The Souvenir Page 17

  My father, then thirty, was still lean and muscular from combat in the Philippines, but he walked with the slow deliberate step of the stockier, softer man he would later become. His army buzz cut had grown out and his blue-black hair waved upward from his brow like Van Cliburn’s. His young blue-eyed wife wore her bangs short across her forehead. Her step was more exuberant, but she restrained herself in deference to her husband’s more dignified pace.

  My father had waited two and a half years for this: to walk down a safe sun-dappled street in civilian clothes, holding his wife’s hand. The long separation—the jungle fighting, foxholes, bloated corpses—was only a nightmare. My father was determined to forget all that, or at least that’s what he claimed.

  On that late afternoon in the early spring of 1946, he pulled his wife closer to him, inhaling the sweet smell of her hair. As they approached the corner of Sycamore Street and Beverly Boulevard, he noticed a trim soldier emerge from the canopied walkway of the most elegant apartment building on the block. Not just any soldier, but a soldier wearing the distinctive shoulder patch of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division: a red taro leaf emblazoned with a yellow zigzag, the insignia of “Tropic Lightning.”

  Without hesitation, he dropped his wife’s hand and sprinted toward his presumed comrade. In his rush, he failed to notice the cables, the klieg lights, the director’s chair. Before he could reach the handsome soldier, two burly security guards lunged forward and tackled him to the ground. Their job was to prevent reality from intruding on illusion.

  Dazed, he lay on his back looking upward through sycamore leaves toward blue sky. “Who the hell are you?” growled one of the security guards. “Norman Steinman,” my father sputtered back, gesturing toward the uniformed soldier. “I was just demobbed from that outfit.”

  The guard stepped aside and my father now looked up into the anxious face of the man he’d been racing to embrace. “Let him go!” the soldier admonished, extending his hand. Warily, my father grasped the proffered hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. Only then, looking the man square in the face, did he recognize the actor Frederic March. My father, the just-returned GI, had stumbled upon the set of William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, what would become the classic American film of GIs returning home from World War II.

  My mother, in her high heels, was still four houses from the corner when she saw him go down. Arriving on the scene, she watched in astonishment as her favorite leading man dusted off her husband’s gabardine slacks. Frederic March offered him a crisp salute as the grips and gaffers cheered. “You must forgive me,” he said in a grave tone of apology. “I’m just a powder-puff soldier.”

  Frederic March had not spent nights shivering in his foxhole. He had not buried his buddies, or walked for days in wet boots, or watched kamikaze pilots fall from the sky in brilliant clouds of fire. He was right to offer apologies to my father for the indignity of being tackled to the ground.

  I’ve watched Wyler’s film many times by now. There’s one scene that always holds my attention: the first morning home for Sergeant Al Stevenson (Frederic March) after three years of combat in the Pacific. Still in his pajamas, Al sinks into his favorite armchair and rests his feet on a hassock. He’s not yet at ease in the lap of comfort. How can his loving wife and children who gather around him possibly imagine what Dad’s been through “over there”? Next to Al’s chair is his worn army duffel. He reaches into it and pulls out a three-foot-long Japanese samurai sword. Without saying a word, he unsheathes it from its scabbard and hands it to his bewildered teenage son.

  The war hero reaches into his duffel bag a second time and pulls out a Japanese flag with characters written all over it. “I got it off a dead Jap,” he says brightly. “The writings on it are messages of good luck from the soldier’s family and friends.” He offers this also to his son, who handles it cautiously, as if it were contaminated.

  Al Stevenson has a daughter as well, but he does not consider offering his war trophies to her. Perhaps he brought her a kimono or a doll, but the distribution of the real spoils of war are usually patrilineal. War is considered the province of men and, just as mothers presumably share the secrets of childbirth with their grown daughters, it is a father’s prerogative to tell his son about his experiences in war.

  Just before they were shipped home from occupied Japan in November 1945, the Twenty-fifth Division drew war trophies. My father wrote that he’d received “a fairly nice saber. Very good blade and mediocre scabbard and handle—but I’m satisfied.” He had no intention of bequeathing the sword to his still-infant daughter. “You’re probably thinking now what on earth are we going to do with it—another thing to keep out of little Ruthie’s way. Well it’s just like any other trophy—just to hang over the mantelpiece—or show to our son many years hence.”

  When we were children, when our parents weren’t home, my older brother, Larry, and I dared each other to take the sword out of the closet. We crawled underneath the soft hems of our mother’s rayon dresses to excavate the heavy metal shaft from its obscure corner.

  Larry drew the sword out of its scabbard. Through the louvered windows of our parents’ bedroom, turquoise light shimmered off the surface of the swimming pool, illuminating the fine Japanese steel. We lightly ran our fingertips over the golden chrysanthemum embossed on the hilt. We carefully tested the edge of the razor-sharp blade.

  My father was always planning to have a son, and in time, he was blessed with two. He intended to give his first son the saber, but he never did. He kept it hidden away in the back of his closet for fifty years.

  As for Yoshio’s flag with the black-inked calligraphy and the rust-red speckles? He never intended to bequeath that to anyone.

  Suibara

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Swans in the Morning

  I TIPTOE ACROSS the lobby, dimly lit by fluorescent vending machines. I’m the first guest up. At the front desk, the gap-toothed night watchman obligingly hands me binoculars. “Hakchyo?” he asks. “Swans?” I nod vigorously. Yes, 4,658 of them by yesterday’s posted count. I step into my boots, pull down my earflaps, and head outside into steady snow.

  It’s December 1998 and I’ve returned to Suibara. Since our brief visit three years ago, I’d been yearning to see the Shimizus again, to deepen my understanding of what life was like in Yoshio’s town before, during, and after the war. And of course, I remembered the Swan Uncle’s invitation—to see Lake Hyoko during swan season. On this trip, with Lloyd working on a project in Los Angeles, I have traveled alone.

  Outside, in the predawn dimness, I walk away from the inn and into a medieval landscape painting: pure white swans rousing themselves on an ice-fringed lake. Lake Hyoko reverberates with a glorious dissonance. The morning greetings of thousands of whooper swans—plus assorted mallards, widgeons, teals, and grebes—sound like a hundred orchestras tuning up simultaneously in the same concert hall. Sunlight leaks over the nearby Ise mountain range. The mighty five-foot-tall birds begin their takeoff, actually “running” on the water to gain enough speed to lift their heavy bodies into the air. It’s a thrilling spectacle: thousands of birds rising en masse then skimming over the lake toward the sun.

  Before coming to Suibara, I met with Masako. We’d been corresponding these past few years and by now we felt like old friends. She had continued to be the go-between between the Shimizus and me, ferrying messages and gifts. “I called the Shimizus to tell them you were coming, I spoke to Suezo,” she said. “He told me, ‘I just dreamed of Louise-san last night.’ As if he were expecting you.”

  The mayor’s office in Suibara has established an ambitious schedule for my week-long stay. They have contacted a number of Suibara villagers who are war veterans or have memories of the war years in Suibara and are willing to speak with me. There also will be a gathering at Suezo’s house. Masako has generously offered to travel every day from her home in Nagaoka to be the translator during these meetings.

  Mr. Mihara, the
mayor’s energetic young assistant, meets us at the Suibara train station and we drive to the town’s first guest house, the Rhythm Inn. Puzzled, I ask Masako, “Why ‘Rhythm’?” “From tour-ism,” she shrugs, laughing.

  The banner over the front door reads “Welcome, Mrs. Steinman.” The manager, an officious man in a black suit and tie, rushes out to greet me. I am his first American guest. Though Suibara draws Japanese tourists in the winter swan season, it’s not exactly a mecca for Westerners. After Masako and Mr. Mihara leave, there’s no one around who speaks English, but the staff is friendly and we communicate through sign language and giggles.

  Each afternoon, Masako and Mr. Mihara pick me up in the city van and we drive to the cultural center. In a bare white classroom, buoyed by cans of hot green tea, we meet our interviewees. Speaking to someone you have just met, across a table, with a translator, is an inherently formal situation. Yet in all these interviews, there is the desire, on both sides, to transcend the limitations.

  Our first guests are Mrs. Seito, an eighty-six-year-old farmwife, and Mrs. Nakayama, an eighty-eight-year-old former second-grade teacher. Both women were widowed during the war; they have outlived their husbands by more than fifty years. Seito-san has a wide face crisscrossed with well-earned wrinkles; her smile reveals a mouthful of crooked gold and silver teeth. Nakayama-sensei (“teacher”) is more regal, finer-boned than Mrs. Seito, though hobbled by arthritis.

  Mrs. Nakayama’s husband, Takeo, was drafted October 1, 1943, and died December 29 that same year, in Java. She learned of his death two years later. “When he died, I had two children and my mother-in-law to care for. I had a teaching job. We had to eat potato leaves, potato stems.” War widows did not have it easy; Japanese culture is traditionally unkind to women without men.

  “Pearl Harbor Day was a day just like today,” Mrs. Seito remarks, “it snowed all day.” She glances out the window of the classroom at an overcast sky, snow dusting the bare branches of a persimmon tree. Mrs. Seito’s husband, Hideo, was drafted in 1942 at the age of twenty-two. His submarine was sunk by a torpedo en route from Manila to Burma, in 1944. Three years later, his family received an official announcement. “I still have the envelope,” she sighs. “In those days we were told that Japan was doing the right thing, and the United States was our enemy. That’s what we were told. But I never thought we could fight against Americans. I thought a country called America was a far-off place filled with rich, strong, very clever people.”

  Eventually, the government sent her a box purporting to contain her husband’s bones. “I was suspicious,” she says, “how could they have found his bones if he’d drowned at sea?” She opened the box and found dry twigs.

  More than one bereaved woman told me there was a moment when she intuited her husband’s—or son’s or brother’s—death. There were omens: a bowl inexplicably breaking, a dog’s melancholy howling piercing the silence of a snowy night. Mrs. Seito says, “There was some strange cracking sound near the portable shrine in my house. We went to look around the room, but nothing had happened. That was the time that my husband died.”

  From the two widows, I learn how, during World War II, the military siphoned off Suibara’s agricultural bounty. The storerooms of rice, the barrels of miso and soy, the mounds of huge green cabbages, the bushels of white daikon—all were requisitioned. “We had to give all the rice harvest to the government, even though we had nothing,” Mrs. Seito tells me. The people of Suibara ate tree bark and foraged in the mountains for wild greens. “You saw how a person could ‘grow thin like a mantis.’ ” Suibara schoolchildren were dismissed from school to collect sap from the pines in the mountain foothills, part of a military scheme to make ersatz fuel for what was left of Japan’s air fleet. Farmers watched anxiously overhead for American B-29s while tilling their fields and, in an era of virulent nationalism, watched their tongues lest the dreaded Kempetai (military police) suspect them of any unpatriotic utterances.

  In the summer of 1945, the villagers began training for the ultimate battle, the American invasion of the mainland. Suibara villagers sharpened bamboo “spears” and practiced using them on bales of hay under the eyes of retired soldiers. Even though official propaganda concealed most news of Japan’s defeats in the Pacific, many suspected their efforts would be useless against the weaponry of such a powerful foe.

  Mrs. Seito was summoned by her neighborhood chief to listen to the emperor’s historic surrender speech on August 15, 1945. Static obscured much of what the emperor uttered in a quivery voice. “But when we realized that Japan had surrendered,” Mrs. Seito recalls, “all the energy went out of our bodies. We became weak, exhausted.” Shikata ga nai. What could they do? They had to reconstruct their town, their country, their lives.

  On New Year’s Day 1946, the emperor made another radio address to the nation, and, in a speech written by an advisor to General MacArthur, renounced his divinity. As the writer Ian Buruma has noted, “It was, perhaps, the first time in human history that God had to declare himself dead.” Later that spring, Suibara’s men who’d survived the war began to arrive home.

  Isamu Watanabe, a handsome, silver-haired seventy-four-year-old man and former mayor of Suibara, was an army private on Japan’s southernmost island of Shikoku, where he’d been digging “octopus holes” along the coastline. Japanese soldiers were supposed to conceal themselves in these holes when the Americans invaded. From a distance of 150 kilometers, he’d seen the cloud from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. En route home to Suibara, he stopped in the ruined city to see for himself the extent of the devastation. Mr. Watanabe also made a stop in Niigata, where he saw bone-thin American POWs who’d barely survived the war.

  “People criticized young men if they didn’t join the army,” he says, “and the training was very very strict.” He touches his cheek where, he tells me, officers slapped recruits with their leather slippers. “We were educated from very young that we must fight against our enemies. Soldiers were told to say, ‘Heil emperor! Banzai!’ when they died, but in reality, no one said that, they all cried for their mothers.”

  My father, I tell him, could never talk about the war. “I understand that,” he responds thoughtfully. “Many Japanese soldiers could not talk about it either, because it was so cruel.”

  Mr. Watanabe picks up a piece of chalk and draws a crude timeline on the blackboard. He marks off the prehistoric Jomon period; the Edo era, when the feudal Shibata clan built Lake Hyoko as a reservoir; Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan in 1853; the Meiji Restoration that followed; the Manchurian Incident of 1931; Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941; and January 1945, when Yoshio died in Luzon. His timeline ends on April 15, 1995, “when Yoshio Shimizu’s flag came home.” He wipes the dust chalk off his hands and sits down.

  In 1947, Emperor Hirohito himself passed through Suibara, an orchestrated countrywide tour intended to humanize the “divine” emperor by having him personally greet his subjects. What most Suibarans remember seeing of him was the top of his gray fedora. That same year, Mrs. Nakayama, the teacher, joined one of the many volunteer brigades that journeyed to Tokyo to rake leaves and repair the gardens of the emperor’s Imperial Palace. She remembers the great numbers of orphaned children wandering around Tokyo, sleeping under bombed-out bridges, scavenging for cigarette butts and scraps of food.

  “One day in the barbershop I was very shocked and sad to hear a young man say that the war dead were very stupid people,” Mrs. Nakayama comments. “He said only stupid people died. It is quite difficult to tell the young people what the war was like, for them to understand what we went through.”

  Young people I spoke to in Japan knew little about their elders’ experiences in the war. In the collection of letters about the war written to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun was one from a thirty-one-year-old housewife named Kishida Mayumi. She had never once heard her father speak of his wartime experiences. All she had learned from her mother was that her father had gone to Manchuria as an army soldier, and that he
had returned with an orphaned girl and three children of relatives who had died. She noticed that when by chance a Chinese person spoke to her father, he answered in Chinese. “I wondered what Father had seen and what he had done. I have no way of asking him now. But I wonder if his refusal to accept his military pension and his repudiation of those who sang military songs were Father’s way of expressing how he felt about the War—the war that Father never spoke a word about. What Father taught me about the War was the scar from a bullet passing though his thigh and the heavy, gruesome pain residing in his heart.”

  In his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John Dower describes the moral and psychological dilemma facing families like the Shimizus, widows like Mrs. Seito and Mrs. Nakayama, and former soldiers who’d lost friends in combat after the surrender: What do you tell the dead when you lose a war? That they were deceived? That their deaths didn’t mean anything?

  In Japan, one universally accepted way to mourn the war dead is to be a proponent of peace. A major tenet of the Japanese peace movement, Dower points out, is “to champion a nonmilitarized, nonnuclearized world.” Without exception, everyone I spoke to in Suibara and elsewhere in Japan professed their abhorrence for war, their gratitude for peace.

  Over the five years following Japan’s surrender, soldiers from Suibara who’d served in Manchuria, or on the Korea-Chinese border, returned from prison camps in Russia and China. Mr. Abe, eighty-four, a former hospital administrator, spent four years in a Siberian prison camp after just one week of active service in Korea. Mr. Abe, slight but powerfully built, is also a judo master. “When I was captured by the Russians, I never expected to see Japan again,” he says flatly. His family presumed he was dead. I ask cautiously, “Can you tell me what your life in the camp was like?” Mr. Abe does not respond at first, then he emits a quiet groan. “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to remember—but I will tell you.”