Soldiers in Hiding Page 6

  “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry. This is Japan, but I’m not bloody well enlisting.”

  “Quiet, Teddy,” said Ike, and Kazuko put her fingers to her lips, her other hand gently upon my forearm. “Shh,” she said. “Silence is what is called for now. It is time for us to show our strength.”

  Jimmy just sat there, not adding his voice to mine, a model for Kazuko’s admiration. I think he knew if he said anything he’d give himself away, for all of us were looking at him. They all thought him so strong, but I suspected that the prospect of violent war had wrenched the voice from his throat.

  “Say something, Jimmy,” I said. “Will you enlist? Will you bear arms against the Americans?”

  When I spoke to him this time I spoke in English so the others kept quiet. But when Jimmy finally answered it was in Japanese again.

  “I think I will enlist,” he said. “It is the only thing to do.”

  While Jimmy had been quiet the reality of the war seemed to wait at the edges of the room, but when he broke his silence it all came in on us. The grandfather dug into his box of war relics and, pulling out an old battle flag, draped it across Jimmy’s shoulders, the red rays of the flag falling down his arms. The patriotism shared by Kazuko and her mother and grandfather immediately centered on the flag, on the strength that came from that streaming sun. Even Ike seemed to bask in its warmth.

  “You’re all nuts,” I said, but the fight had gone out of my voice.

  “Most young men our age are gone already,” Ike said softly, his eyes still fixed on the flag. “I’m still here because I’m helping to organize the ward.” He shook himself loose a little and said, “Don’t worry, it will be great. I think I can guarantee that we’ll all stay together.”

  While Jimmy was statued in the center of the room and Ike was still talking, while that battle flag still streamed from my friend so electrically, there was nothing I could do. I still hoped, though, that if I got him alone we could think of some way to get home. I walked out of the room and into the garden, the little cat following me. “Well,” I said to it, “you’ll be safe. All of the shamisen makers will be at war.” But it would not look at me. Over the past months I had taken to running my fingers along the edges of my knife wound whenever I saw the cat. Until now it had been a point of some pride with me, a wound taken voluntarily and for love.

  “All right,” said Jimmy, standing beside me, the flag finally gone, “what would you have me do?” He spoke English, but softly. Since we were outside we wanted to keep our eyes open for the neighbors.

  “Christ, Jimmy!” I said. “This is no joke. We’re in Japan and Japan is at war with our country! What will we do? How will we get out of here?”

  He smiled that distant smile of his. “Resign yourself to it,” he said. “I’ve been up all morning thinking about it and there is nothing we can do. It is better to come to that realization now than later. I’m talking about staying alive, Teddy. If anyone thinks our ambition is to join the Americans we’ll be killed.”

  “Jimmy,” I said, “ we’ve got to get home.”

  “ Don’t be optimistic,” he said. “Be careful. Don’t mess it up.”

  The cat crawled halfway up the fig tree and meowed, waiting for me to rescue it. Jimmy was looking straight at me, his hands somehow strong again at his sides. He picked up the cat and handed it to me. “Enlist,” he said. “Come with me and enlist today. Don’t mention America. With luck we might make the military band. With luck you might grow old in Los Angeles, Teddy, just as you’ ve always hoped you would.”

  The grandfather came and motioned us in for tea and rice cakes, the beginning ritual for our long days ahead. Kazuko was wearing a more beautiful and formal kimono, and her mother had turned the flowers in the tokonoma in fresh directions. Only Ike, still playful, had maintained himself. He had slipped into his grandfather’s old uniform and was turning about the room like a fashion model.

  When Jimmy stepped inside, the cat leaped from my arms and followed him, leaving me alone in the garden once more. I could see the Japanese battle flag, vaguely, through the open doors. The grandfather was holding it up, trying to make it flutter in the breezeless room.

  During the next days things happened fast. Kazuko calmed, finally, to my initial fears, and the rest of the family accepted me again. The newspapers and radios told people what to do, where men should report, and which factories were in need of female laborers. The community was mobilized. Kazuko and her mother began working making uniforms. Ike was gone from the house most of the time, coming in and out like a man with a purpose. He seemed to have warmed to his new role, making the change from band manager to military man with ease. Then one night he came back with ward instructions. “Of course all the club dates are canceled” was all he ever said about the band.

  The athletic field next to the local middle school was to be used for induction ceremonies, and Ike, now clearly in charge, said he’d get us proper clothes, tell us the times, bring us first news of any battles that might have started, of Japanese victories at sea.

  Jimmy liked to remain within the confines of his house, but I found it hard to stay off the streets. Students like the ones I lived with were in evidence everywhere. Flags appeared, like the one the grandfather had, and businesses were booming.

  I rode one day, on a bus, down around the Imperial Palace. I imagined the Emperor sitting somewhere inside, his aides all about him, maps of the United States staring down at him from his wall. What would happen? I wondered. How long could such a war last?

  The people around me were full of goodwill toward each other, and nobody was uninvolved. Barbers about town were busy shaving heads. Trucks with loudspeakers roamed here and there, giving information to the general public that the family and I had gotten from Ike the day or the night before. By the beginning of the new year the Japanese had beaten the British at Singapore and the Americans in Manila. “Asia stands united,” our loudspeakers told us, “and will stay that way. From this day forward the western world will have to pay for the pleasures that it takes, for the natural and human resources that it has, until now, taken from us at will.”

  Ike’s grandfather was with Jimmy in the garden and had shaved half his head by the time I walked in one evening. “Good,” he said, “you’re next.” The ward had received its orders.

  Kazuko came out with a large framed photograph of Ike in her hands. She held a camera. “We’re going to make an altar,” she said cheerfully. “Ike and Jimmy, and your photo too, Teddy. We’ll have a shrine to the sacrifices you all are making.”

  Jimmy was sitting silently again, very serious, so I said nothing. What was the use? When he finished with Jimmy the old man motioned to me, so I sat down in his chair, my feet among Jimmy’s black droppings, and watched as Kazuko positioned her husband in a solemn pose, his American-made clothes still clinging to him. Jimmy’s cheekbones were high and he looked smaller without his hair. The camera she used was one we’d brought from the United States, and as she clicked away with it I could feel my own hair joining Jimmy’s. Here the war had upset every household; I wondered what was happening in America.

  That same evening, after we lost our hair, Ike came to the house and we left for the middle school playground and the beginnings of the real war. Kazuko and her mother and grandfather walked with us, talking, taking turns telling us how glorious it would be, how the radio said the American fleet was already beaten and that the rest of the war would be merely a mop-up, a claiming of lands, an administration. Pictures of Pearl Harbor were posted everywhere, and it did look bad. Could it be true? Could Japan really be winning?

  At the edge of the playground the families of all the soldiers fused together, swaying as a single body, kimono colors blending. The officer in charge, a man named Nakamura, shouted through a megaphone, over the straight faces of the new recruits, and as he spoke silence settled in. Glory was one word I recognized. The honor to die in battle does not come to every generation. The Bushido spirit
, between conflicts, is a sleeping tiger, but is born of us on this playground here today. Stand straight, young men, and remember the word victory. Some of you will die, but the rest must go on, not even taking time to regret that your lives still linger within you. The code of the Bushido cannot wither, only our flimsy flesh can do that, so do not worry.

  On and on the officer spoke. He was the commander of the unit to which we all would be attached, and he liked what he saw. Jimmy stood as straight as those next to us, so I tried standing straight too. I was afraid. I could no longer see Kazuko in the crowd around us. The poor and private streets of east Los Angeles came to mind and for just a second I began to cry.

  “The wooden soldiers of the rice nation will be sorry to have challenged us,” said the officer, “for we are a people who know the beauty and special glory of violent death! Throughout our long history we have fought according to our code, and we have never been defeated! We are Japan! There is no other nation that, in anyway, resembles ours. We are Japanese! In this war we will be victorious for there is no other possible outcome!”

  The crowd came together spontaneously, the soldiers and the spectators too.

  “Banzai!” they shouted.

  “Remember that our cause is an honorable one!”

  “Banzai!”

  “Remember Pearl Harbor and the glorious start it has given us!”

  “Banzai!”

  “Remember the Bushido and your Japanese ancestors!”

  “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

  Everyone in the crowd raised their hands, fingers toward the clouds, shouting. Around the outskirts I could see the swaying civilians stretching skyward too. “Banzai!” Ike joined the chant and so did Jimmy and I. The air was electric, the urge to fight in them all. Once, quickly, I thought I saw Kazuko, her face tense, tears streaming. My skin was tight, raising itself into gooseflesh. I had the urge to speak in English, so I turned to Jimmy but held my tongue. I felt that to say something in English just then might mean my life, for English orders reality so differently that the whole spectacle might seem silly and I would laugh. When the speech was over we all stayed standing, waiting as men walked among us with instructions. The three of us kept calm, not saying anything to each other. There were buses parked along the far street, away from where Kazuko was, and as we walked toward them Jimmy didn’t once look back, yet my head was constantly turned. As we boarded our bus I stuck my face up near Jimmy’s ear and whispered. “Banzai,” I told him. “Remember your Japanese ancestors.” I kept craning my neck for Kazuko but the crowd was immense. Jimmy just sat there, not next to me but up next to his brother-in-law, in the seat ahead. The buses began to move before I was ready for them. They went in a direction I did not know, out into the endless city. Our comrades were quiet, their hairless heads dimly shining. There was a corporal in the front who kept talking to us. We were going to train in some place I’d never heard of. We were heading for parts of Japan where neither Jimmy nor I had ever been.

  LONG AFTER JIMMY AND IKE AND I FINISHED OUR TRAINING, long after we’d been assigned to a unit and left Japan, I got a letter from Harry, my father, his last. The letter came through Kazuko, tucked deep within one she’d written to Jimmy, and the danger of it was that it was written in English. We were in the Philippines and there were American prisoners everywhere. We were members of a backup unit, and our job was to set up local administrations, to keep the people under control, to let them know that the rules were to be obeyed and that we’d come down swiftly upon the heads of violators.

  Amazingly, Ike had been true to his word. He had kept us together throughout it all. Ike was a sergeant, and whenever he had to take someone on a small neighborhood patrol with him he chose the two of us. In certain sections of these little towns, we’d worry about snipers. The Japanese weren’t very popular with the Filipinos. The Americans had been occupiers too, but apparently of a variety less rigid, less repulsive to the native population. There were very many bands of mountain guerrillas, and though the invasion was over, though the Japanese victory was secure, many of our men had been killed and we weren’t taking any chances.

  It was on one of these patrols, on one of the dark mud streets, that Jimmy took the letter out and gave it to me. We almost never spoke English, but when he handed it to me he said, “This came. Kazuko took a great chance getting it to you.”

  The envelope was creased and bent but it was mail, and it was from home. Father had written the address in Japanese and, who knows how, had found some way to post it. As near as I can remember, it was February when Jimmy gave me the letter.

  I stepped into a poorly lit shack, a little store where townspeople could buy bits of things, ingredients for the making of a meal, a notebook, a little candy. The woman who ran the store was silent when she saw me. She kept her back against the wall, her eyes on my uniform, on the big gun that I carried.

  I sat at a square table and she immediately brought me tea. This is what the letter said:

  My dear Teddy:

  This is an exercise to make me stop thinking of you because I know the letter can’t find you wherever you are. Are you surprised to hear from your old man? Not so old though, ’cause I’ll be leaving in the morning for Europe. You should see me all dressed to kill like I used to do when I was young. Even farmers canfight, says your mother, even grocers, say your cousins and your uncle’s wife. The ironical world is folding in upon us, isn’t it, Teddy? You remember how you used to help on the farm? No problem no longer though for the farm is gone. Your uncle’s store too, such a popular hangout for you and that Jimmy, has got boards nailed around its windows and the sign is down. Things have been hard here but I bet they are harder there, for you. Your mother has thought out loud that you are dead. What a joke, right? She saved all the little parts of you she could find when we left the farm and she made a little altar out of them. I feel you are fine but I let her keep the altar anyway. Your mother will be staying here (we are living not too far from the farm now with all the other Japanese they could round up) while I and your uncle and many of the other men go fight. The army won’t let us fight in the Pacific, but that’s ok because we don’t want to anyway, most of us.

  Nobody could have been more surprised than me when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Things must have changed a lot since I lived there, that’s all I’ve got to say. The United States and Japan have always been friends and though the friendship between them hasn’t exactly been 50-50, I sure never thought it would end in war. Everyone here is upset about it. That is why we are living all together like this, they think maybe there are spies among us. Still, life is not as nice as it used to be, not at all. I keep thinking of planting, of all my good ground gone to waste. Even the small farms could help supply food to our fighting boys, I told them, but the answer was no. Things are bad, Teddy boy. In order to illustrate this point I’ll tell you about a poster they’ve got. It is called, “How to tell a Jap from a Chinese,” and it’s pretty funny really. There are these two guys standing side by side and one of them has got good posture and the other bad. One of them has fine teeth and a big smile where the other is sneering out at the photographer like a mad dog. One is tall and one is short; one handsome, one ugly. And there are little notes on the poster, arrows pointing to parts of the body so that the public will not make the mistake of thinking one is one when he is the other. I don’t know, they both look Japanese to me. We’ve got some pretty ugly guys, but a few handsome ones as well.

  Do you know why I’m writing in English? It is because I don’t want your mother reading over my shoulder. She is so nervous lately. If she thought I was writing to you she’d go to her altar and there’d be no peace tonight. I wonder if they have you in jail over there for being an American? Whatever they’re doing, it won’t go on forever, and when the war is over your countrymen will be there to set things straight, remember that.

  Well, Teddy, God bless you. I just thought that this is the first letter I’ve ever written in English. Not ba
d, huh? Say hello to Jimmy for all of us. Even your mother. When the war is over and we get together again we’ll all laugh about all the funny things that happened. Do you think so? When we get to Europe we’re gonna fight like hell.

  Sincerely yours,

  Daddy (Harry Maki)

  The woman who owned the store was watching me carefully and as soon as I finished my tea she brought me more. When I stood to pay for it she waved me away. Jimmy and Ike were just outside the door.

  “Did you tear it up?” Jimmy asked.

  When I’d finished the letter I’d been surprised to think that my father had never meant much to me. It was always my uncle whom I’d looked up to, my uncle, the city man. But I didn’t want to tear up the letter. I asked Jimmy if he wanted to read it, but when he declined I kept it tucked inside my shirt.

  “They’re fighting in Europe,” I told him. “They could all be dead by now.”

  REALLY, THE LENGTH OF WORLD WAR II WAS DECEIVING. It began very quickly but ended in a casual way, and many times. Historians might say that after the battle of Midway the war lost any of the suspense it had, but though the Japanese were defeated they held on everywhere, dug in, kept the propaganda of virtual victory alive in the hearts of the citizens at home. And in 1942 all was still undecided. The prisoners we held were skinny, in some cases, emaciated. Jimmy and I began to be known for our English-speaking ability. With Ike telling us what to do, we began, very occasionally, to interrogate, to ask the captives to tell us what they knew of the movements of their troops.

  There were night patrols constantly. Major Nakamura, the same commander we’d had since leaving Japan, had told the commanding general in Manila that he would be responsible for taking care of the guerrillas that were in evidence all over the region where we were stationed. He had groups of us standing against the jungle wall, easily visible in the light of the pale moon. A few of us were killed every week.