Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus
his way into the second class and the chance of some fresh air.
In New York George went straight to a Fellowship of Reconciliation conference before he took to the road. To everyone’s surprise a delegate from China made a speech damning the Japanese attack on Shanghai and defending China’s right to meet force with force. He then resigned from the Fellowship. This triumph of nationalism over pacifism stunned the meeting.
George wrote to his mother, ‘I don’t think there are many real pacifists in the world…Aren’t you glad when you hear China has pulled off something good in the war?’ It is not recorded how this letter went down at Harpenden, nor whether George told Muriel that he had begun to question the politics with which he had grown up. But he consistently distanced himself from the family’s pacifist beliefs throughout his time in China, although return letters from his mother never challenge his apostasy.
Hogg spent several months in the autumn of 1937 hitch-hiking across and up and down the USA. By his estimate he covered 5,500 miles by car and lorry, sleeping where he could. On several occasions when he could not find anywhere to stay he was given a cell for the night by the local police. The experience was not always pleasant. He described one of his jailors, a police sergeant, as ‘a most sinister man. A steel tube took the place of a severed right hand and he was driving nails into the wall with it; no hammer was necessary. The bare room [of the police station] contained a few people standing around the stove; they spat expertly and frequently. “If you are in more of a hurry than I am,” said the sergeant, “there is always the sidewalk outside.” Only pride forbade an immediate retreat. His face was as hard as his steel tube hand; eyes blue, when you saw them, hollow cheeks and an Irish jaw. He showed me a musty pile of blankets in a filthy cell. “Up at four and we don’t feed anyone, get that straight,” he said.’
In the Deep South an introduction from Muriel took him to the Delta co-operative farm in Rochdale, Mississippi, where black and white sharecroppers were working together to pay off their debts and buy their land. The co-operative had been founded the previous year to take in workers who had been sacked from cotton farms after trying to start a union, and it made a big impression on the English visitor: here was theory in practice, an ideal that had actually been translated into working reality.
Still immersed in Gone with the Wind, Hogg travelled through the states and cities in which Margaret Mitchell had set her novel. He went to Richmond, Charleston and Savannah. The widespread evasion of the Prohibition laws, still supposedly in full force, made Hogg laugh: ‘Tennessee is dry!’ he wrote. ‘They voted dry because everyone makes a good profit out of illegal drink. The state police make good tips, the people get cheap liquor and the bootleggers make big profits. But the drink is still very cheap because the state can’t tax it!’
The final leg of his journey across the United States brought a stroke of extraordinary luck, the same good fortune that would carry him through his perilous years in China. Some days before he was due to meet Aunt Muriel in San Francisco, Hogg found himself well over a thousand miles to the east, in the plains of Texas. Forced to stand outside city limits because hitching was against the law in the city, he spent day after day watching cars accelerate past him. Finally one car stopped. The driver said nothing, but drove west for a half an hour before asking his passenger where he was going.
‘To Japan and China with my aunt,’ replied Hogg. After considering this statement the driver said, ‘I’m on my way to China too. I’m travelling with an Englishwoman named Muriel Lester.’ It turned out that the driver was a Dr Lacey from the American Bible Society, and that he was taking a shipment of Bibles to Japan. George went with him for the remaining 1,600 miles, and met his aunt on the quayside.
A fortnight later, in mid-November 1937, aunt and nephew arrived in Yokohama, and went to the port city of Kobe to stay with their host in Japan, Dr Toyohiko Kagawa. This remarkable man was a Christian leader in a nation where the Emperor was considered divine, and Shinto, the worship of ancestral and other gods, was the state religion. He preached pacifism in a society that been indoctrinated in the militaristic ethic, and had twice been imprisoned for trade-union activism. Kagawa had been born in 1888, orphaned at an early age, and brought up by American missionaries. Disowned by the rest of his family after his conversion to Christianity, he went to theological colleges in the United States and Japan, but rejected the endless doctrinal arguments and decided instead to work among the poor in the slums. He played a major role in the successful campaign for universal adult suffrage in 1925, and would go on to publicly apologise in 1940 for the Japanese invasion of China. This inevitably led to further arrest and imprisonment.
Among his other activities, Dr Kagawa had spent twenty years developing a co-operative system among farmers and small businessmen around Kobe. While Aunt Muriel sought meetings with government officials to give them the benefit of her views on militarism, George was shown co-op banks, farms, restaurants and market gardens. He also learnt from Dr Kagawa how a government dominated by the military had drawn on a deeprooted cultural and religious belief in Japanese racial superiority to sanctify, and thus legitimise, the Chinese campaign in the eyes of the people. Japan projected its role in China as a civilising mission, designed to bring peace and prosperity to a country racked by warlordism and corruption. The message resonated deep within the Japanese national psyche.
Hogg found himself in a nation gripped by chauvinist hysteria. The slow-moving invasion of China had begun in the 1890s, with an encroachment into the north-eastern region of Manchuria. But from 1931 the pace of conquest quickened. By the time George and Aunt Muriel arrived, Japan had occupied large areas of China, established a puppet state, Manchukuo, in the north-east, and taken control of the old imperial capital Beijing, then called Peking.
In Japan, criticism of the government was forbidden. Anyone who dared to publicly question official policy was dismissed from his or her job, and even risked assassination. Newspapers and radio were heavily censored. Foreigners could be accused of spying on the slightest pretext. Schools and 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