Published in Japan Forward 7/6/2021
The wedding between Bose and Toshiko took place in secret at Toyama’s residence, with witnesses including Foreign Minister Shinpei Goto and future Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, both enthusiastic pan-Asianists.
In order to allay suspicion, Toshiko and her parents breached custom by travelling to the ceremony by streetcar and in ordinary clothes. Toshiko’s wedding kimono had been sent directly to Toyama’s house by the Takashimaya department store.
In the crude ideological categories of today’s world, Mitsuru Toyama carries the label of “right-wing nationalist.” He was a major figure in two semi-clandestine organizations, the Black Dragon Society and the Dark Ocean Society, and through mysterious means rose from poverty to riches while remaining a private citizen all his life.
Yet he was on good terms with the bohemian Nakamuraya crowd, to the extent that examples of his calligraphy remain in the Nakamuraya art collection to this day.
Toyama with the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore (see below)
Historian Ian Rapley of Cardiff University says this about the Nakamuraya circle. “There were undoubtedly strong socialist and in particular anarchist connections but, whilst we might characterize them broadly as ‘progressive’ or some similarly loose term, it is important to recognize that many associations crossed what seem, to contemporary eyes, to be intellectual boundaries.”
What gave the Taisho era its freewheeling dynamism – so different to what came before and after – was this willingness to cross boundaries and the intellectual ferment that was thereby generated.
With the end of the First World War, the British pretext for arresting Bose, that he was a German agent, lost validity. Bose came out of hiding and took his place in the Nakamuraya family. An accomplished linguist who had quickly mastered written Japanese, he set himself up as writer and activist for Indian independence.
In 1923 Bose took Japanese citizenship. His sponsors debated whether he should be added to his wife’s family register (a crucial aspect of Japanese identity) or start his own, as might be more fitting for a male. In the end, he started his own register, using Chinese characters for his surname: 防須 .
Toshiko died at the young age of 26 after bearing two children. By then, Bose was a shareholder and director of Nakamuraya and had built a house for himself in Harajuku.
Shinjuku was changing from a sleepy semi-agricultural suburb to a major hub. When the Mitsukoshi Department Store opened a branch there, Nakamuraya’s revenues plunged 15%. That was the context in which Bose created his “authentic Indian curry.”
Biographer Nakajima believes that Bose had an anti-colonialist agenda too: he couldn’t bear the thought of Japanese people assuming that the basic fare served up on the colonizers’ warships was a true representative of India’s national dish.
Nakamuraya’s 60 staff celebrate the opening of the curry restaurant in 1927
In reality, Bose’s curry had to be modified for Japanese tastes. The spices had to be milder, the meat off the bone and indica rice swapped for something softer and stickier.
Here the Somas came up with a masterstroke by reviving shiromemai, a rare rice variety favoured by the Shogun and the Imperial family in ages past. The product was a hit. Nakamuraya was able to charge eight times the price of British navy-style “kare raisu” as wealthy sophisticates flocked to the restaurant.
Yet the British had the last laugh. In Japan, “kare raisu” remains the overwhelmingly dominant format, to the extent that Ichibanya, a stock market-listed “kare raisu” purveyor, has opened restaurants in India itself, as well as several other Asian countries. Indeed, if you want to know what the food was like on board a British warship in the mid-nineteenth century, the best place to look today would be in a low budget eatery in Japan.
Bose and the Somas were great admirers of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet and thinker, and welcomed him several times during his five trips to Japan. Tagore had become increasingly critical of Japan’s copying of Western modernization, particularly its imperialist designs on the east Asian continent.
Other erstwhile Indian admirers of Japan, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, later to become India’s first prime minister, felt the same way. In the 1920s, Bose did too and published articles that deplored Japanese policy towards China.
According to the memoirs of A. M. Nair, another Indian resident of Japan, in 1934 Bose even sent a telegram to Minister of War General Araki, protesting the ill-treatment of the Chinese in Manchuria.
From bottom left – Aizo Soma (Bose’s father-in-law), R. Tagore, Bose’s son Masahide, Kokko Soma. Top – Bose, his daughter Tetsuko and wife Toshiko.
Later, however, Bose’s attitude changed to whole-hearted endorsement of Japanese expansionism. As he said himself, he was prepared “to shake hands even with Satan himself to drive out the British from India.” This damaged his reputation in the post-war period, and biographer Nakajima is highly critical of Bose’s support for Imperial Japan’s conquest of China.
Yet Bose was not an ideologue, but a single-minded Indian nationalist – and Japan never showed any interest in extending its empire into the subcontinent. A similar Machiavellian calculation caused the allies to shake hands with the communist Satan, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and trade away eastern Europe as part of the deal.
The clash of empires was indeed destined to end colonial rule in Asia, but not in the way that Bose had anticipated. He became an increasingly influential figure in Japan and an increasingly marginal figure in his homeland.
Although never a military man, in 1943 Bose was given the task of organizing and leading the Indian National Army, a pro-Japan force recruited from Indian prisoners-of-war captured by the Japanese in Hong Kong and Singapore. Eventually, command was transferred to his more famous fellow-Bengali, Subas Chandra Bose, also by no means a military man. The INA’s attempt to invade India from Burma ended in a disastrous defeat.
Neither Bose lived to see the end of war, let alone Indian independence, which followed two years later. Chandra Bose went down in a plane crash. Rash Bose died of illness in January 1945 while the bombs fell around him. At his funeral, condolences were read by General Tojo.
Bose’s son Masahide – “straight and excellent”, a name chosen by Toyama – died in the Battle of Okinawa. His daughter Tetsuko – “child of wisdom”- passed away in 2016 at the age of 93. She lived most of her life in the RB Building in Harajuku, named after her father and constructed on the site he acquired in the mid-1920s.
Golden years: Kokko (l) & Toshiko (r) wearing saris c. 1922
History is never kind to the losers, and Bose and his pan-Asian backers are often dismissed as apologists for Japanese Imperialism, which is certainly part of the story, but by no means the whole. A more nuanced verdict comes from Professor Cemil Aydin of North Carolina University.
“Despite its internal paradoxes and its tensions with the logic of Japanese imperialism, pan-Asianism nevertheless allowed Japan to conduct a relatively successful propaganda campaign against Western imperialism in Southeast Asia while motivating numerous idealist Japanese activists and their collaborators. Pan-Asianist propaganda, accompanied by Japan’s own imperial expansion during WWII, did contribute to the end of Western empire…”
The pan-Asianists may have been right about the western colonizers, but they were woefully naïve in assuming that the natural state of Asia was one of peace and harmony between different peoples. There was nothing in pre-colonial history to support such a belief, nor does contemporary reality correspond with it.
Which takes us back to the Quad – and specifically the paucity of human interchange between Japan and India. Imagine a future Japan containing tens of thousands of Rash Boses and hundreds of institutions like Nakamuraya. Imagine a twenty first century version of the Taisho era, overflowing with not just home-grown and Western trends but, to quote historian Ian Rapley on the Nakamuraya circle, “a complex and unpredictable mix of influences from across the globe.”
It would be a lot of fun – and Japan would be all the stronger and safer for it.
Toyama’s calligraphy, from a poem by Kaishu Katsu – “the sun and moon shine on all things with perfect equality”