What Lies Beneath -- Researching Ephemera

All weekend I thought about how I had left you dangling on the edge of the cliff, but Eric got home from Indiana, we went to a great estate sale both Saturday and Sunday and had a million errands to run. The first second I’ve had to get back here is now, so I hope you’ll find this post worth the wait. The item shown above is the one which inspired my last post on value added. It’s a 1926 program from the prestigious Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, a prep school still in operation today. I’ve sold several vintage Lawrence items over the years including a catalog, several sports programs like this one, and a glossy newspaper, but all were sold on their own merit. This one is made special because of one student and a lot of bookseller research.

Had I not made the colossal mistake I wrote about earlier with another golf related item I might have let it slip right by me. But I looked carefully at every page and was struck immediately by one photo, that of a young Asian boy who was captain of the golf team. What caught my interest is the fact that I had never seen a non-Caucasian student in any previous piece of Lawrenceville ephemera from the period and he was the sole person in this one. The caption reads Captain Konoye, but with no first name. So I went to Google, typed in the last name and the school and -- wow!— found scattered in various articles the pieces of an unforgettable story.

Every time I look at the picture of this handsome, carefree young man, so promising a golfer that he was later Varsity Captain of the golf team at Princeton too, I shudder to think of what befell him. His name was Fumitaka Konoye and he was the eldest son of Prince Konoye of Japan who in the early 1940’s served as Prime Minister. Konoye Sr. is known for having failed to reach a peace agreement with Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt that would have kept the United States out of WWII. I’m not going to get into all the politics, but suffice it to say that the sins of the father were visited upon the son.

Young Fumitaka, whose American friends called him Butch, proved to be a social success in the U.S. The kid played golf, boxed, rode horses and spoke English like a native, even tossing the current slang as easily as if it were a Frisbee. He laughed a lot, plastered the walls of his dorm at Princeton with Esquire cartoons, and didn’t spend much time hitting the books. As one of his professors said in the Daily Princetonian, “he was less than an earnest student, but a likeable boy.” Little did Butch know that his pleasures, though many, would all come early and be swiftly passing. Butch returned to Japan before graduation from Princeton where, despite his youth, he landed a job as dean of a college. Not long after though war called and he enlisted in the Japanese Army and found himself stationed in Manchuria.

Pearl Harbor. WWII. Chaos. Mass destruction. And then finally,liberation and peace for most of the world. But not for the Konoyes, a family regarded by the Japanese as being of divine descent. 1945 brought the trials of those suspected of war crimes and prominent on the list was Prince Konoye, young Butch’s father, who knew that he would most certainly be convicted and executed by hanging. So at 5 a.m. on December 6, 1945, the morning he was to surrender, Prince Konoye swallowed potassium cyanide. At 6:30 a.m, his wife discovered him and a half hour later he died. A farewell “party” was later held, but the Prince’s eldest son did not attend. “Butch” Fumitaka Konoye, the happy-go-lucky boy from Lawrenceville and Princeton, the boy who only wanted to play golf and have a good time, had previously been captured by Soviet troops when the Red Army swept through Manchuria and was being held as a prisoner of war. Ultimately, due to the prominence of his father, a tribunal found him guilty of supporting capitalism and sentenced him to 25 years hard labor in a Siberian prison camp.

According to William F. Ninno, author of Behind the Curtain of Silence; Japanese in Soviet Custody (Greenwood Press, 1988) one out of five prisoners died in Soviet camps. One of the final ones to succumb was the boy in the argyle golf socks. Ironically, he did so on October 20,1956, two months before his scheduled repatriation to Japan and ONE DAY after Moscow and Japan restored diplomatic relations. Today Princeton awards a scholarship in his name to Japanese students.

I told you it was a heartbreaker.