beauty is one such dynamic and that individuals who are born with perfect symmetry and visual charm have an inside track on the path to exceptionalism. Who among us, possessed of a face or body that is rather unremarkable, has not at some time gazed longingly at someone who has that classic female profile or handsomely chiseled masculine face and wished secretly that he or she could trade places with that person?

Intelligence is another dynamic that sets one apart on a higher, perhaps more admirable level, although it’s no secret that nature favors a more average mean and that the majority of people, being ‘average’, are often unappreciative of someone who is clearly superior to them in thought, reflection and/or basic essence. I think here of that sad fact that to be born with an exceptionally high-quality intellect is essentially to be born to a life of unending sadness, when all the sheer stupidity, crudities and ignorance of the masses has to be contended with each and every day of one’s life accrue.

At any rate, this is all a digression, for while I am a self-described romantic, I am certainly not a Walter Mitty, nor do I normally entertain dreams of being or doing something that I know my basic assets are incapable of attaining.

No, I am simply a person who, perhaps atypically for most males, is rather easily overcome with sentiment and emotion when I read certain books or see certain films dealing with the eternal male-female love-story.

Most recently, the old tear ducts were triggered by a book I read titled Sword and Blossom, a fascinating biographical account of two lovers just before the turn of the century, one an upper-class member of the British aristocracy and the other the humble daughter of a Japanese shop-keeper. It is at its most basic core, a real-life counterpart to the fictional tale that ended up as Giacomo Puccini’s hauntingly beautiful opera, Madam Butterfly.

In that opera, which is set in 1904, an American Naval Lieutenant takes a young Japanese woman (named Chochosan, ‘Butterfly’, aged 15) as his ‘convenience-wife’, intending to leave her once he has found a suitable American woman to marry. Such was the practice, after all, back in those times and it is not uncommon to find this still going on here and there around the world, men typically being more concerned with the physical conveniences of sex rather than with actual love.

In Puccini’s opera, Lt. Pinkerton (Puccini’s character’s name) ultimately becomes aware of the intensity of Butterfly’s devoted love and loyalty to him (to the extent of bearing his son in Pinkerton’s absence). But too late, for realising that Pinkerton does not honor her as his true wife, Butterfly commits ritual suicide in the accepted manner of one born into the Samurai class (by cutting the artery in her neck) and dies.

Madam Butterfly is a powerfully evocative opera, certainly one of Puccini’s ‘modern era’ masterpieces, but it effectively highlights one of the most important dynamics of that previous (late 19th century) era, when the technologically advanced Western capitalist powers force a culturally isolated Japan to open itself to foreign trade.

At that time, ironically, America and Europe considered the Chinese and Japanese to be barbarians, when in fact it soon became apparent that it was the Western cultures that were actually less refined by direct comparison. In keeping with that cultural perception, Western individuals were stringently admonished not to fraternize with the Asian women and it was looked down upon by both the military forces and the higher levels of Western society to have an affair with a ‘local’ or ‘native’ woman, let alone marry one.

Of course, love is love (just as sex is sex) and there is no set of rules yet formulated that can adequately quantify or adjudicate the phenomenon of physical attraction of man to woman (and vice versa). This is especially true in wartime, and back in that era war was almost a constant factor in the affairs of most nations. Love would often persist in flourish amidst the bleakness and tragedy of war then and it still does today, although most often it was lust and not love that was being felt.

Be that as it may, Puccini’s beautiful and haunting opera (make no mistake: I am not a fan of most opera by a long stretch) strikes a redolent chord time and time again when the chronicle of relations between Western and Asian nations is closely examined. Sword and Blossom, by Peter Pagnamenta and Momoko Williams, has many amazing similarities and congruencies to the fictional story of Lt. Pinkerton and his young Japanese bride, Butterfly, and it also occurs in exactly the same time-frame.

Let me, at this point, make another digression (I am famous for this sort of tangential diversion, after all) and remark upon a phenomenon all too commonly encountered in the United States today. I speak principally of something known colloquially as Yellow Fever. Yellow fever is a term used principally by millennials to describe the seeming preference of young White males for young Asian females and there has been a huge amount of discussion and controversy over the matter throughout both written and social media.

Clearly, with so many people weighing in on the subject and with so much polar antipathy involved, there have been a great many opinions aired on the subject (many of them not well argued). According to the common thread, White females feel that they are being deserted by young (White) men who invariably seek out and are attracted to young Asian-Americans (for example). Young Asian men in many cases bitterly resent this ‘poaching’ on what they perceive as their rightful preserve and feel somehow that the practice is ethically, morally and culturally wrong. There is clearly a very strident and obvious element of jealousy underlying their (Asian males’) complaints, although that aspect of the issue is so sensitive that most do not want to acknowledge it or openly discuss it.

Disregarding any attempt to establish the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of Yellow Fever, I think it is salient to delve into one aspect of Asian culture pertaining to this attraction that bears closer examination and that is that that while Western women tend, by and large, to be ‘larger’ (and often heavier) than their Asian sisters, the average Asian woman is both in terms of stature and weight far slimmer, slightly more delicate in physical structure and…if one dare say it, more feminine in their nature, demeanor and deportment.

Noted Japanophile Ian Baruma even makes a specific remark on this characteristic in his 2008 fictional novel, The China Lover (ISBN 978-1-59420-194-3), a book about the Japanese occupation of Manchuria during the late 1930s. In it, he describes the merits of Chinese and Japanese women. “Every man has his weaknesses. Mine was young women, especially Chinese woman and most especially Chinese actresses. We Japanese like to pretend that most Chinese in Manchukuo (the Japanese name for Manchuria) were Manchus. In fact, there was little distinction between the two races. Chinese or Machukuo, I adored making love to them. They had none of that giggly school-girl coyness of Japanese women. Their erotic attraction was like Chinese poetry—refined, romantic, elusive. There is something particularly alluring about the Chinese body, which matches the Chinese mind in its subtlety and finesse: the long elegant legs, the pert, round bottom, the perfect breasts—not too small nor large. Where the Western women is large and coarse, like an overripe fruit, and the Japanese woman is small, shapeless and bland, like cold bean curd, the Chinese woman is a banquet of flavors, spicy, sweet, sour, bitter; she is the finest specimen of a racial selection that found its perfect form after more than 5000 years of civilization. And the feeling that she was mine, all mine, afforded a pleasure that was more than just sexual. I would go so far as to say it was spiritual.”

I could easily add that these days, with the present wave of women’s empowerment at its shrill peak, the ‘largeness and coarseness’ Baruma refers to is even more pronounced, making the interesting mix of East and West that is the average Asian-American female even more appealing and attractive to White men long since grown tired of being brow-beaten simply because they are men with all the traits of biologically equipped males.

Naturally, it cannot be overlooked that Asian cultures are and have always been traditionally male-dominated, that Asian women have been culturally suppressed, if you will, by male chauvinism for centuries. It is only very recently, with the most recent wave of world-wide ‘women’s movement’, that Asian women have started asserting their equality in social, economic and cultural terms. Given that many Asian families are still strongly influenced by the ancient Confucian shared heritage, however, that essential feminine gracefulness and charm that attends their subservient mien has been strongly set in those cultures.

As someone who was early-on struck by the feminine beauty of Asian women (while I was a student, many, many years ago in Berkeley, CA), I eventually ended up marrying a Chinese woman (from Hong Kong), although I had spent a number of years in the Far East and had determined to marry an Asian woman far before I met my present wife.

I thus view the present controversy over Yellow Fever with mixed feelings, often feeling that the essential interactions between today’s young White males and young Asian-American women are more powerfully influenced by the superficialities of our dreadful American pop-culture than by any traditional considerations (with perhaps more substance and gravity). In other words, the uniform attitudinal homogeneity of the sex, drugs & rock’n roll culture, if you will.

In the old Asian cultures, the woman’s role was to be a nurturer, bearer of children and strong supportive backbone of the family. In today’s bastard American culture, so heavily influenced (adversely) by pop culture superficialities (read: excesses by the so-called entertainment industries), such as rampant adulation of pop-culture celebrities, sexual looseness and total rejection of cultural antecedents/traditions, succeeding generations of Asian-Americans are becoming so thoroughly acculturated that they are (except for the obvious visual characteristics that identify them as Asian) pretty much indistinguishable from all the other homogenous masses of young Americans.

Thus, young ‘studly’ White men tend to seek out Asian-identified young women as being (so they perceive) desirable sexual objects, perhaps less resistant, more pliant and more ‘accessible’ than their women’s movement White female counterparts. Then too, there is the fact that Asian people rarely tend to become obese and usually remain slender and physically trim throughout their lives, whereas the average White American tends these days to eat inappropriately, gain weight and disregard the best interests of a healthy lifestyle (although that is discernibly changing, most recently). It is also a fact that Asian women tend to be less hirsute, a characteristic that pleased me no end when I first encountered it.

From a strictly aesthetic personal standpoint, I have always felt that Asian women are among the most beautiful to be found anywhere on the planet, but my bias is well known to all my friends and relatives. There is, however, more to it than that. Equally attractive to me has been the strong Asian family ethic that derives from the Far East’s near universal Confucian cultural heritage. There is a strong sense of maternal nurturing in most young Asian woman that has always appealed greatly to me, a person who at an early age lost my own father & mother, and the sight of a young Asian mother with her child (or children) never fails to hit a soft spot within me with all the emotional impact of an arrow. Then too, there are the other aspects of a shared Confucian heritage that include respect, even reverence for education and learning. All of these characteristics are to be found in the Asian cultures and all are most desirable in potential mates.

Back in 1904, when the essential stories central to both Puccini’s opera and the modern book Sword and Blossom emerged, there was certainly a sort of secret admiration for these classical elements of the young Asian woman that flew in the face of ‘official’ state policies and prejudices. Hence the stuff of magnificent tales of love flourishing in the midst of both moral and political adversity.

But to return to Sword and Blossom, this marvelous story concerns a certain scion of a wealthy English family (resident in Ireland) whose name is Arthur Hart-Synnot and a young Japanese woman of modest origins named Masa Suzuki.

Ostensibly, a story of enduring love by an English officer for a young Japanese woman (and described as such by reviewers), it is not so much a story of enduring affection as a tale (albeit true and extraordinarily well researched by its two authors) reflecting a similar motif as found in Puccini’s famed opera. I don’t mind revealing that in the end it is a semi-sweet tragedy, just like Pinkerton’s affections for Chochosan in Butterfly, but what makes the story so fascinating is (in my opinion) its contrast between the protagonist’s (Arthur Hart-Synnot) concept of romantic love and his declared love Masa Suzuki’s very different and far more realistic understanding of what enduring love is actually all about.

The story in a nutshell finds Hart-Synnot, a young higher-class English officer of above average intelligence, who uses his linguistic skills to take a post in Japan, where he quickly cultivates an appreciation for the nation’s culture. It’s already been noted that miscgenistic assignations were not uncommon in colonial England, out in the farthest corners of the Empire, but they were never officially condoned or approved of by conventional English morality. That did not stop them from developing.

As his career, assisting the Japanese Army in its war with Russia, gathers momentum, he meets the daughter of a shop-keeper whom he hires to act as his housekeeper. Hart-Synnot, a product of constipated Victorian society, quickly finds her absolutely charming and a relationship grows that results in his conviction that he loves her exclusively. As the decades unfold, first impacted by the Chinese-Russian war, then successively by the First World War, his love for her continues apparently unabated (as his letters to her reveal; they were discovered by accident in 1984, prompting the book). Adept in the Japanese language, it is touching to read his florid bilingual expressions of love for this woman, Masa, who meanwhile bears two of his children.

Then in the First World War, he is gravely injured by a German artillery shell that so badly mangles both legs that they must be amputated at the knee. Hart-Synnot recuperates in a hospital in France, where his growing dependence on the rude artificial legs he has been given result in his becoming attached to a young English nurse who takes a special liking to him.

Eventually, he decides to marry the nurse, thus forsaking faithful Masa and his two sons, although at the very end of the book, despite her initial anger at being so grievously ‘betrayed’, she eventually accepts the unhappy outcome with traditional Japanese resignation to the inevitable (Shigata ganai or ”It can’t be helped”).

The two authors of Sword and Blossom, one a Japanese woman who is married to an Englishman and the other her English male co-author, have done an incredible thing in constructing this story from Hart-Synnot’s letters (hers were all destroyed during the war) alone, and perhaps even more interesting is the accurate portrayal of that era’s turbulent historical setting, as East and West came into contact and conflict.

As regards Hart-Synnot’s enduring regard for Masa Suzuki, to his credit he retains love and affection for his ‘convenience wife’ as can be seen in his final letters before his death, despite the fact that his demeanor ultimately reveals him to be a not-atypical Englishman, quite egotistical and self-centered to the usual extent so many men are. Still, there’s no denying the strong attachment he had for Masa and it is certainly a paean to the traditional allegiance and faithfulness evidenced by Japanese women for their men (as the old culture demanded). In all of this, the story is a remarkable one, all the more admirable for being both meticulously researched and eminently readable.

The book holds great charm for me, as someone who has all my life been affected with what so many younger people callously dismiss as Yellow Fever today and each morning as I read several chapters in it, I found myself utterly fixated on the book and its amazing revelations of this fascinating miscegenistic liaison at a time when cross-cultural love affairs were severely censured.

But then, I am as I have already said, a hopeless romantic who is quite capable of being moved to the point of being somewhat misty-eyed by certain events in life (such as passionate personal love affairs, the death of a much-loved dog, sad stories…both human and about dogs…and other matters of the human spirit in the ever-uncertain world of someone who is both a would-be Stoic and a seemingly born devotee of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as an avowed ‘non-believer’).

Having long been avidly interested in Asian cultures, as well as someone who has invariably found Asian women extremely desirable (vice Western women, most of whom have never elicited much interest from me), I read voraciously in the area of Asian and Asian-American literature, hence this subject of a cross-cultural love is particularly of interest.

I recently saw, for the first time, a film starring Tom Cruise titled The Last Samurai. As much as I disdain banty little Scientologist Tom Cruise, the story was quite good and the film also masterfully executed. Of course, it is total fiction, albeit a story based on many real elements (including the model for Cruise’s character who was, surprisingly, in fact a French officer of the late 1800s who had a similar proclivity for Japanese culture).

Much criticism has been levied at The Last Samurai since it was released, not least for its over-dramatisation of the vaunted Samurai/Bushido culture, but particularly for its incorporation of the hackneyed theme of ‘brave Western male conquers all and gets gorgeous Asian gal in the process’ also used by James Clavell so successfully in his Taipan and Shogun novels/films.

The actual chances of any truly high-class Japanese or Chinese woman falling for ANY Westerner were almost nil back in those days, although hook-ups between common bar-girls and prostitutes certainly were not at all uncommon and were often the actual norm (given the absence of ‘acceptable’ Western women). Again, the romantic possibilities in these stories are largely ‘sexed-up’ to appeal to Western (White) manhood’s sense of primacy in the world. So too do we find in The Last Samurai barbarian Tom Cruise not only turning against his culture (as in Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves) but going native with such enthusiasm that he literally becomes A Man Called Horse on another continent.

All that having been said, the odds against things of this sort happening in real, actual life in that period are almost as good as they are for winning the Powerball mega lottery. However, they do make great dramas and there’s a strong element of romance in them (strong, brave man meets courageous, dedicated woman and they ride off into the sunset together, etc.). After all, everyone loves a good romance, don’t they? Perhaps not fully everyone, but once again we find an element of Thurber’s famed character Walter Mitty beneath all the imagining, since doesn’t every man want…in his innermost secret fantasies…a gorgeous, demure gal as his life-companion? And doesn’t every woman ever born (except for some who fancy themselves gay in our confused modern era) secretly pine for a strong, muscle-bound man, possessed of great wisdom, humor and moral character?

Not an unfamiliar theme, no matter what era one examines. And the sad fact that most men/women marry average, dull, perhaps rude and stolidly overweight partners is hard to reconcile with these wild dreams that so many have yet are realistic enough to accept the fact that they are merely dreams and not possessed of any vestige of reality.

There are a fair number of similar books and films that utilize this theme and in so doing, the real issues implicit in real-life cross-cultural relationships are seldom explored to any substantial degree. It does engender a lot of what I consider largely misinformed and inappropriately heated controversy, though (most often encountered on the internet via social media).

The fact is that any cross-cultural relationship takes strenuous, constant and continuing effort, commitment and dedication towards making what is all too easy to become frustrated with and insolvably problematic: the daily interactions of far less spectacularly romantic nature.

Relationships between men and women are hard enough as it is, without the added minefield of cultural differences to get across intact and uninjured. Even when both partners possess a preponderance of shared values, there are so many other dynamics involved that may at any point destroy and make irreparable any relationship between a man and a woman. This is particularly true in Western society, with the growing wave of jarring protest accompanying the modern women’s movement and even in very traditional societies like those of China and Japan, the unstoppable incursion of American mores, pop-culture and cultural trends has had unignorable impacts as well.

If and when anything that even remotely approximates something like that described in Sword and Blossom (or Shogun, or The Last Samurai, ad infinitum) occurs today, it would have to be so freakishly abnormal as to be rightly the subject of speculative fantasy. And indeed, it is usually treated as such.

Personally, I’m waiting for a big blockbuster film to come out with a whole new take on this subject: a film about an Earthman and a female of an ALF (extraterrestrial) species from another Galaxy. Although this theme has been explored to a limited degree in the sci-fi pulp fiction world of the 50s and 60s, it seems that the time appears ripe for that particular idea to surface in Hollywood. Perhaps even with a twist on the old ‘women’s rights’ movement, as the Earthman finds (much to his intense distress) that his sexy alien love interest intends to wear the virtual pants in their association until she tires of him and eats him alive.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, I highly recommend Sword and Blossom to you if you are a conventional closet romantic like me.