“Jiro,” Takahashi answered, and the other man-who was a few years younger than he-wrote it down.
“How long have you been in Hawaii, Takahashi-san?” Mori asked.
“More than thirty years now.”
“Ah, so desu! That’s a long time. Where were you born? Somewhere not far from Hiroshima, by the way you talk.”
“Hai.” Jiro nodded. “Yamaguchi prefecture. I call my sampan the Oshima Maru, after the county I come from. I learned to be a fisherman there; my father took a boat out onto the Inland Sea.”
“Have you been fishing ever since you got here, then?”
“Oh, no. I worked in the sugar fields. That’s what they brought us over to do. I had to save my money for a long time before I could buy a boat and get away.” Jiro laughed reminiscently. “They weren’t very happy about it-they didn’t want cane pickers leaving. But I’d met my contract, so they couldn’t keep me.”
“You settled down here? You have family?”
“I’m a widower,” Jiro said, and no more about that. After a brief pause, he added, “I have two sons.”
“Do they speak Japanese, I hope?” the reporter asked. “Some of the people born here can’t say a word in what should be their own language.”
“Not my boys.” Pride rang in Takahashi’s voice. “I made sure they learned it.”
“Good. That’s very good.” Mori scribbled notes. “And you’re happy the way things have turned out here? Are your sons happy, too?”
Jiro glanced over to Nagao Kita. The consul was from Japan. Would he want to hear that Hiroshi and Kenzo thought of themselves as Americans? Not likely! Jiro didn’t want to hear it himself. He spoke of his own views first: “Would I bring fish here if I weren’t happy?” That let him think about what he would say next: “My sons work too hard to worry much about politics.”
“Hard work is always good,” Mori agreed. “What did you think when the Rising Sun came to Hawaii?”
“I was proud,” Jiro answered. His boys hadn’t been proud. He didn’t think the gulf between them would ever close. He added, “I waved a flag in the victory parade. The soldiers made a brave show.”
“So you were there for the parade? What did you think of all the Yankee prisoners? Weren’t you happy to see that their day in the sun was over?”
What did I think? Jiro wondered. Mostly, he’d been amazed. He’d never imagined filthy, ragged, beaten American POWs shambling through Honolulu. “The Japanese soldiers who were guarding them certainly were a lot sharper,” he said. “I told you, I was proud of all they had done. They were heroes for the Emperor.”
“ ‘Heroes for the Emperor,’ ” Ichiro Mori echoed, beaming. He turned to Consul Kita. “That’s a good phrase, isn’t it?”
“Hai, very good,” Kita agreed. “Takahashi-san has a way with words.”
“Oh, no, not really.” The fisherman’s modesty was altogether unfeigned.
“Can you stay for a little while, please?” Mori asked him. “I’d like to call a photographer over here and get your picture.”
“A photographer? My picture? For the newspaper?” Jiro said, and the reporter nodded. In a daze, Takahashi nodded back. He’d never imagined such a thing. He’d never thought of himself as important enough to land in a newspaper. He read the Nippon jiji. Reading about himself in it… He felt himself swelling up with pride. This would show his boys!
The photographer got there in about twenty minutes. He was a wisecracking fellow named Yukiro Yamaguchi. He took photos of Jiro by himself, with the fish he’d brought, with Consul Kita, and with the consul and the fish. By the time he got done popping flashbulbs, green and purple spots danced in front of Jiro’s eyes.
Blinking to try to clear his sight, he bowed to Yamaguchi. “Thank you very much.”
“No huhu, buddy,” the photographer answered, casually dropping a Hawaiian word into his Japanese. “No huhu at all.”
KENZO TAKAHASHI HAD never paid a whole lot of attention to Honolulu’s Japanese papers. Like most people his age, he preferred the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser to Nippon jiji and Hawaii hochi. All papers had shrunk since the war, the English-language ones much more than their Japanese counterparts. Not surprisingly, the occupiers gave what woodpulp there was to papers that would back their line a hundred percent.
But when Kenzo saw his father staring out at him from the front page of the Nippon jiji, he spent a dime to get a copy-the paper had gone up since the fighting started, too. Sure as hell, there was Dad, holding an ahi and clasping the Japanese consul’s hand. Kenzo didn’t tell the newsboy he was related to the man in the paper. The kid, a few years younger than he was, might have hated him. Or he might have congratulated him, and that would have been worse.
What the devil had Dad said? Kenzo had no trouble reading the Japanese as he walked along. He hadn’t much wanted to learn it-he would rather have had fun after American school let out-but he’d conscientiously gone and done it, as Hiroshi had before him. And he’d lived in a neighborhood where there were so many Japanese signs and posters and ads that he couldn’t very well forget it once he had learned.
Now he wished he had. There was his father praising the Emperor, praising the courage of the Japanese soldiers who’d conquered Hawaii, saying he’d been proud of the victory parade, and telling the world the American soldiers they’d paraded with them were a bunch of decrepit wrecks. He also had good things to say about the way Japan was running Hawaii and about the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
“Oh, Dad,” Kenzo said, wishing he’d never seen the picture, never bought the paper. “Oh, Dad.”
Maybe it wasn’t treason. Maybe. But if it wasn’t, it sure came close. Kenzo wondered how many words the reporter had put in his old man’s mouth. Would his father recognize the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere if it trotted over and bit him in the leg? Maybe he would, at that. He’d talked about it once.
The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere damn well had bitten all of Hawaii in the leg, and wouldn’t let go. And here was Dad, a smiling propaganda tool for the occupiers. He couldn’t have known what he was doing. He must have said the first things that popped into his head when the reporter-Mori, that was the lousy snake’s name-asked him questions. But how it had happened didn’t much matter now. That it had happened did.
Kenzo started to crumple up the Nippon jiji and throw it in the trash. He started to, but he didn’t. Instead, he carefully folded the paper and put it in the back pocket of his dungarees. One of the things that no longer came into Honolulu harbor was toilet tissue. He could put that miserable story to good use. Not the picture-he’d tear that out first. But the story? Hell, yes. And the soft pulp paper would be an improvement on the scratchy, coated stuff they put in the outhouses by the botanical garden.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo muttered, deliberately ignoring how much he sounded like his father when he said it. To think he’d been reduced to worrying about how he could comfortably wipe his ass! Before December 7, he would have taken the answer for granted. Before December 7, he’d taken all kinds of answers for granted. What did that prove? It proved he’d been pretty goddamn dumb, that was what.
Here came a squad of Japanese soldiers. Kenzo got out of their way and bowed. By now, he did that automatically. But he couldn’t help noticing that one of them was reading a copy of the Nippon jiji. How could he, when the soldier held it open to read an inside page so Dad’s picture was right there looking out at him?
What did the soldiers think when they read a piece like the one Ichiro Mori had written? Did it make them think all the people who lived on Hawaii were glad they’d come? Or did they just go, Oh, more crap? Had they seen so much of this garbage that they recognized it for what it was? Kenzo didn’t know.
He hoped all the people who saw the story wiped their asses with it. Then they would forget about it. If the USA got Hawaii back, people who said stuff like this would be remembered. Dumb as Dad was, Kenzo didn’t want that.
XII
FLETCH ARMITAGE LOOKED longingly past the barbed wire surrounding Kapiolani Park. Waikiki was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Honolulu wasn’t much farther. If I could get past the wire…
Escape was a POW’s duty. He’d had that drilled into him. But even the Geneva Convention let garrisons that recaptured escaped prisoners punish them. And the Japs cared as much about the Geneva Convention’s rules as a bunch of drunks in a barroom brawl cared about the Marquis of Queensberry’s. They’d already made that very, very clear.
And so… Fletch looked. A mynah flew over the barbed wire. The scrounging was bound to be better on the other side. Fletch had never dreamt he could be so jealous of a stupid, noisy bird.
After a little while, he turned away. Contemplating freedom just hurt too much. He laughed, not that there was much to laugh about. In one sense of the word, there was no such thing as freedom anywhere in the Territory of Hawaii, and there hadn’t been since the surrender. In another sense… Fletch would gladly have traded places with anybody outside the camp. He didn’t think anybody out beyond the wire would gladly have traded with him.
He mooched back toward his tent. A slow Brownian motion was always on display in the camp. Some prisoners who had nothing else to do would drift toward the wire to get a glimpse of what things were like out beyond it. Others, having seen as much as they could stand, sadly drifted into the interior once more. You never could tell where any one man would be, but the traffic pattern hardly ever changed.
Here and there, POWs bent over a card game or a makeshift checkerboard or a race between two or three crawling bugs-anything to make the time go by. Most of the captives, though, just sat around letting it go by as it would. A lot of them were too hungry to have the energy for anything unessential. They came fully alive twice a day, at breakfast and supper, and banked their fires the rest of the time.
I’m not far from that myself. Fletch contemplated his own hand. He ignored the filth; nobody here could get as clean as he wanted. What he noticed were the bones and tendons thrusting up against the skin. The flesh that had softened his outlines melted off him day by day, leaving only the basics behind.
He saw the same thing on other men’s faces, which displayed more and more of the hard uplands of nose and cheekbones and chin as time went by. No doubt the same was true of his own mug, but he didn’t get to see that very often. Not seeing himself was a small mercy: in a place singularly lacking larger ones, something to cherish.
Ducking into the tent was another small mercy. If he stayed outside for very long, he burned. Oahu never got too hot, but sunlight here was fiercer than it was anywhere on the mainland because it was more nearly vertical. Back before the fighting started, he’d gone through a lot of zinc-oxide ointment. It hadn’t helped much, but nothing else had helped at all. Since then, he hadn’t had much choice. Some guys tanned almost native-Hawaiian brown. Fletch just scorched, over and over again.
He didn’t have to wait till after sundown to emerge, though thoughts of Bela Lugosi crossed his mind every now and then. The sun was sinking toward Waikiki as he came out to line up for supper. That was funny if you looked at it the right way; people in Honolulu often used Waikiki as a synonym for east, the same as they used Ewa for west. But now he’d moved far enough Waikiki of Honolulu that Waikiki was Ewa of him.
POWs gossiped in the chow line, almost as they would have back at Schofield Barracks. What energy they had came out now. They were hungry, but they knew they’d soon be… less hungry for a little while, anyway.
Somebody behind Fletch said, “Do the Japs really feed you better if you go out on a work detail?” Fletch pricked up his ears. He’d heard the Japs did that, too. They’d damn near have to. They couldn’t expect to get much work out of people who ate only the horrible slop they dished out here.
Another prisoner answered, “Yeah, they do, but only if you meet their work norms. And they set those fuckers so high, you do more shit to meet ’em than they give you extra food.”
“Sounds like the Japs,” the first man said.
Fletch found himself nodding. It sure as hell did. The Russians had a name for workers who went over their norms. Some of the left-wingers at Schofield Barracks had used it now and again. What the hell was it? Fletch scowled, trying to remember. Sta-something… He snapped his fingers. Stakhanovites, that was it!
Feeling smart was almost as good as feeling full. After supper, Fletch shook his head. Feeling full would have been better. But feeling smart was almost as good as feeling not quite so empty, which was the most camp rations could achieve.
After the morning count, a local Japanese came into camp and, speaking good English, did indeed call for volunteers for work details. He got them, more than he could use. Lots of men figured things were so bad here, they had to be better somewhere else.
Fletch wasn’t convinced. Here he ate next to nothing, but he also did next to nothing. If he ate a little more but did a lot more, wouldn’t he just waste away all the faster? That was how it looked to him.
The Japs had boasted about their victories in the Philippines and New Guinea. Taking Hawaii had let them run wild farther west, and had kept the United States from doing one damn thing about it. Fletch could see that very clearly. But the USA hadn’t given up. The B-25s that had visited Honolulu were proof of that. Sooner or later, he was convinced, the Americans would try to retake Hawaii. He wanted to be around when they did.
If that meant sitting around on his can doing very little and eating very little, then it did, that was all. He’d been in more than enough poker games to know that bucking the odds was the fastest way to lose. From where he sat, going out on a work detail looked to be bucking the odds. How many of those who went would come back? Ma Armitage hadn’t raised her boy to be a fool. Fletch hoped she hadn’t, anyway.
CORPORAL AISO WAGGED a finger in Takeo Shimizu’s face. “Be careful when you go out on patrol,” the veteran warned. “Something’s in the air. Don’t trust any of the locals. Don’t even trust the local Japanese. Some of them are like bananas.”
“Bananas?” Shimizu scratched his head.
Kiyoshi Aiso nodded. “Hai. Bananas. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. They may look like us, but they think like Americans.”
“Ah, so desu! Now I understand. Bananas!” Shimizu wondered who’d come up with that. It was pretty funny.
Aiso might have been reading his mind. “You may laugh now, but you won’t if you run into trouble. And don’t go wandering off by yourself or let your men do anything dumb like that. Somebody knocked a soldier over the head and stole his rifle the other day.”
“My men and I will be careful,” Shimizu promised. “Why did the Americans want a Japanese rifle? Even after all the sweeps we’ve done, I think this little island has more small arms on it than all of Japan put together.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aiso said. “Whoever slugged the soldier was probably after him first and took the rifle as an afterthought.”
Shimizu nodded. That made sense. He warned his squad the same way the older corporal had warned him. The men all looked attentive. He looked like that whenever a superior addressed him, too. He knew it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Half the time he’d been thinking about something else, no matter what his face said. Half the squad was likely to be thinking about something else now.
“Let’s go,” Shimizu barked, and off they went.
They made a fine martial spectacle, backs straight, helmets all just so, bayonets gleaming in the sun. Locals scrambled to get out of their way and bowed as they tramped past. People of Japanese blood did it right. The others? They obeyed the requirement, but they still didn’t really understand what they were doing.
Back and forth went Shimizu’s gaze. Trouble might come from anywhere, Aiso had said. If somebody’d been brave-or foolhardy-enough to take on a fully armed Japanese soldier, the other noncom was right, too. Shimizu wondered whether the attacker had killed the soldie
r. Shimizu hoped so, as much for the man’s sake as for any other reason. Anyone who suffered a disgrace like that was better off dead.
A policeman escorted a fisherman with a string of silvery fish along the street. Otherwise, he would have been a real candidate for getting clobbered. The policeman was white, the fisherman Japanese. Because of his job, the policeman retained the pistol he’d worn before Honolulu changed hands. But, like anyone else here, he bowed when the Japanese soldiers marched by.
Senior Private Furusawa said, “I still don’t like seeing Americans walking around with guns.”
“Policemen don’t worry me too much,” Shimizu said. “They’re watchdogs, not wolves. They’ll do what the people in charge of them tell them to do-and we’re the people in charge of them now.”
“Hai,” Furusawa said. That wasn’t agreement; it was only acknowledgment that he heard the corporal. Shimizu knew as much. He shrugged, ever so slightly. Furusawa didn’t have to agree with him. The senior private did have to stay polite, and he had.
Cars sat next to the curb, quite a few of them on flat tires. Hardly any rolled down the street these days; fuel was too short for that. Even seeing them immobilized, though, reminded Shimizu of how different Hawaii was from Japan. Honolulu wasn’t anywhere near as big as Hiroshima, but it boasted far more automobiles. They were perhaps the most prominent mark of American wealth.
The corporal shrugged again. Who cares how rich the Yankees were? We beat them anyway. They were easier to beat because they were rich. It made them soft. Men set above Shimizu had said that a great many times. They’d said it so often, they undoubtedly believed it. He wasn’t so sure. The Americans he’d fought hadn’t shown any signs of softness. They’d lost, but nobody could say they hadn’t fought hard.
Everything seemed quiet this morning. That was the idea behind patrolling. Marching through Honolulu, making the Japanese presence felt, was the best way to stop trouble before it started. Remind the locals that the Army was keeping an eye on them and they wouldn’t get gay. Leave them alone, and who could say what might happen?
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