A Thousand Stitches

by Constance O'Keefe

  Like Yamamura-sensei, Father came to this conclusion early. After my trip to the city with Sensei, he brought me back to Ishii and dropped me off with a cheery wave to Mother and shouted, “Thanks again for the sweet potatoes. My wife loved them when we dropped them off. Isamu has some interesting news for you.”

  When Father arrived home from work, Mother and I were anxiously discussing the afternoon’s events. After he listened to the lollipop story, Father laughed, and said, “Son, I think it’ll be fine. You’ll be a natural. And you need to stop moping around the house. Time to move forward.”

  I watched Mother swallow her worries and decide to agree with Father. The next thing she said was, “A bit of chicken and some sweet potatoes,” in response to Father’s inquiry about dinner.

  He laughed again, “Ah, the infamous trouble-making sweet potatoes. I’m looking forward to an interesting chat with Yamamura-sensei the next time I see him. I think, Isamu, that I should thank him. I know you don’t think that’s appropriate, but I have a little bet with myself that you will eventually.” Turning to Mother, he said, “Let’s have a taste of those sweet potatoes, and I do believe we still have a bit of shochu in the back of the kitchen cupboard, dear. Let’s drink a toast to our son’s new work.”

  Late one night I arrived home after interpreting during a meeting of the civic officials in Tobe with the Division representative; the trip from the far suburb had taken much longer than I expected. I found Mother and Father laughing at the table, waiting for me before starting dinner. They looked lighthearted and younger than they had in a long while. “Isamu, come listen to the funny story your father has to tell you.”

  “Yes, my son the translator should be proud of me,” said Father as he made space for me at the table. “I got home early from work today and decided to do a little weeding in the vegetable garden. And from there I went to see Farmer Morita. I was walking back along the road. I still had my hoe with me—but mind you, no sweet potatoes,” he laughed. “I must have looked the complete country bumpkin. I went past an American soldier—Isamu, he was no more than eighteen—a baby compared even to you—who was standing sentry at the checkpoint. I did the polite Japanese thing and smiled.

  “When the soldier saw, me he said—in English of course—‘Hi there, old man. How are you today?’”

  “‘Well, I’m just fine thank you,’ I replied. ‘How are you?’”

  “‘Did you just speak English?’ he said. I don’t think he could believe his ears. I guess English-speaking old Japanese farmers weren’t what this kid was expecting. So I stopped and explained why I knew English. He was from Pennsylvania, and San Francisco is, I think, as unimaginable to him as I’m sure Matsuyama was just a few weeks ago. It was a pleasant chat. I wish you could have been there.”

  Not only were they not going to do us any harm, they were determined to improve things. A few weeks after all the excitement of the full occupation—and after the patrols had become nominal at best, small teams of U.S. Army personnel moved into the capital cities of all four of Shikoku’s prefectures.

  The Ehime Prefecture Military Government Team (MGT) was stationed in Matsuyama. The MGT took over civil administration from the Division, and the translators were reassigned to the team. And soon thereafter the entire Division moved off Shikoku and set up operations in Okayama. The teams were then the only military presence. In each prefecture, the teams were divided into four administrative functions: a Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E), an Economic and Labor Section, a Legal and Government Section, and a Medical and Social Section. I was assigned to the CI&E Section, and with the new assignment, I moved to an office on the fourth floor of the Prefectural Library building. I found it ironic that CI&E was occupying this space.

  The large room where we were working had been a ceremonial space, and it was there that the Prefectural Governor had bowed to the Imperial portraits before and after he read official decrees, including the one that supplemented the Emperor’s speech and formally ended the war. The portraits were still there. Looking at them the first day I worked in that room, I remembered my first experience with Japanese official ceremonies and remembered how alien and fascinating it all had been to the out-of-place little American gentlemen with his neat suit and long hair.

  All of us translators started our new assignments with considerably more confidence than we had had in our first days working for the Division. And at this time my life began to shift—inexorably, I now realize—toward English. I was using my English every day. Of course, everyone in Ishii Village knew where I was working and what I was doing. And now everyone remembered that Mother and Father had lived in San Francisco, that I was born there, and that I still spoke English.

  First two, then four of the Ishii Village children knocked on our door and asked about English lessons. Soon I lost track of how many had asked, and I was teaching free classes two nights a week. Mother joked about her son following in Yamamura-sensei’s footsteps, and Father sometimes poked his head in and helped me demonstrate simple phrases. The children sometimes brought little offerings—vegetables, some rice or barley, a piece of cloth, some charcoal. Mother and Father would make sure that they sorted these things out, and redistributed any extras we had to neighbors with too many mouths to feed.

  My new job at CI&E was to travel as a translator-interpreter throughout the prefecture with Captain Roger Rudolph. Our job was to make sure that local schools were complying with the educational directives from General Headquarters (GHQ) in Tokyo that were promulgated through the Ministry of Education. The specifics of this mandate included checking to be sure that the new textbooks were in use and that there were no remnants of the old imperialistic, militaristic slant that had dominated education during the war.

  CI&E also had the duty of checking to be sure that no weapons were stored in the schools or hidden on their grounds—it had been common in the last months of the war to bury caches of weapons for use during the final battle the government expected on the homeland. The plan was to distribute them to all civilians when the fateful day arrived. All weapons should have been surrendered to the Americans during the first days of the occupation, but rumors circulated about caches that were still hidden. Given how peaceful everything had quickly become, I found it hard to take this seriously, but it was still, officially, part of the job.

  Captain Rudolph and I got along well, and I became quite fond of Roger, as I believe he did of me. We started with the schools in Matsuyama, which were all relatively large. We then progressed to the suburbs, like Tobe. Finally all that was left were the schools in the remote villages at the far reaches of the prefecture. We went by jeep. Captain Rudolph drove and I was the passenger. In the out-of-the-way places, the small fishing villages or the farming towns way up in the mountain valleys, our arrival invariably caused a great stir. Captain Rudolph’s large body, big round eyes and—as we say in Japanese—his “high” nose, made him scary to the folks in these isolated places. Many of them had never actually seen any foreigners, but he fit the image of the “foreign devil” they had been told about endlessly during the war.

  Not surprisingly, we often got lost on these excursions. On several occasions, we would see villagers far ahead on the road and were relieved that there would be someone to ask for directions. But by the time the jeep reached the place where we had seen them, they would have disappeared, scampering into hiding, like children playing hide and seek. After this happened a few times, we figured out how to deal with it. Roger would drop me off and drive on ahead. I would stand in the road and wait until the villagers felt safe enough to come out of hiding. Once they were convinced that we were there only to visit the school, they were happy to give directions.

  Our reception at the schools was an entirely different matter. Usually the children ran out of their classrooms as soon as the jeep pulled up. They kids were full of curiosity and somehow convinced that this big funny-looking foreigner would have treats. As they surrounded the jeep, the teac
hers stood sheepishly in the background. Our usual drill was to send everyone back to the classrooms. Captain Rudolph would meet with the principal in his office and then tour the school, being introduced to each teacher, asking the questions, and making the inspections he was there for in the most casual way imaginable. We virtually never found anything out of line. At the end of his tour, he would ask the teachers to assemble the students in the playground. By now, the teachers were able to reassert control, and they lined the students up neatly. And this was where Captain Rudolph always had the most fun. He did indeed have treats, usually candy and sometimes small notepads or supplies of pencils. Discipline was destroyed again as he distributed the candy to the children, who were usually literally jumping with joy. The teachers were always especially grateful for the supplies, and they would be bowing deeply as we left, as the children ran alongside the jeep, begging for even more candy, and yelling a chorus of “Hallo! Good-bye!” or whatever other tiny scraps of English they knew.

  Only one of our excursions had no lighthearted elements at all. CI&E received an anonymous letter saying that army rifles were buried in the sandbox in the playground of a junior high school in the suburbs. Captain Rudolph and I went to the school to investigate. The principal met us at the entrance, pale as a ghost. He had clearly ordered that the students be kept indoors and seemed to know exactly why we were there; when we asked him to have the school custodian dig up the sandbox, he began trembling. “But, Sir,” he said, “there were some rifles there, and they might still be there. The neighborhood association folks came the week the war ended. They didn’t really ask. They just buried the box. But they were just wooden dummy rifles. They were used when they held the training sessions for all the civilians in this area here in this playground.”

  “Well, let’s see,” said Captain Rudolph. “Please call the custodian.”

  The principal was still agitated, but he walked off and came back with the custodian, who had a shovel over his shoulder. As the custodian went to work digging, the principal stood by the side of the sandbox. He nervously pushed his hair back from his forehead, and then reached in his pocket. He must have been looking for a handkerchief, but didn’t seen to have one. He finally used his hands to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. When he finished, he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, and eventually starting wringing them. I had never seen anyone do that—I learned that day that people actually do that under stress; it’s not just a dramatic detail added to stories. Every time Captain Rudolph said something to me in English, the principal looked even more anxious. I really wanted to say something to him, but there was nothing for me to translate, and I knew that anything I’d say would be improper inter­ference.

  The custodian grunted when his shovel thudded against something. Captain Rudolph and I helped him push off the last of the sand from the top of the box and wrestle it out. We lifted it out of the sandbox and stepped back as Roger leaned over and opened the latch. The principal stood behind him, still wringing his hands. About twenty wooden rifles were shoved every which way into the box. Roger and I upended the box and dumped them—just to make sure they were all just dummies. As we bent over them, Captain Rudolph looked over his shoulder at the principal. “Well, Sir, you were absolutely correct. Thanks for letting us take a look.” Even before I could translate, the principal was sagging with relief.

  He hung his head as he apologized and thanked Captain Rudolph for being so understanding. As he spoke, the custodian started quickly dumping the wooden rifles back into the box. He finished as Captain Rudolph and I were walking back to the jeep. My last memory of this episode was hearing the custodian ask the principal, “So what should I do with these damn things now? Bury them again?”

  I got married on December 14, just four months after the war ended. The bride? Kayoko, of course; the wedding was the culmination of the omiai meeting the year before. Mother started pushing the arrangements to their final, unavoidable conclusion the week after I arrived home.

  I had the day off from work. Mother, Father, and I walked to Ishii Station, took the train to Matsuyama City Station, where we changed trains and headed to a small town called Gunchu out in the far suburbs on the other side of the city. As I walked through Matsuyama City Station with my parents, all of us dressed in the best outfits we could patch together from our sparse wardrobes, I imagined myself slipping away. I thought about how quickly I could be at the office, doing my interesting work in English. Somehow, Mother and Father wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care.

  Mother chose Gunchu for the wedding because that was where her younger brother, a successful doctor, lived. His house was large, the rooms spacious. When we arrived the Shinto priest was already there, waiting rather impatiently. The wedding began almost immediately. The bride entered, in full traditional Japanese wedding dress. Looking at her, all I could think was that she was not my type at all. The ceremony was soon over, and the priest, with his cash envelope from my uncle discreetly pocketed, was on his way. The twenty or so guests—all close relatives of my family and Kayoko’s—sat in the spacious tatami room chatting. I sat with them, but had nothing to say.

  Kayoko went off with her mother to change. When she reappeared, she was wearing an obviously high quality Western-style dress. As she walked back into the room, I thought this outfit’s no improvement. She absolutely is not my type. The entire wedding party then walked to a local inn for dinner. It was a feast—the best food I had had in years. After dinner, everyone left, but Kayoko and I stayed the night at the inn. The next morning, I awoke, and lay still as she slept. I tried to think, to reason myself into accepting my marriage to the woman beside me, but I couldn’t get very far because I was overwhelmed by the knowledge deep in my being that Kayoko was not my type.

  The two of us took the train trip back to Ishii Village. I provided the only conversation, announcing the travel directions, “We’ll stay on this train for six stops.”…“The next stop will be Matsuyama City Station. We’ll change trains there.”…“Now we’re at Ishii Station. It will only take ten minutes to walk home.”

  It was with great relief that I crossed the threshold into our Ishii Village house and called, “Mother, we’re back,” and with even greater relief that I left for work as soon as we all finished the lunch that Mother had prepared.

  Only Mother had talked during lunch, chattering on and on about how well everyone looked at the wedding, how nicely everyone had managed to dress, how kind her brother had been to lend his house for the ceremony, when would be the best time to go to Ishii Town Hall to record the wedding in our family register, how nice the plates and bowls were that the inn used in the place settings for our lunch, how delicious the food had been, how our lunch was so poor in comparison, but at least we had some delicious local sweet potatoes from our neighbor and tenant farmer Morita. “Have Isamu tell you why sweet potatoes are such a big joke in this household,” she said to Kayoko. “And of course he’ll tell you all about that dear man Yamamura-sensei, the teacher at Matsuchu.” Kayoko gave her usual response: Nothing!

  Finally, even Mother seemed to give up and said, “Kayoko, dear, let’s clear these lunch dishes and get them washed. I want to make sure you know how the kitchen is laid out and where everything is stored.” I made my escape.

  When I got to the Prefectural Library, a peaceful early afternoon quiet filled the wide entrance corridor, and I didn’t meet anyone as I climbed the wide stairs to the fourth floor. I savored being truly by myself for a few moments and inhaled the kerosene fumes from the heaters and the familiar wintertime wet wool smell. The kettle was bubbling on the top of the heater when I walked into our big work space on the fourth floor. Carol and Louise were eating their lunches at their desks. Everyone else had disappeared. “You missed everyone, and so did we,” said Louise. “When we got back late from going with the Colonel to see that visiting general off at the station, everyone else was gone. There was a last-minute translation job at the Regiment. I think the s
chedules were confused because everyone was busy thinking about the general.”

  “Congratulations,” said Carol. “Welcome back.”

  “Yes,” said Louise, “we’re very happy for you.”

  “I guess,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as ungrateful as I felt, and added, “Thanks a lot, actually,” in English, because we all liked using the easy, casual phrases of our childhood. I then switched back, into work mode, “Is there anything for me to do?”

  Carol laughed and said, “The Captain has a big report on his desk from the Education Ministry. He said he wanted it summarized and that whoever had the most free time should start the project. Isn’t that you, Sam?”

  “Yes, today that’s me, most assuredly,” I said, as I picked up the report. This dull work would be fine for the afternoon. The first afternoon that my mother and my wife, my wife, were at home, getting to know each other. I turned to the statistics on textbook inventory.

  Captain Rudolph left the next week. “If I’m lucky, I’ll catch the right flights that will get me home to Seattle by Christmas Eve. My first order of business after hugging my mom and dad is proposing to ­Evelyn. I hope she’ll still have me. I hope to have the same sort of happiness in front of me that you have now that you’re married, Sam. All the best of luck to you,” he said. “I wish you well in everything that lies before you.”

  I had heard a lot of stories about Evelyn, a grade school teacher, as we drove around looking for those country schools. I imagined the tinsel shining on a Christmas tree in the living room of his parents’ home and pictured Roger and Evelyn sitting with his parents, opening presents, and admiring the ring shining on her finger. I wondered if he thought it was odd that I had never spoken to him about Kayoko. My wife.