Japanese Agent in Tibet

"This was the book that really showed me how difficult it is for Westerners in particular and foreigners in general to talk or think about the Tibetan issue without introducing our own histories. We’re so deeply embedded in wishful thinking. But when you read Kimura’s account of living in Lhasa in the early 1940s disguised as a Mongolian – sent as a spy by the Japanese imperial government before the Second World War to report on possible routes for transporting arms that might exist in Tibet – then you see a foreigner, in part because of fluency in the language and the culture, who has the capacity to really enter into Tibetan society and language. He writes about Tibet with a freshness and alertness to detail that is so invigorating. It’s partly because you sense that this man – even if he was a Japanese spy – really respected the people he was interacting with. Whether they were conservatives from the monasteries or radicals who were sympathetic to the Tibetan communists in Lhasa, he treated these people as if they were his intellectual equals, if not more. He didn’t follow the tradition that was so common at his time, including among previous Japanese visitors there, of looking down on Tibetans or of idolising them, which seems to be much the same in practice."