I understand he has put the case that the Americans also should be charged with war crimes, because of the atomic bombings.

  Exactly so, she said. He argued that the tribunal had the opportunity to judge both Japan and the Allies, to put war itself on trial.

  The words struck me with great power. To put war itself on trial.

  If only, I said.

  It happened that we had stopped by Yamanashi’s memorial to the Class of ’42, the Cherry Blossoms of Mejirogaoka, fallen.

  We read the inscription, stood a moment in silence, bowed our heads.

  I remember the time of year, the month, though not the precise date. November in Japan was still autumn, the maple leaves a glorious overblown riot of colour, all reds and golds and every shade in between, all of it blazing, bright in the sunlight, and yet, with that first hint of chill, there was the sense that it was soon to fade.

  That day the young Crown Prince was taking part with his classmates in a boisterous round of games, a tournament known as kibasen – a cavalry charge. The teams formed into groups of four, three of them linking arms and forming a horse, two to the front, one to the rear. The fourth member climbed up and sat astride as if on horseback. On a chant of ichi-ni-san they let out a yell and charged towards their opponents, jostling and grappling at close quarters. The aim was to barge or drag the opponent to the ground, or steal the coloured bandana from the rider’s head. The last team standing were the victors.

  I stood on the sidelines with Mrs Vining, looking on and cheering. I wondered aloud if this little game would be banned under the new regime as overly militaristic.

  I sincerely hope not, she said.

  We watched these young men, in their uniforms, their high-necked tunics, running and playing in the autumn sun, celebrating their little victories, stoical in their little defeats, and neither of us acknowledged our trepidation over an announcement to be made later that day.

  The long drawn-out trial of Tojo and his generals had finally reached its conclusion, delayed even further by an adjournment until after the US general election. No doubt this was to ensure the political will to enforce the decision of the court.

  The verdicts had been announced. The Japanese Nation was declared guilty of an ‘aggressive war.’ (Was there such a thing as a passive war?) Tojo and his fellow defendants had likewise been found guilty of war crimes and atrocities. All that remained was for the sentences to be imposed, on this bright, clear autumn day.

  Mrs Vining and I tried not to appear too sombre as we took leave of each other, she to accompany the Crown Prince back to the Palace, I to return to my lodgings. But as we parted, we saw it in each other’s eyes, and we nodded in silent acknowledgement.

  The Crown Prince’s team had won. He came over and bowed to us, saluted, then ran off laughing.

  The evening had grown cool and I was glad to close the shoji screens and keep warm with my legs tucked under the little kotatsu heated table. Tomiko poured me some miso soup and I switched on the radio, waited while it whined and droned into life. I turned the dial, tuning through static and interference and eventually, crackling over the airwaves, came the voice of Sir William Webb, chairman of the tribunal. In a thin tinny monotone he read out the judgements. Sixteen of the accused, including Shimada, were given life imprisonment. Togo and six of the other military leaders were sentenced to death. They would hang by the neck till they were dead, at a date yet to be announced.

  After all that had gone before, it was strangely perfunctory, and rather shabby, and very sad.

  I said as much to Tomiko, and once again we exchanged mantras.

  Shikata ga nai, It can’t be helped.

  Nantoka Naru. Somehow or other, things will work out.

  Then, in English, she managed, Maybe now Japan no more war.

  We can hope, I said. We can hope.

  I had seen photographs of the defendants during the trial and they had looked beaten and dispirited, weary of it all and longing for an end to it. The day after the sentencing, the Nippon Times carried a front-page picture of the same men standing to attention, dignified as they faced their fate.

  The accompanying article called for calm. It urged the Japanese people to hold emotion in check and view the verdict calmly and objectively. What it represented was a return to the rule of law, the only hope of the world. The execution of a few misguided and exhausted individuals, it argued, was a relatively minor episode and must not obscure the greater significance of the verdict in the light of its long term historical purpose.

  God save us all from long term historical purpose.

  The sentences were carried out on a cold drab December morning, unannounced, with no newspaper coverage, no final photographs of the accused. (There would be a small formal notice the following day). They went to their deaths unheralded, and largely unmourned. But Mrs Vining told me the mood at the Palace was sombre, and the Crown Prince was unable to celebrate his fifteenth birthday, as to do so on such a day would have been deemed inappropriate and inauspicious.

  The Emperor’s Poetry Party, Utakai Hajime, was formal in the extreme. It followed a thousand-year-old ritual, precise in every detail and strictly hierarchical.

  The ceremony was to welcome in the New Year and let the court poets recite their verses and also to appreciate the poems written by the royal family for the occasion. In modern times there were submissions from poets outwith this gilded inner circle, and the best poems, as chosen by a panel of judges, were also read out at the ceremony. These commoners – the word was used without irony – were granted the privilege of being allowed to attend and hear their poems chanted aloud in a ceremony that was part performance, part ritual. It was worlds away from Basho on his narrow road to the deep north, or Issa in his flea-ridden hut.

  And yet….

  That year there were three Westerners in attendance, Mrs Vining, Mr Edmund Blunden and myself. Mr Blunden, as English as his name, was the poet-as-official-observer to the Japanese Nation. I had thought him a cold fish, like many from his country and class, aloof and withdrawn. But on reading his poetry I realised his demeanour was due, at least in part, to what he had endured in the First World War. He had enlisted as a boy, straight from school, and served for two years on the front line. It was clear from his work that the experience had brutalised and traumatised him, and it tortured him still.

  It was yet another irony that we sat here, exchanging literary pleasantries across a polished table. Neither of us could have imagined such a thing when we were young men, when he had fought for his beliefs and I had gone to prison for mine. Yet here we were, here we were, in a room redolent with thick musky incense, in the Imperial Palace, in presence of our (former) foes.

  Blunden and I had not submitted poems. As gaijin we thought that would have been stretching protocol to breaking point. But Mrs Vining, entering into the spirit of things, had written a poem in English and sent it to one of the judges. She had given a copy to me, written out in her elegant script. The theme for the year was Asano yuki: Morning Snow.

  The morning snow

  Lies deep and white

  And gleaming in

  The early light.

  I wonder what

  Footsteps will mark

  Its innocence

  Before the dark.

  To her surprise it was translated into Japanese and distributed around the palace, and it was even published in a newspaper. Part of her was pleased, but overriding that was a kind of embarrassment.

  It was only meant as token, she said. I’m not a proper poet at all, just an amateur. I mean everyone in Japan writes poetry. And almost everyone writes better poetry than this!

  Nevertheless…. I said.

  Come on Mister Blyth, she said.

  I’m mindful of something I read by Rilke in one of his letters to a young poet. He said nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism.

  Nevertheless…. She said, and laughed.

  I told her one of my own early poems had been called Snow in Moonlight. it was one of the pair that had been published in the London Mercury.

  I copied it out from memory and handed it to her.

  Returning good for evil, she said.

  Hardly, I said.

  On one dark trunk he laid

  His brow of thought.

  On all around, the snow

  A hush had wrought.

  There birth and life and death were stayed,

  A silent pause, a quiet made

  In nature’s ceaseless flow.

  All things were one,

  Changeless eternity

  At last begun.

  Upon the pine tree crest

  Of that bright hill,

  All thought dissolved in peace,

  In calm and still.

  His was enough of joy and rest,

  Only to be, made quiet his breast,

  Only to stand where trees

  Laid, far below,

  Moon-shadows, soft and grey,

  Upon white snow.

  It’s beautiful, she said, when she’d read it through.

  Thank you, I said. It was written by a very young man.

  All thought dissolved in peace, she said. That’s very fine.

  I believe it’s my own favourite line, I said. And we sat for a while in a comfortable, companionable silence.

  That had been some weeks before. Now I caught her eye as she came into the grand room where the Poetry Party was to take place, and she gave me a little half-smile I could only describe as complicit. By now she would know, to her great relief, that her poem had not been chosen as one of the winners.

  The room had been decorated for the occasion with exquisite good taste. There were gold screens painted with scenes from The Tale of Genji, and above them hung an embroidery depicting a magnificent peacock with tail-feathers outspread. In front of this display, facing the rest of us, sat the Emperor, the Empress and the Dowager Empress on lacquer chairs decorated with gold. My gaze was drawn to the young Princess Kazuko, attending her first public engagement. She sat poised and still in a kimono of a deep wine colour embroidered with snow-covered plum branches, and little birds flying from branch to branch, the whole thing so delicate and subtle it took the breath away.

  How to reconcile this utter refinement, the sheer love of beauty, with the brutality of the warmongers who had so recently driven this nation towards annihilation? How had the rigour and discipline, the code of bushido, been so wilfully misunderstood or misused? How could this civilisation have allowed itself to be so degraded?

  The seven men who were to chant the poems came forward and took their places at a special table draped with purple brocade on which the poems had been laid. The men were all middle-aged and came from ancient noble families. As always it struck me as incongruous to see Japanese men dressed on an occasion like this in formal Western suits, like the Emperor himself, with high wing collars. But then the men began to chant and the mode was entirely other, entirely Japanese.

  I followed the words, made sense of the meaning, as they chanted poem after poem.

  The scent of early plum blossoms – my garden covered with morning snow. I translated as I listened, made my own versions in English. In the morning sun, snow glistening on the pine trees. The chanting swelled, each line repeated, overlapping, like a round or a canon, but with subtle variations in volume and pitch. It was atonal but not discordant, and as it washed over me in waves, it went beyond language and became pure sound, abstract. The sound filled the room, resonant, and I felt I was moving out beyond myself, yet observing it happen with a kind of strange detachment, a clarity I had known from time to time seated in zazen or listening to the sutras.

  The chanting subsided and I was back here, in the moment, in the room. All attention was now focussed on the Emperor and I realised his poem was about to be recited. He sat straight-backed, attentive, as everyone else in the room stood, as if to receive a blessing or a prayer.

  The main cantor sang the first line, his voice high but powerful, as if delivering a line from a Noh drama. Snow deep in my garden this morning… Three of the others joined in, My thoughts go out… All seven voices sang the last line, … to the people shivering in the cold.

  It wasn’t quite Lear’s Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er ye be… But it was something, an attempt.

  I looked at this small dignified man seated before me and I felt some sense of what he had been through. There had been calls for him to abdicate, to give up his religion, to go into exile. He could have been tried as a war criminal with Tojo and the generals. He could have been hanged with them. It was only two years since all of that had happened, the trial, the executions.

  There was a story in circulation that when Tojo and his Supreme Council had made their irrevocable decision to declare war, they came to the Emperor not for his advice but for his approval. Those present reported that the Emperor sat in silence for what seemed a very long time. Then he recited a poem by his ancestor Meiji.

  In this world we are all one family.

  Why then on every sea

  Do wind and wave storm and rage?

  After another silence he had stood and recited the verse again, then left the room without saying another word. Maddeningly oblique, it was as far as he could go, finally powerless in the face of the military.

  The horror and carnage that had followed. War and the pity of war. Defeat and surrender.

  And here he sat, quiet, scholarly, utterly human, listening to his poem.

  Snow deep in my garden…

  The verse was chanted five times, again with that overlay of voices, chiming against one another, expanding, filling the space.

  My thoughts go out…

  The last note died away, left a hush, a wash of no-sound.

  Mr Blunden, beside me, cleared his throat, as much, perhaps, to break the silence as out of any necessity. I looked again at Mrs Vining and thought she was fighting back tears.

  The royal party rose to go, and we all stood and bowed. Still a little dazed, I raised my head and found myself looking straight at the Dowager Empress as she passed. She smiled as she acknowledged my gaze, gave a nod of the head, glanced back at me as she left the room.

  Namu Myoho Renge Kyo

  Mrs Vining had decided to go back to the United States and return to her previous incarnation as a novelist. I wanted to pay my respects, wish her well, and after her last lesson I made my way to the little classroom where she had been teaching. I found her there, as I had expected. She sat quite still behind her desk, looking straight ahead into the middle distance, her eyes fixed on nothing, in what might be a moment of meditation. On the blackboard behind her were chalked the words Hope, Despair, Knowledge.

  I considered leaving her to her reverie, but then she turned and saw me, brought me into focus.

  Mr Blyth, she said, composing herself, smiling. How delightful to see you.

  Likewise, I said. I had hoped I might see you before you left.

  That’s kind, she said.

  It must have been an interesting lesson, I said, indicating the words on the board.

  I hope so, she said, then fell silent, and we sat and let the silence deepen, something shared, unspoken, a kind of prayer.

  As it happened, Mr Blunden also left Japan around this time, heading home to London. Before he did, we had occasion to meet a few more times at this or that reception, and I found myself appreciating the man’s fine qualities, his intelligence, his reticence, his love of Japan. What I had taken for an aloofness was instead a kind of innate shyness and reserve, a genuine humility.

  A mutual acquaintance told me he thought Mr. Blunden was modest to the point of extinction.

  I replied, He is modest to the point of genius.

  Not long after Blunden’s departure, Harold Henderson also returned home, to take up a teaching post at Columbia University. We had shared much and I would miss our disagreements on haiku.

  One by one my peers were leaving Japan. I could not imagine myself doing so. For better or worse, for better and worse, this was my home.

  A few months after the Poetry Party the Dowager Empress died, quite suddenly, of a heart attack. Hers had been a warm, benign, humorous presence in the Imperial palace, looking on with what had always seemed to me a kind of amused detachment, watching events unfold as they must.

  I tried to say as much to the Crown Prince, her grandson, not quite sure if I was communicating what I felt. But he nodded, lips tight as if controlling his own emotion.

  Yes, he said. We shall miss her.

  I remembered Yamanashi describing her as a wise and thoughtful woman, adding that she was a wonderful judge of men.

  Perhaps, I’d said, if the Japanese constitution had allowed for female succession, and she had become Empress in her own right, then the course of history might have been changed, and the carnage we had lived through might not have come about.

  Perhaps, he’d said. But that was all impossible. It could not be.

  Three weeks after her death there was a ceremony at the Palace, assigning a posthumous name to the Empress. Yamanashi described the purpose of the ceremony, which he said was called, as I understood it, the Rite of Informing her Spirit of the Posthumous Title. This was to acknowledge and honour her contribution and declare the name by which she would be remembered, which was Teimei, Tei meaning righteousness and constancy, Mei meaning light, enlightenment. He said the Emperor himself had chosen the name, and had read out at the ceremony a passage from Confucius.

  Nichigetsu no michi wa Teimei nari. The path of the sun and moon is that of righteousness and light.