Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East [Paperback]

Richard Hughes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2008

For 30 years Hughes wrote newspaper stories for The Sunday Times and the Economist from and about Southeast Asia. Followed by readers around the globe, his reports were often harbingers of momentous events to come. In addition Hughes teases the reader with was or wasn't he-a spy, a double-agent and, most important, for whom? This is a rollicking read by a seasoned veteran who keeps his cards close and his enemies closer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One thing for sure Richard Hughes was a good writer and perhaps one of the great journalists of his day. His book Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East has been republished by 1500 Books.

A copy sits on my desk. I am drawn to it like old memories. It is full of anecdotes with strong punch lines. The writing is compelling and fresh even though the events are so long passed.

In The Untold Story of Richard Sorge Hughes tells the story of an espionage ring in 1940s Tokyo led by Richard Sorge. Sorge worked for the Nazi embassy in Tokyo as a journalist but as events transpired it turned out he was a double-agent working for the Soviet Union. His activities were exposed and he was captured by the Japanese Secret Police. He was hung out to dry by his Soviet controllers and then literally hung by the Japanese authorities. One of his fellow conspirators, a Japanese national named Ozaki, penned a list of `precepts', a kind of guide for espionage agents...

As Hughes writes,

"For reasons completely unconnected with espionage, I cannot resist quoting the nine precepts which Ozaki - a far better journalist than Sorge was, or thought he was - laid down as a guide for intelligence agents:

1. Never give the impression that you are eager to obtain news: men who are engaged in important affairs will refuse to talk to you if they suspect that your motive is to collect information.
2. If you give the impression that you have more information that your prospective informant, he will give with a smile.
3. Informal dinner parties are an excellent setting for the gathering of news.
4. It is convenient to be a specialist of some kind. For my part, I am a specialist on Chinese questions, and have always received inquiries from all quarters. I was able to gather much data from men who came to ask me questions.
5. My position as a writer for newspapers and magazines stood me in good stead.
6. Because I was often asked to lecture in all parts of Japan, I had an excellent chance to learn general trends of local opinion.
7. Connections with important organizations engaged in the collection of news are vital. I was affiliated with the Asahi Shimbun and later with the South Manchurian Railway.
8. Above all, you must cultivate trust and confidence in you on the part of those who you are using as informants in order to be able to pump them without seeming unnatural.
9. In these days of unrest, you cannot be a good intelligence man unless you yourself are a good source of information.

The reason I list the Ozaki precepts, with respectful salute to one communist at least who was an idealist as well as a realist, is because they constitute a perfect guide to all young foreign correspondents. Every successful foreign newsman I ever knew followed and follows, consciously or instinctively, those same rules - especially Precepts 1, 2, and 9."

Journalism is who, what, when, where, and why. It is all about information.

The last chapter in Hughes book is titled Old Hands' `Last Supper'. This is Hughes tribute to the many reporters he was associated with through his career. Journalists who wrote for Reuters, The Chicago Daily News, AFP, AP, UPI, or who freelanced their way from one Asian trouble spot to another from World War II through the Vietnam War, a long chonicle of bloody struggle and the remaking of the world: Noel Monks, John Gunther, A.B. Jamieson, Robert Shaplen, Sydney Brookes, Frank Robertson, Carl Mydans, George Thomas Folster, Robert C. Miller, Jacques Marcuse, Dennis Bloodworth, Denis Warner, James Cameron, Alex Josey, and Stanley Karnow.

Dennis Bloodworth and James Wilde were present in Jakarta on Novemeber 30, 1957, the day that Darul Islam attempted to assassinate Soekarno outside of the Cikini School in Jakarta but ended up killing only innocent women and children.

Bloodworth writes a great story of panic, driving through dark, rainy, blockaded streets of Jakarta to file a wire story.

It begins... " `Here lies the fool that tried to hurry the East', they say of our copy, but in fact we manage to tell a remarkable amount of truth, considering that we are painfully torn between two qualities of time - the pricelss stuff jealously hoarded by our editors in the impatient West, and the cheap, throwaway variety of the bureaucrats in the enternal East."

Has much changed?

From Alex Josey a short "prized memory of Soekarno: "...We had a breakfast appointment. I wandered alone down a corridor. Sukarno suddenly appeared from one of the bedrooms. He approached me, hand outstretched. We were shaking hands when his bedroom door opened again, and into the corridor stepped a beautiful, young, shaply European woman. I stared, astonished. Sukarno looked at me, turned and saw the girl. He was visibly annoyed. Then he smiled at me and said: `I know what you are thinking. That she's my girlfriend. Aha! All you journalists are the same. She is not.' I shook my head and said brightly: `Mr. President, at this hour of the morning I am incapable of thought.' Sukarno, never lost for an explanation, said: `She is a furniture designer. I want a new bedroom suite.' By then members of his Court had appeared. Sukarno pointed to one official. `She's his wife', he said briefly. The man looked astonished. We moved on to the verandah for breakfast. Sukarno had solved another problem..."

How terrible were Hughes day. And oddly, how kind. -- Thomas Belfield, Jakarta-Indonisian-Urban Blog

The name RICHARD HUGHES, if not the man, is known to anyone who followed journalism or just about anything else in post-War Asia. He arrived in Japan in 1940 as a correspondent for Reuters, and the wrote from Asia for the next several decades for the Economist, Far Eastern Economic Review and The Sunday Times. He was, they say, the inspiration for characters in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice and was John LeCarre's The Honorable Schoolboy. He "found" the defectors Burgess and Maclean in Moscow -- described in the book -- and was, it is also said, probably a British spy himself, about which the book is silent.

A small publisher, 1500 Books, has taken upon itself to re-publish Hughes's FOREIGN DEVIL: THIRTY YEARS OF REPORTING FROM THE FAR EAST, a collection, a somewhat random collection it has to be said, of anecdotes, stories and accounts of his escapades in Japan, Russia, China and elsewhere for about three decades.

The past is, as they say, another country. The time has passed when expats, journalists or not, could really be a law unto themselves in Asia: some of the appeal of FOREIGN DEVIL: THIRTY YEARS OF REPORTING FROM THE FAR EAST, at least for those who have followed in Hughes's footsteps, will certainly be nostalgia. These extended anecdotes will also appeal for those with a taste for literary and political name-dropping: Somerset Maugham and Ian Fleming rub shoulders with Lee Kwan Yew and Kim Philby.

But Hughes should be read for more than curiosity. He may have been something of an Indiana Jones-sort of journalist, but goodness, how the man could write!

Hughes's prose is conversational and pointed, and so fresh I actually had to look up the fact that the original edition of the book was published more than 35 years ago. Required reading, perhaps, for anyone who considers journalism a calling? -- Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

About the Author

Richard Hughes, considered by most as outrageously delightful, was the inspiration for characters in novels by Ian Fleming and John le Carre. During his thirty years in the Far East his news reports were avidly read throughout the world. He is regularly mentioned in web sites and books ranging from spycraft to Sherlock Holmes to Japan. He was honoured with a C.B.E and was the dean of Asia's foreign press corps. Born in Australia in 1906 he died in 1984. Foreign Devil was originally published in 1972 and this is its first paperback publication.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: 1500 Books (February 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933698179
• ISBN-13: 978-1933698175
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,710,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars By the Richard Hughes I knew, September 9, 2011

By 

Donald M. Bishop (Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East (Paperback)

I came to know Richard Hughes (1906-1984) in his last years. At that time he was Richard Hughes the legend, "dean" of foreign correspondents in Hong Kong, and I was working at the American Consulate General.

He had been the last Western reporter in Japan before war broke out in 1941. During the occupation, he was the lion of the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club. He had covered Japan, Hong Kong, China, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand in the 1950s and 1960s, as the momentous events that shaped the postwar era unfolded.

To many of the young journalists in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, however, he had become too salty and too old, out of phase with the times. In the aftermath of the Vietnam war and China's Cultural Revolution, who cared to remember the Japanese peace treaty or the Bandung conferences? His contacts had become the retired generation of Asian leaders. He had an affection for Taiwan and South Korea that was out of fashion in the 1980s. His occasional articles were by that time short on first-hand reporting and long on reflection, and his reflection often seemed passé.

It happened, though, we shared a common awe of the excesses of North Korean propaganda. Richard Hughes was perhaps the only man outside the Marine Corps who could, when sufficiently provoked, match the North Korean vitriol, returning their colorful insults in kind. His capacity for colorful language had been honed, I learned, during a misspent youth in Australia. But I came to realize that his outrage at the North's propaganda stemmed from a loathing for what Goebbels had done to Germany and what the military propagandists of prewar Japan had done in that country -- stimulate latent emotions of xenophobia and race hatred, overcome the gentle and humane impulses of those cultures, and set in motion terrible conflicts.

From Richard Hughes I heard many stories and learned many lessons. His lively reporter's classic, "Foreign Devil," told more.

The book's 32 sketches and essays are not so much about the great events that he covered as a correspondent. They portray rather the distinctiveness of news work in the intercultural setting of Asia. In this book he placed many of his "good stories" that had not been the subject of news reports or columns, but illustrated events, moods, and trends almost as clearly.

-- A half a dozen recollections of reporting in Japan in 1940 and 1941 include speculations on the Richard Sorge spy ring, and how the Japanese police sought to control foreign press coverage. Another six chapters portray reporting during the occupation of Japan.

-- Hughes' role in persuading the Soviet government to bare the defection of the British turncoats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, giving Hughes the scoop, is told in two chapters. Every young diplomat should read Hughes' memorandum to Molotov, and take notes.

-- Another dozen chapters relate encounters -- with Japanese fans of Sherlock Holmes, with the "blind bonze of Luang Prabang," with the Japanese detective who solved the notorious Teikoku bank murders, and with Ian Fleming as he travelled through Japan. Hughes' "Fanfare of Chopsticks" is a graceful and merry essay on Chinese food.

-- Two of the book's chapters come from the pens of guest authors. USIA officer Robert Lasher contributed an adventure in northeast Thailand. And sixteen western reporters -- John Gunther, Robert Shaplen, Jacques Marcuse, Carl Mydans, Dennis Bloodworth, and Stanley Karnow among them -- told their favorite personal anecdotes.

-- Finally, six chapters deal with China, impressions garnered during the Cultural Revolution. An introductory essay describes the dilemma of foreign reporters covering China -- to report from Beijing or from Hong Kong? In two chapters that relate interviews with Chinese, Hughes allows the implausibility of their actual words, made in controlled Potemkin interviews, speak for the Cultural Revolution. "'Brute force' and 'Brute reason'" gives texture to the nature of Chairman Mao's "reforms." Another chapter features material gleaned from FBIS reports that lets Chairman Mao speak for himself.

Published many years ago, what does this book still offer?

First, it is a marvelous good read in a punchy style. Second, it gives life and spirit to events and personalities now in danger of becoming dry history. Third, the book captures the state of intercultural understanding of one important journalist over 30 years.

In my case, the book helped me understand Richard Hughes the legend and elderly friend. His reporting rested on an enormous attraction and affinity for Asian culture. He could find common ground and make friendships with anyone. The great tragedies of modern times, in his eyes, were the events and forces that prevented Asians and Westerners from coming to know one another.

-30-

5.0 out of 5 stars Foreign Devil Rocks, June 2, 2011

By 

Miles G. Dahl - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East (Paperback)

Richard Hughes spent a career in Asia. I can identify with 20+ years living and working there. His quote near the end of the book captures the essence, "Asia is the university from which no one ever graduates." Just when you think you have it figured out, something happens to alter your perspective. From the spiritualism of Thailand to the business ethic of Japan and the politics of China, Hughes has some poignant observations that will alternately make laugh or cry. Highly recommended!

5.0 out of 5 stars A different time/world, August 30, 2010

By 

Marshal Berthier "Marshal Berthier" - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Foreign Devil: Thirty Years of Reporting in the Far East (Paperback)

Hughes was an Australian journalist working in Asia from the late 30's until the mid 60's. This is a collection of some of his stories and recollections.

Hughes was probably a British spy, during the last days of the empire. He may have been a bit of the inspiration for James Bond, and he reportedly was the inspiration for one of John LeCarre's characters. He knew and worked with Ian Fleming, and probably knew LeCarre though he doesn't explicitly mention him. He is a bit on the chatty side, but breathtaking in his ability to paint a picture of ordinary life as a working journalist during WW II and the Cold War in Asia and the Pacific. Excellent eye and ability to describe detail. He never exalts himself or dramatizes his role in the coverage of events. He reminds me a bit of John Steinbeck's WW II coverage from Africa and Europe. If you are a Yank, I would take the time to read this book. It gives a very different picture of Asia than you would have gotten from U.S. correspondents.