An Essay on the Differences of the Races
Ambassador Taeko called me into his office, the entire top floor of the Japanese Legation to the League of Nations. The white masonry building, with its attic and mansard roof, was formerly the headquarters of a Dutch trading company, and there were residual narrow, bronze bands stamped onto the frames of each door, engraved with cursive Dutch names full of intimidating strings of consonants. All the interior walls had been removed, but you could still see the old floor plan in lighter-toned sections of the maple flooring. Here had been a secretary’s office, beyond that a storage closet, and then there must have been a bathroom, for the floorboards had two roughly circular patterns, evidence of where a toilet and a sink had recently been.
The Ambassador said he preferred a chamber pot, and so, several times a day, an attendant, a silent woman with a doleful expression named Frau Fingerhut, would knock on the door, enter, and remove the Ambassador’s waste in a brass-covered ceramic pot with wooden handles. There was a crest of some kind on the pot, but I had never ventured close enough to determine if this was the Taeko family crest, or if the vessel had been left behind by the Dutch. However, having studied the Dutch national character as part of my preparations for taking up this posting in Geneva, I knew that the Dutch are widely considered to be a parsimonious people and would not likely have left behind an item of such utility.
The Ambassador was seated at his desk, a starkly modern affair on which he had placed an inkwell that was a miniature of Matsumoto Castle, complete with the small reflecting pool made of an actual mirror. It was elevated off the desk by four little ball-and-claw legs. On a side table were several dozen red-bound fact books about Japan, printed in Japanese, English, and French. As Deputy Cultural Attaché, I had recently overseen the printing and binding of these books.
Ambassador Taeko adjusted his round, wire-frame glasses of the type most associated with our Emperor. He had also grown a narrow, prominent mustache of the type most associated with Charlie Chaplin, or, if you prefer, the German Chancellor. I myself had attempted to grow an even more prominent mustache, wild, bristling, and insistent, in the manner of Clark Gable, or, if you prefer, the Soviet Dictator. However, I had been advised by my colleague, Deputy Naval Attaché Koizumi, that Ambassador Taeko considered my obviously more hirsute and, frankly, masculine, facial hair an unspoken insubordination, and so I had shaved it.
It was with such a smooth upper lip that I appeared this morning, bowing deeply. Ambassador Taeko looked up, did a dip of the head so slight as to be the suggestion of a bow rather than a bow itself.
He had a pipe jutting from his mouth and was reaching toward a desk lighter in the shape of two eagles stood back-to-back, a gift of the Colombian Legation. He twisted a knot of foolscap into a kind of faggot and then clicked the lighter, setting the paper ablaze and holding the fire to the tobacco in his pipe, inhaling and exhaling, the resulting smoke momentarily obscuring his face before he waved it away. It seemed to me that as he puffed, he was appraising me, making certain that my upper lip was indeed well shorn.
Apparently satisfied, he shook the paper so that it
