‘Ah, Tomo-kun. Look how big you’ve become!’ Mr Sasaki said, and ushered us into the living room.
The Sasakis had lived in the same family home for almost thirty years. It was spacious and immaculate, yet showed signs of wear: the wooden floorboards dipped in certain places. But it was a distinguished home, far nicer than ours. Mr Sasaki owned a small accounting practice, and business had been steady.
In the living room, we had a view out to the foothills of Mount Fuji. Mrs Sasaki had not entered the room with us—I could hear her preparing tea elsewhere in the house. I had not seen Kayoko yet, and began to wonder whether we would meet on this occasion. Perhaps the Sasakis wanted to vet me first before introducing me to their daughter.
‘So your mother tells me you’re interning at Tokyo Hospital. That must be exciting.’ Mr Sasaki leaned back on one outstretched arm as he sat on the floor cushion.
‘Yes, I’ve been there for ten months now. It’s difficult, of course, but rewarding.’
‘What are your plans for next year?’
‘I’m not certain yet. I’m still waiting to hear back from interviews—’ I glanced at my mother to see if it was appropriate to mention it, but she didn’t return my look ‘—but I hope to stay in hospitals, or otherwise go into research.’
‘Research? You mean back at university?’
‘Somewhere more specialised than that, but yes, like a university.’
‘One of Tomokazu’s university professors recommended him for a research position,’ my mother explained. ‘He has always enjoyed research.’
I heard footsteps and the sound of a tray being placed on the floor outside the room. The sliding door moved back. I had expected to see Mrs Sasaki, but instead a young woman wearing a mauve kimono appeared. She brought her forehead down to the tatami before entering the room, then stood up and carried in a tray of tea. I looked away, suddenly stricken with shyness.
‘Tomokazu, this is my daughter, Kayoko. You met when you were children. Perhaps you remember her?’
I was relieved I didn’t recognise her, as it allowed me to see her in a fresh light. She had a long, oval face, eyes that were a little too close together and shapely brows. She was not breathtakingly beautiful, but her skin was smooth and she had a pleasing countenance. She smiled as she served the tea, no doubt aware we were all looking at her.
‘Yes, I do remember Kayoko—I think we played together on the beach. Wasn’t that here at Shonandai?’ I said, feigning recollection to avoid offence.
She laughed—a breathy sound that seemed at odds with her well-defined features.
Mrs Sasaki entered the room, bringing a tray of sweets and dried fruit. She and Kayoko joined us at the table, with Kayoko sitting directly to my right.
My mother asked Kayoko about herself, and through their conversation I learned that she had completed secondary school at one of the most prestigious schools in the area. After she had graduated, she had done a bookkeeping course in order to help her father at his practice. While questions and answers were batted back and forth, I found myself unable to look at her, perhaps because I was aware of how closely we were being watched.
My mother turned to me. ‘Don’t you want to hear her play, Tomo?’
I looked at her blankly.
‘The koto,’ she prompted.
‘Oh. Yes, of course.’
‘Kayoko, would you mind?’ Mr Sasaki said.
Kayoko rose and left the room. She came back carrying a long object wrapped in black cloth. She set it on the tatami and untied the string. The cloth fell away to reveal the wooden instrument shaped like an elongated washing board, with white strings and bridges evenly spaced along its surface. Kayoko fastened the picks to her fingers, and gently plucked the strings several times to tune it. I could watch her comfortably now, without others’ gaze on me. She kneeled at one end of the instrument, bowed, and then leaned over the strings, spreading her arms along their length. As the fingers of her right hand plucked the strings, those on her left compressed them. The tune was lilting and mournful, and reminded me of the songs my mother sang to me as a child—songs of loss and lament. Just as I closed my eyes in recollection, the rhythm quickened. The melody pulsed, fluid and staccato at the same time, compelling me to look. I was surprised at the vigour with which she commanded the instrument, the strength she poured into her playing. Her arms jerked to and fro, her fingers snapped the strings. I could see her clearly now. Her talent and passion were apparent, and her girlish laugh that had bothered me before quickly faded away. When she played the last note, I completely forgot the unease I’d felt in her presence a few minutes earlier, and burst into applause.
Major Kimura offered me the position, much to my surprise. My mother was particularly pleased, and wasted no time in telling family and friends of my achievement. I finished my hospital internship at the start of the new year and immediately began at the research unit, which was called the Epidemic Prevention Laboratory.
The research room was located in the basement of the building in Shinjuku where I had had my interview. On my first day, a man named Shimada greeted me in the foyer. He was tall and thin, with a prominent Adam’s apple that moved up and down as he talked. I wasn’t certain of his age; he looked young but had the sort of mannered effeminacy more typical of someone at least a decade older than me. He said he had been a junior professor of microbiology at Tokyo University before being engaged by the Army Medical College on this project.
He led me past the reception desk and down a flight of stairs to the basement. We entered a brightly lit passageway with doors and other corridors leading from it. As we navigated the maze, Shimada pointed out the bathroom facilities and the tearoom, then showed me to the locker room. ‘Before you go into the laboratory, you must come here and change into the uniform first,’ Shimada said, holding up a white coat and cotton trousers. ‘They are laundered and disinfected after every shift so outside pollutants don’t interfere with our experiments.’
Shimada and I removed our slippers and changed into the uniform before returning to the corridor. A door opened ahead of us, and a tall man emerged, one hand hooked inside the pocket of his coat. Shimada greeted him, then turned to me. ‘This is the laboratory for the senior researchers. You’ll be working with them on bacterial growth. There’s another laboratory on the other side of the building that mainly deals with specimen analysis. I can show you later.’ He stopped outside a heavy metal door with a thick rubber seal. ‘And this is the laboratory where you’ll be working.’ The door opened onto a small corridor with a disinfectant bath in a large metal tray on the floor. There was a similar rubber-sealed metal door at the end of the corridor. Following Shimada’s lead, I walked through the bath, dried my feet on a towel and put on a new pair of slippers. Then I walked behind Shimada into the laboratory. I was accustomed to following procedures to maintain hygiene, but I had never before encountered such stringent methods.
The room was larger than I had expected, with a central workspace and wide benches that ran along two of the walls. Half a dozen shiny microscopes were lined up along the benches, with stools positioned neatly beneath them. At the far end of the room was a glass cabinet containing dozens of flasks, test tubes, funnels and Bunsen burners. There were charts—both hand-drawn and typed—pinned up around the room, and various other equipment, some of which I recognised, but others I had never seen before. Two men were already in the room: one was bent over a microscope and the other was at the sink. They looked up when we entered, but quickly went back to their tasks.
I later found out their names: Nomura and Ota. They were researchers who’d started in the laboratory about a year earlier. Although we were of a similar age, they kept to themselves. In the first few months, the little information I gleaned about them was that Nomura had been in the year below Shimada at Tokyo Imperial University and Ota had studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. Even when we were in the tearoom together they said very little, and after several early failed
attempts at conversation with them, I gave in and learned to appreciate the silence. I wondered if Nomura and Ota’s reticence was what Kimura had meant when he’d talked about ‘discretion’.
My duties were simple at the start: I grew bacteria for the senior researchers to use in developing vaccines. Although I was familiar with culturing bacteria from my student days, the equipment at the laboratory was new to me. First, I had to prepare the agar solution in a huge boiler, then sterilise the medium in autoclaves. After distributing the solution into cultivation trays and moving them into cooling chambers, I inoculated each one using a sterilised loop. I finally shifted the trays into incubators, which had apparently been designed by the head of our unit, Lieutenant Colonel Ishii Shiro. I grew various types of bacteria, including typhus, yellow fever, botulism and anthrax. Due to their virulence, I was required to wear rubber gloves and a mask at all times. ‘One wrong touch and you could die,’ Shimada had said. My greatest challenge was keeping up with the demand. As the months passed, the researchers requested greater amounts of bacteria, so I was often forced to work late into the night. The cultivation was on a scale I’d never seen before.
About six months into my role, we hired a new junior, a twenty-three-year-old named Yamamoto Daisuke, who had graduated from Kyoto. Yamamoto’s mother was a cousin of Kimura’s, and his family ties had helped get him the job straight out of university. We got along well—Yamamoto was affable and efficient, and he also thought Nomura and Ota were strange. Like me, he had played baseball at university, and we spent much of our time in the tearoom discussing the players in the American league. There was another reason why Yamamoto’s arrival was a welcome change: he took on my role of growing the bacteria, and I was given more senior responsibilities, including analysing samples from infected animals. I was grateful for the opportunity to exercise more intellectual rigour, and I also hoped the new role meant my working hours would be curtailed. Since my visit to the Sasakis’, I had begun to think seriously about finding a wife, so I was eager for more free time.
Loveday
1942
In early April the weather finally started to cool. For the first time since my arrival I woke in the morning not covered in sweat. When I walked to the toilets, the ground was damp with dew. The landscape beyond the fence looked like a scene from a picture book: a bright sky dotted with fluffy clouds above a sweep of yellow-green grass and orange dirt. On the rare days I had off from the infirmary, I sat in the sun on a log near the perimeter fence to read the newspapers. I had found only one brief article about the Broome attack in the papers smuggled from the guards’ barracks. It said that Japanese planes had targeted the military craft in the aerodrome and the bay; there were an unspecified number of casualties, all thought to be military personnel. I was relieved that none of the townspeople were harmed.
At night we relaxed in our tents, sharing cups of sake that had been secretly brewed beneath the ablutions block. The men from the Dutch East Indies recalled the hardship of their arrest and subsequent voyage to Australia, when they were at the mercy of the cruel guards. They saw a man being beaten after he asked for extra food for his wife and child. One of Yamada’s colleagues at the rubber company died on the ship after contracting dysentery. ‘They took all our medicine and wouldn’t return any, even though many of us were sick. After Kobayashi died, I wanted to perform basic funeral rites, but they wouldn’t let me. They threw him over the side over ship, just like that. I thought I was in hell.’ Yamada turned to me, eyes shining. ‘It’s the only time in my life I wanted to die.’ It was a side of Yamada I’d never seen before. I was touched he spoke so openly even though we hadn’t known each other long.
Although I enjoyed the mild autumn weather, I was mindful of the effect on the patients at the infirmary. Even though I wasn’t in charge of the TB ward, I always monitored it during my shifts. Harada’s condition had improved and he now had the strength to sit up in bed. But he still had a persistent cough, which worried me.
The cooler weather at least softened the blow of living in close quarters. New internees continued to arrive, sometimes just a dozen or so, at other times more than a hundred. Internees were also transferred to other camps—often for no obvious reason other than to satisfy the whims of military administration, which were a mystery to us. More and more tents were added to the rows that stretched across the dusty flank of our compound. When there was no more space for new tents, we were told to increase the number of people per tent from six to eight. This triggered complaints about the cramped conditions, but we were told that nothing could be done until permanent huts were built. The materials were said to be arriving soon. As I was the seventh member of our tent, we received only one new person: Hayashi, one of Yamada’s acquaintances from Sumatra, who’d agreed to shift from another tent so that three new internees could move into his former tent.
One of the new internees was a young half-caste who immediately fell in with Johnny’s crowd. Tall, thin and pale, he was easy to identify among the gang, with his distinctly Asiatic eyes in contrast to his prominent nose and forehead. He would have been considered handsome if not for his weak mouth, which seemed to swallow itself in one thin, expressionless line.
At headcount one morning, Major Locke announced there would be a film screening later that week.
‘The Red Cross has kindly donated a projector to the Loveday internment group, and this Sunday night a representative from the Kraft Walker company in Adelaide will play a reel for the enjoyment of the internees in 14C. I’m told the films will be educational in nature. Mr Mackenzie will be travelling all the way from Adelaide to do this on his own time. I trust you’ll make him feel welcome and treat him with the respect he deserves. It should be an enjoyable evening, and if all goes well Mr Mackenzie may be kind enough to make the trip again.’
The film screening became the talk of our compound. One old New Caledonian who’d spent most of his life in the mines hadn’t even heard of films, and we had a difficult time trying to explain to him what they were. ‘Moving pictures,’ was how it was best described by someone in his tent.
I’d been fortunate enough to see a few movies at the local cinema in Broome, where the sea was known to creep in during king tides and lap at the audience’s feet. I was delighted by the vaulted iron roof that ended abruptly, open to the stars. Throughout the movie, I was aware of the chatter of my countrymen, the soft beat of wind as the Britisher women in the row behind me fanned themselves, and the laughter of the native Aborigines from the back and sides of the space.
A few days later, Mr Mackenzie of the Kraft Walker company arrived at camp as the sun hovered on the horizon. He wore shorts and knee-length socks over his gangly legs. His cheeks were deep red and balled when he smiled. I had been asked to translate during his visit, so I joined Mayor Mori, Yamada, Mr Mackenzie, Major Locke and two other officers on a tour of our compound. We pointed out the kitchens, the canteen and the shadehouse we’d recently built for the craftsmen. Mr Mackenzie picked up a half-woven basket.
‘It’s made from grapevines,’ I said. ‘One of the men from Okinawa made it the way he would in his village.’
‘How remarkable,’ he said, bringing it close to his face to inspect the tight weave.
Major Locke stepped forward. ‘They’ve also got some lovely gardens and a shrine. Why don’t you show Mr Mackenzie that?’
So we led the group between the tents to the outer fence, where the earth was dark inside the vegetable plot. Further along, a thicket of bamboo had been planted to create a windbreak. On the other side of it, a line of grass and flowers created a border, opening into a stone-edged path that led to the altar. The grounds had greatly improved since my arrival, due to the efforts of a dozen keen gardeners. The altar was now painted and raised on a mud-brick platform inlaid with hundreds of stones.
Mr Mackenzie gasped. ‘The Japanese made all this?’
‘Yes, and in only two months,’ Major Locke said.
I’d heard ru
mours Locke was a schoolteacher before he became head of our camp, and one could see it in his stringent manner and the way he admonished us for not cleaning our tents properly, as if we were schoolboys. So Locke’s pride in our work took me by surprise.
‘The gardeners collected the plants and materials from the area around camp when they were working outside the fence,’ I said.
Mr Mackenzie gestured to the path leading to the altar. ‘May I?’
‘Of course,’ I said.
He walked up to the altar and bent over to inspect the painted roof and the intricate woodwork beneath the eaves. ‘Well, I’ll be.’ He straightened up and turned to take in the entire sweep of the garden. ‘Just wonderful. Never seen anything like it. And to think you did this in two months, with what you found near camp? Most Australians could learn something from what you’ve done here.’
The sky was tinted lavender as we wandered back to the entrance. Two white sheets were tied to the fence to create a screen, their edges flapping in the breeze. A few hundred internees were already sitting on blankets that fanned out around the screen in a rough semicircle, hemmed in on one side by the fence and on the other by a row of seats directly opposite the screen. Voices rang out.
Secretary Hoshi rushed towards us, his face red. ‘I tried to get them out of the seats, but they wouldn’t move!’
I looked towards where he had come from. Five silhouettes occupied the seats reserved for Mr Mackenzie, the army personnel and the camp executive. I didn’t need to see their faces to know who they were: Johnny and his gang.
After Darkness Page 6