Red Downs was on the phone in the News Horizon office, desperately trying to convince someone in communications to give us a second photo of Kojima Akiko. Photos in those days were transmitted by radio-telephone and received, slowly and primitively, by a kind of fax machine. Red asked me where I had been. I told him I had had a ‘session’ with the chaplain, which caused him to state, ‘You are in trouble again.’
It would not help the situation, I thought, to try to explain the skewed world of Lieutenant Commander Peeples and his gift of The Torch of Life, so I said, ‘Did you know he has a big collection of confiscated books and magazines?’
‘No kidding,’ Red said. ‘He took them?’
‘I don’t know. He has them. Maybe he put the word out. Something like, “Bring me sex books. They are bad for morale.”’
Red laughed. ‘Bad? I got a few of them myself. Do you want to see?’
‘Oh, no. No. Thank you, and all that. But I have enough problems already. He also gave me this book on “sexual harmony” and I think he wants me to read all of it so I can block my interest in Marxism and Yukiko.’
I showed Red the book. Out popped a small postcard marked ‘Place 1¢ Stamp Here’, and self-addressed to the Eugenics Publishing Company at 317 East 34th Street, New York, NY. On the reverse side of the card, under the wording, ‘I am interested in unusual books dealing with sociology, sex and related subjects and would like to be kept on your mailing list to receive announcements of new publications which you intend bringing out from time to time,’ the chaplain had used a pencil to fill out his name and a street address in the civilian world in a New England state.
‘He must have forgotten to mail it,’ Red said. ‘I’ll put a stamp on it and send it off and alert the guys in the mail room to expect sex books for the chaplain. You know what that means, don’t you? Gossip.’
Then Red said, ‘You have another letter from Yukiko.’ He slid it across his desk. It had been written one month previously. Where it had been all that time was a mystery. I cut the envelope open with a penknife and read.
Dear Paul,
It is a very nice day. As you know, this is the beginning of the rainy season, but I have never seen such a day like this since I came to Yokosuka. Actually, all my recent days have been good ones. I hear crows cawing in the morning and at sunset. Sometimes I see the crows in the trees but I realize I cannot be a friend to them because they make me feel something unlucky might happen. You know what I mean, I think. For me it is so strange to have such soft and maiden feelings for a man. I sigh. That never happen for me for such a long long time. I can sit in my chair in front of the window and enjoy those feelings of friendship and joy and suddenly I am a young girl again. My imagination is full of dreams again. I know they are impossible dreams, but I get a feeling like the opera – like Maria Callas – when I feel such emotion so long denied to me. I want to sing an aria. Oh yes. BUT, unfortunately, there have been signs of danger that have nothing to do with you, Paul-san. The danger is my history. I have to live my life as if I am in a tall castle . . . I quote here from a poem by Fu Hsuan. He wrote this in China in the year 210.
WOMAN
Bitter indeed it is to be born a woman!
It is difficult to imagine anything so low.
Nothing on earth is held so cheap.
Boys stand leaning at the door
Like little gods fallen out of Heaven.
Their hearts brave the Four Oceans,
The winds and dust from thousands of miles.
No one weeps when you, a girl, are married off.
Your husband’s love is as distant as the Milky Way.
Yet she must follow him like a sunflower follows the sun.
Their hearts are as far apart as fire and water.
She is blamed for all and everything that goes wrong.
I am sorry to put the burden of this poem on your broad shoulders, Paul-san. I have tried, but it is so difficult to explain my life. I feel that here in Yokosuka I have come to the end of the road. I can’t go back to the beginning of the road because it is so far away. I would get lost trying to find myself. I would never find the way I was before I arrived in Japan. And then, after I arrived, everything was bad too. I made some terrible friends. I was trying to survive. You are a nice boy. This is strange for you. But please be patient. We are lovers of literature and music, but we will never be lovers. I know that already. It is impossible. I am an old woman. I am a bad woman. You have your whole life to live. I have depended on you for comfort. You were generous with your time and affection for me. How precious to me is your loyalty, and your respect! Thank you for that. Thank you also for your blue letter to me. That was such beautiful paper. Your letter I put in my pillow. Please be careful when you go to Hong Kong. There are robbers, you know. I had that experience when I lived in Manchuria. My father killed. My brothers killed. I saw that. That was not a dream. The terror. Such terror on that day.
I am sorry if this bad letter is making you tired. That poem might rob you of happiness, but it is true. Please study my letter and that poem as if I was a student who submitted an examination paper. I am sorry that I do not have the sensibility to be a poet.
My heart is sensitive.
My mind is hard.
My body is a shield.
My spirit is armor.
When I cry, I cry inside.
In this world, I am a woman.
Of course, you already know that the English poet, Stephen Spender, says that a poem does not talk truth. You feel something that is truth when you read the poem and then you examine the feelings in your heart. I read that in the newspaper about two years ago when I had to be a refugee again. I ran from Hiroshima. You know that, I believe. Please excuse my poor letters and my typing and also my sentence construction. Thank you for being so kind to me. Sometime I imagine you as a strong young samurai in an ancient book of poetry written by a woman of the court. That certain woman is lonely, longing for the lover who CAN NOT be her love. Do you understand? Will you promise to always remember me? I send you love wrapped in silk, like the kiss of the first morning breeze after lovemaking.
Yukiko
P.S. Do you like the melody, Love Somebody in Blue, by George Gashuin? Oh yes, it is Gershwin. You told me that already. So sorry. Is the title Love Somebody in Blue? Or is it Rhapsody in Blue? It is the same thing, right? Love is blue. Love is not kind. How could Mr. Gershwin say love is rhapsody?
Yukiko: you signed your name in kanji – Chinese characters – for the first time. The characters were firm, assured, artistic, as if a poet had written them, I thought. Kanji: that was something new.
I folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. I was dealing with such a surge of emotions. I felt as if I had been talking face to face with you, our bodies close, in a hot room. It was like the first time I met you. My whole body was flushed. My shirt was damp with perspiration. That kind of reaction usually happens to me only when I am talking to a beautiful woman, and I am trying hard to sound coherent while at the same time my eyes are studying her face and her eyes for evidence of life lived. You might remember, Yuki-chan, how closely I studied you, as if you were white marble at the Louvre.
If there had been a safe in the office, I would have locked the letter and all your other letters inside. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if they were not locked away someone would be reading them. It was just a thought.
About that same moment, a senior Marine Corps sergeant, assigned to the USMC detachment aboard ship that guarded the nuclear warheads, dropped by to say he was retiring and to ask if we would like to write about his experiences on Iwo Jima. Red took notes. I listened. I knew a lot about Iwo Jima and the titanic struggle there in February and March of 1945 between the Marine invaders and the Japanese defenders, who were well dug in and ready to sacrifice their lives to help protect their homeland six hundred miles to the north. A total of 6,821 Marines were killed, and more than twenty thousand were wounded. More than twenty
thousand Japanese troops died; only 1,083 were taken prisoner. It was hand-to-hand combat of the heroic kind, the cream of manhood from two aggressive nations.
I listened to the sergeant talk about the fact that two hours after the landing, only twelve of the 220 men in his Marine Corps company were still fighting. I did not say anything. A few weeks earlier I had sat in a Yokosuka movie theatre with you, Yuki, and watched a double feature. I know it was part of my education, but it was an ordeal unlike any other. First on the screen was the American film Sands of Iwo Jima from 1949, starring John Wayne as the flawed and fearless Sergeant John Stryker. The Marines used flamethrowers, bayonets, rifle fire, machine guns, artillery, mortars, tanks, and bare muscle to slowly kill the Japanese one by one. Every seat was occupied in the theatre, and many people were standing in the aisles. In an odd way, it was as if they had all come to church. As far as I know, I was the only foreigner in the crowd. Except for the noise of war on the soundtrack, there was absolute silence from the audience. These were ordinary Japanese people watching American Marines and crack Japanese troops in a fight to the death, which is the way the war in the Pacific had to be fought as the Japanese Empire began crumbling.
There was a short break. You would not look at me. I was the enemy and you were my Japanese friend.
Paired with Sands of Iwo Jima was the 1953 film by director Imai Tadashi Himeyuri no tō [Tower of Lilies], which was never shown in the United States in those days because it was perceived by the Japanese studio to be anti-American. It was, however, a spectacular hit in Japan. Of course, there were no subtitles. I imagined the dialogue. You did some interpreting. The audience reaction was completely different this time. The theatre was mostly full of women. They had come for the Imai film, not for the Sands of Iwo Jima. The women were crying, gasping, sobbing, almost from the start. You were rocking back and forth in your seat, clutching my arm sometimes, putting your hands in front of your eyes at other times to hide from the bloodshed on the screen. I cried too.
Later, Yuki, I found this description of the film that I would have loved to have shared with you. It is from the American author Donald Richie’s pioneering book from 1959, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. I could attempt to describe the film myself, but every time I try to visualize it my hands start shaking and I start choking up. Those emotional reactions did not happen to me during the Sands of Iwo Jima: it was about sacrifice, but it was also about flag-waving and thus not quite real. Tower of Lilies was also about sacrifice – but the Japanese killed during the invasion of the island of Okinawa were schoolgirls. It is a true story. There is a monument – the Tower of Lilies – on Okinawa to the memory of the more than two hundred teenage girls and their eighteen teachers who were shot or were killed by flamethrowers or committed suicide rather than surrender during the ninety-day battle. These girls and young women had been hastily conscripted by the Japanese military as nurses. They had been given a few hours of training. They had believed there would be a quick battle, the Americans would be destroyed, and then they could return to school to resume their studies and play basketball and softball, which they were good at. It was their duty to tend to the Japanese wounded, not in a hospital, but in caves, in the trenches, on the front lines. They were not warriors, they were children, and this film, for me, was far more real than the one made by Hollywood, Yuki.
Tower of Lilies, Richie said, acquired the reputation overseas as
the most scurrilous of anti-American projects. If it is ‘anti’ anything, the film is anti-war. It is the story of the girls of the Okinawa Prefectural First Girls High School, often called the Lily School, who just before the American invasion are mobilized as special combat nurses. Their unit was named The Lily Corps. Under the American attack they are all killed. . . In the film Imai had almost nothing to say about the enemy, and the terrific pounding given the area by the American forces is not implied to have been one of terror against the civilian population; rather, it is presented as a straight battle between opposing military forces.
More than two hundred thousand human beings died in the battle – soldiers from both sides, civilians, and the members of the Lily Corps, in their medic uniforms of white headbands, school satchels, straw sandals, black shirts, and black skirts and pants. They were teenage innocents, you said, more innocent even than me. The US Marines won a titanic victory. There have been countless stories through the years about their valour. To their credit, the Marines often tried to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender. But they would not. There was no valour in surrendering. It was not honourable, the Japanese military code declared. Often the Marines watched in horror as Okinawan civilians – they were also Japanese civilians – sometimes killed themselves rather than submit to capture. The desperate struggle put up by the Japanese was one reason the United States opted to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later. The thinking was that the destruction caused by the bombs would be such a shock to the Japanese that they would choose to avoid an invasion of the home islands and months or even years of hand-to-hand combat.
The Marine Corps sergeant had just told Red that he was at the Battle of Okinawa too. I asked whether he had heard of the Japanese film or had ever visited the Tower of Lilies. He shook his head. ‘Never heard of the Tower of Lilies,’ he said. He asked me what it was about. I told him. I was a youngster, like so many youngsters, who wanted to make a point and sometimes lacked finesse, Yukiko. About two-thirds of the way through my highly detailed account the sergeant walked out of the office without a gesture, without a word, and never came back. I saw him again a few weeks later at his retirement ceremony. He shook my hand. I was so glad he did that. It had occurred to me that I had no idea about what he had experienced in the battle.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was another one of those things that came back from the past to haunt me in my sixties. It reminded me, after many years of forgetting, of my connection with Japan that started in the White Rose bar when you walked up to me and said, with a tired smile, ‘Hello.’ That moment in the bar was really when my adult life started. I think you would be happy to know, Yukiko, that I followed your advice, almost to the letter. My university years began immediately after my four years in the navy. I majored in ancient Japanese history and language. My professional years, some of which I spent in Tokyo with Newsweek; my interests in the arts; even my personality, which includes a lack of patience for incompetents, can all be traced back through the tangled threads of life connecting them to that moment in the bar.
In early 1995, Yukiko, I got word that more than eight hundred surviving Marines (a Marine is always a Marine) who fought on Iwo Jima in 1945 were going back to the island for a memorial ceremony. A handful of former Japanese soldiers who opposed them would attend the ceremony too, which included the raising of both the American flag and the Japanese flag on top of the extinct volcano Suribachi. It was on this six-hundred-foot-high cinder dome at the south end of the island in February 1945 that photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the photograph that will probably never be forgotten: five Marines raising the Stars and Stripes after fighting their way to the top of Suribachi.
You might like to know that the newspaper in Phoenix I was writing for at the time went along with my suggestion that I sign up to travel with the Marine veterans. After all, one of the five flag raisers was Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Hayes was long dead. He had a drinking problem and had passed out in the desert and died on a very cold day in 1955, depressed, according to his family, because he had survived and he could not handle fame. I interviewed his family members, such shy, modest people. They brought out a small box of letters from Ira. ‘Aye,’ they were saying, as if it were the first word of a lament. ‘Aye! Poor Ira.’ When they showed me the letters as if they were sacraments I suddenly thought of your letters, Yukichan.
On Iwo Jima I walked down to the beach with a half-dozen silver-haired Marines who had landed there in 1945. They stopped at the point where the ocean met the land and they turned to loo
k up at Suribachi for the first time in many years. I could only guess what was going through their minds. The single question I asked myself as I stumbled through the deep black sand was, ‘Could I have done that?’ Could I, at age nineteen, have dashed through the surf and crawled up the steep incline from the beach to the barren flat terrain above while bullets and shells were killing and maiming everyone around me?
Would I be as cheerful as these old men on this reunion day? They had come through the experience of combat, but what dreams did they have? What nightmares? They were such proud men.
I can never forget the scene at the airport in Honolulu, where our charter flight landed to refuel after leaving the West Coast. The Marine Corps had lined the corridors of the terminal with hundreds of young Marines in full dress uniform. They stood and saluted smartly. Some of them were crying, even as they held on for dear life to those stiff salutes. The old Marines, leaning on each other for support, were saluting and weeping too.
‘Semper Fi!’ – always faithful – someone shouted fiercely, not as if it were a motto but as if it were a battle cry.
15
What Is My Joy?
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain
EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY, ‘SONNET XXX’, COLLECTED POEMS
The Shangri-La sped south by south-west, past the main Japanese island of Honshu, past the smaller island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki was located, down the long string of tiny island jewels leading to Okinawa, and then to the Taiwan Strait, where the great mass of China loomed on one side and the island of Taiwan hid in the fog on the other. It was a journey of 1,400 miles. The People’s Republic of China was fiercely, theatrically anti-American. Just a few months earlier in 1958, ‘Red China’, as we called it, had unleashed deadly artillery barrages against Quemoy, Matsu, and other small islands within sight of its coast. The islands had been fortified by the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan, which the Americans supported. It was the task of the Shangri-La to turn back any invasion by the mainland: that is why the ship had an arsenal of nuclear warheads. I did not have much sophistication when it came to understanding politics or making war, but you said, Yukiko, that I did know the difference between right and wrong.
Please Enjoy Your Happiness Page 15