Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus
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.
‘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 the United States, no guided tour of the co-ops in Japan. He had been pitched in among a population which was fighting to survive. The streets of the international settlement had become home for tens of thousands of refugees driven from their villages in the countryside. For the first time in his life Hogg saw human degradation at first hand. The refugees ate, slept, made love, gave birth and died on the pavements of the city. Old newspapers were fought over by the street people because the scant warmth they provided could mean the difference between life and death during the bitter nights.
Everything in Shanghai was for sale. Hogg described street sellers touting fried eels in one hand and fountain pens in the other. In between there was nothing that was not on offer. There was no luxury that could not be bought, no whim that could not be satisfied. This was an aspect to life in the city that even a naïve young Englishman could not have missed, although he took good care not to mention it in his letters home.
Hogg arrived in the city only weeks before W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who had been commissioned to write a travel book about China. The book would be called Journey to a War, and in researching it the two writers joined the growing foreign press corps in China, of which George Hogg was about to become a very junior member.
Auden and Isherwood had known each other since they were both at St Edmund’s school, at Hindhead in Surrey. They had achieved literary fame – and had become lovers – during the thirties, that ‘low, dishonest decade’, as Auden was to describe it a year later. Isherwood had already published his best-known works, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Sally Bowles (1937; later included in Goodbye to Berlin). The two men collaborated on three plays, and enjoyed a sporadic sexual relationship throughout their long friendship.
Isherwood immediately saw through the ‘impressive façade of a great city’. Shanghai was nothing more, he thought, than a collection of semi-skyscrapers dumped on an ‘unhealthy mud bank’. Behind the façade lay a sordid and shabby mob of smaller buildings: ‘Nowhere a fine avenue, spacious park, an imposing central square. Nowhere anything civic at all.’
Despite this indictment of China’s greatest city, the literary couple found plenty to distract them: ‘The tired or lustful businessman will find everything here to gratify his desires,’ wrote Isherwood. ‘You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bathhouses and brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult to obtain but there is enough gin and whisky to float a fleet of battleships. Finally if you ever repent there are churches and chapels of all denominations.’