Who knows why? But it had become a tradition. In the year 1942 it happened to fall on March 8. I never cared much for Harbin, with its Russian Orthodox churches, horse carriages, and beggars. Harbin was a treacherous place. One always felt spied upon. The one-eyed Greek, skulking in the lobby of the Hotel Moderne, was a spy, though exactly for whom was not clear. That was the thing about Harbin. You never knew who your friends were. The Bolsheviks had spies everywhere. So did the Chinese Reds and Chiang Kai-shek’s rebels. We had our own spies, of course. But we weren’t very good at it. To be effective, a spy has to be able to blend in, speak more languages than one, be omnipresent and invisible. The Jews are natural spies. We Japanese stick out like sore thumbs in foreign company. But we were not stupid. Of course we knew very well that the Jews owned the world’s biggest banks, that they had infiltrated the British government, and ran Washington like their own puppet show. It was no coincidence that Roosevelt was a Jew, and that Rothschild was his banker.
