Tomo

by Holly Thompson

  And then wouldn’t everybody be looking at you? How embarrassing would that be? I hope she doesn’t go ringing the bell in Okinawa.

  “We should go to the base, too,” Otosan says, “so you can see for yourself how noisy those planes are.”

  My shoulders tense. When I came up with this plan, I must have forgotten. Whether or not the US military should be in Okinawa is the theme of another one of their arguments.

  When an American army guy in Japan gets into trouble, it makes national news, and Otosan says, “Why won’t the Americans get out of Okinawa? We can defend ourselves.”

  Then Mom says, “When you use that tone, it sounds like you despise Americans. The kids are going to feel negative about their Americanness when they hear you talk like that.”

  Luckily, Mom doesn’t seem to hear him this time. Her nose is still buried in the guidebook.

  “The snake museum!” she says, flipping eagerly through the pages. “Live music!”

  When we get off the plane in Naha, the wind is soft and warm. So this is the tropics. Nice! It’s not cold, like home on Shikoku, where we can see our breath in the hallway. I immediately take off my jacket.

  We gather our luggage and then take a bus to the car rental service, where Mom chews out Otosan for not having reserved a larger car. “How are we supposed to jam all our stuff in here?” she asks. “Somebody’s going to have to ride on the roof!”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have brought along the Christmas presents,” he says. “We could have opened those when we got back home.”

  Somehow, we manage to cram everything in. With bags wedged between Maya and me up to the ceiling, there’s no room in the backseat to move around.

  The rest of the day is a blur of sightseeing. First, we hit up a red castle, once headquarters of the Ryukyu kingdom. We go through rooms filled with lacquered thrones and old scrolls. Whenever one of us falls behind, Otosan hurries us along. “C’mon, c’mon!” he says. “We only have three days in Okinawa, and we still have a lot to see!”

  “Take it easy,” Mom grumbles back. “This is vacation, not a packaged group tour.”

  My stomach is roaring by the time we get out of that place, but it’s still an hour or so till lunch. Luckily, our next stop is Pineapple Park, where along with a pineapple grove and exhibits on pineapple cultivation and a little train shaped like a pineapple, there’s a snack bar. Before Otosan can say anything about the harmful effects of sugar, I order a tropical fruit parfait with my own money.

  Later, on the way to our hotel, we stop by the American Air Force base in Kadena. From the side of the road, we can see the rows of look-alike houses, all modest one-story structures. They’re nothing like the houses you see in American movies. They’re not even as nice as the house where my grandparents live. There aren’t any people milling about either. The place is pretty subdued.

  “It looks peaceful,” Maya says. “Shizuka na.”

  Otosan lowers the car window, but we hear no planes. The sky is clear except for a few puffs of white, and quiet.

  “Huh.” Otosan is clearly disappointed. “When we brought our students here on the school trip it was very noisy.”

  Mom shrugs. “They’re probably on winter vacation, too.”

  Otosan starts up the car again and drives off down the highway.

  Once we’re checked in to our hotel, we finally get a chance to relax. In our room, there’s a little tray of plastic-wrapped cookies—chinsuko. I’m starving again, so when nobody’s looking, I scarf them down. Maybe housekeeping will bring more if we ask.

  Otosan’s tired from all that driving. “I’m going to take a nap before dinner,” he says. “And don’t forget, kids. We’re signed up for glassblowing at seven p.m.”

  So that means we’ve got about thirty minutes of free time. I noticed when we came in that there’s a game room on the first floor. “Hey Maya, wanna go play some air hockey?”

  “Okay.” She follows me to the elevator and down to the game room.

  We go past the lobby, where a woman in an evening gown and Santa hat is singing Christmas carols. Her voice rises to the ceiling: “Let there be peace on earth . . .”

  Peace—that would be nice.

  Maya, the mind-reader, says, “I wish they’d stop arguing.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  The game room is empty. We’ve got it all to ourselves. We take our places at the air hockey table and I shove the puck her way.

  Maya deflects my goal shot. “Do you think they’ll get divorced?”

  I sometimes wonder this myself, and it worries me. If they split up, would we have to choose between them? And if we chose Mom, would she try to make us move to America? Sure, we’re half American, but we’ve never lived in the States. Who would we hang out with? How would we know if something was cool or not? And we don’t even know the words to the national anthem. Not only that, but Japan is my home. And I’m the starting pitcher on my high school’s baseball team. They’d never make it to the tournament final without me. But since I’m the older brother, I think it’s best to keep my mouth shut. “Nah,” I say. “They’ve always been like that, haven’t they? They’re used to each other now. If they were going to get divorced they would have split up long ago.”

  On the following day, which happens to be the day before Christmas, we wake up early. Mom says something about needing coffee, but Otosan insists upon the Japanese breakfast buffet. I pile my plate with bitter melon fried with ham and eggs, and eat three bowls of rice washed down with guava tea. Then we’re off to a famous aquarium about an hour from our hotel. We make it through in record time, and then we have lunch.

  “Where are we going now?” Maya asks over a bowl of Chinese noodles.

  “Himeyuri-kan,” Otosan says. “It’s an important historical site.” He glances over at Mom. “It was a hospital during World War II.”

  Mom presses her lips together, but she doesn’t object. Maybe the lack of coffee is doing her in. Or maybe she’s actually interested in visiting this place.

  Otosan parks in a gravel lot next to a tour bus. We haul ourselves out of the car, past a souvenir shop with brightly printed shirts on sale, and up some stone steps. A group of high school students in uniform is hovering near some sort of shrine. Some people are praying, others are laying flowers and wreaths of origami cranes on the altar.

  Otosan saunters ahead, then calls us over.

  “Look at this, kids,” he says. He’s leaning against a railing, pointing down into a big hole.

  “It looks like a tunnel,” I say.

  “Yes. This was the entrance to the cave. To the hospital.”

  Of course there is another entrance, now. We go through glass doors into an air-conditioned lobby where Otosan buys our tickets. And then we forge ahead, down the dark hallways that make up the museum. Along the walls there are exhibits. Photos. Artifacts: A dented canteen. Pages torn out of a diary. Primitive-looking medical tools. Imagine having your leg cut off with a hacksaw! And no anesthesia!

  Eventually, we make our way to the main chamber. It’s cool and dark. Before it was just a cave, damp rocks, maybe with some spiderwebs or bats hanging in the corner. But it’s been fixed up nice. The walls are covered with black-and-white portraits. I look at the captions underneath: names, ages. Keiko Yamaguchi, fifteen years old, Third year, First Girls’ High School. Noriko Saito, fifteen years old, First Year, Normal School. And on and on. There’s one that reminds me of Chiaki from homeroom. Their eyes are kind of the same.

  “Fifteen,” my sister whispers. “Like us.” She leans against me, as if she needs some comfort.

  “Yeah.” My mouth goes dry. “If we were living here back then, I wouldn’t be playing baseball.”

  “You’d be a soldier,” she says.

  I try to imagine holding a rifle against my shoulder instead of a bat, warplanes zooming by overhead, bombs dropping all around. And Maya with a roll of bandages, or running around with bedpans and burying the dead. “You’d be a nu
rse.”

  I look away from the faces for a moment, back behind me, and spot Mom. She’s reading something out of a big book on a stand at the center of the room. Maya and I go over to check it out. The books are filled with stories written by the survivors. Testimonies.

  I skim over some of the titles: “A patient with no legs crawling in the mud.” “Bloated corpses as large as gasoline drum cans.” “I could hear maggots eating rotting flesh.”

  I read about how the nurses were warned that if they revealed themselves, they would be raped and killed. So when the US Army guys called for them to come out of the cave, they didn’t move. They thought it was a trick to lure them to their destruction. Most of the nurses stayed down in the cave. When the American soldiers gassed the cave, many of them were killed.

  I read a few sentences out loud. “It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. So when you no longer heard someone’s voice, you knew she was dead. One voice after another disappeared. First, Chinen-san, then Hamamoto-san, Ishikawa-san, Kanda-san, and Higa-san.”

  I imagine this cave filled with bodies—some dead, some dying, some just barely hanging on. I imagine the stench of rotting limbs. Those girls must have been hungry and lonely and scared. They must have thought the world was coming to an end.

  Mom puts a hand on my shoulder. She puts her arm around Maya’s waist. And then I feel another, heavier hand drop down on my other shoulder. I turn to see Otosan standing behind us, his arms around our whole family, as if he’s trying to keep us safe.

  “It was a terrible thing,” Mom says, her voice all choked up.

  We look at the portraits again, all those young faces.

  By the time we emerge from the cave, back into the light, we are all sniffling and struggling to swallow the lumps in our throats. Just before we go out the door, we come across a guest book, a place to write about how we feel.

  Maya goes first. She grabs the pen and scribbles a whole page, like she’s writing a letter to someone. Then she wipes her eyes, turns to a clean page, and hands the pen to me.

  I grab it from her and stare at the blank page for a long time. What should I write? I don’t even know how to describe all these weird emotions going through my body. I feel a little bit guilty at having such an easy life. And sad, of course. And angry at the Americans who gassed the cave and the Japanese who told the nurses to stay down there. I’m feeling too many things at once, and there’s not really enough time to process them, so I just write, “I’m sorry.”

  An elderly Japanese lady leans on her cane near the entrance. She thanks us for coming—Mom, Maya, Otosan, and me. I think she must have been one of the nurses, but even if she was, she doesn’t seem to harbor any bad feelings toward Americans, or Japanese who married Americans, or half-and-half kids like me and Maya. She smiles at us as we go out the door.

  This time when we go by the shrine, Mom stops and buys a flower. She lays it on the altar and puts her hands together in prayer. Then all of us go back to the car. I walk slowly, silently, my head bent down.

  As we drive back to the hotel, we’re each in our private worlds. I look out the window at the fields of sugar cane, the ocean in the distance, but what I’m really seeing is all those sad, dark eyes peering down from the cave walls. That girl who looked like Chiaki.

  And then we go by a shop window that’s all lit up with colored lights and I remember that it’s Christmas Eve. It doesn’t seem like the right time to be all gloomy. I’m glad that I saw all those girls on the wall, and I know that I will never forget, but right now we need to cheer up.

  An orange-and-brown sign that I recognize from the guidebook looms into view. As if on cue, my stomach growls.

  “Hey, Otosan,” I say. “Why don’t we stop at A&W for supper?”

  I expect some resistance, but he pulls into the parking lot without comment. For once, he doesn’t have anything nasty to say about Americans and their dominance of Okinawa and the evils of sugar.

  We go up to the counter and order burgers and root beer floats. Then we settle at a table near the window.

  A root beer float, I discover, is a scoop of vanilla ice cream bobbing in brown bubbles. It’s fizzy and creamy at the same time. It tastes a little different from anything I’ve ever had before, but it’s delicious.

  Otosan seems to think so, too. He takes a sip and says, “Mmmm.” And then Mom is humming along with him. For once, they are in tune with each other. I know that it won’t last. Eventually they’ll start bickering again. But for now, we can enjoy this sweet peace.

  When we’re done eating, we head slowly back to the car. We look around for Mom, expecting to find her right behind us, but she’s not. And then we hear the bell clanging at the entrance. She’s there, a huge smile spread across her face, ringing that bell and ringing it again.

  Glossary

  aragoto a style of Kabuki acting that involves exaggerated movements and speech

  atsui hot

  banzai a Japanese patriotic exclamation or shout of celebration

  bara rose

  bucho club captain

  bunko or bunko musubi a way of tying a kimono obi

  -chan suffix for a child’s name

  chanto shita done perfectly

  chinsuko Okinawan sweet

  chiyogami traditional block-printed paper

  chotto kinasai come here

  dokkiri shocked, startled

  domo thank you

  don sound of a drum beat

  fukura suzume a way of tying a kimono obi; literally means “plump sparrow”

  furisode kimono with long, draping sleeves

  gaijin in Japan, a non-Japanese person

  gaman endurance, perseverance

  ganbare or ganbatte persevere, endure, hang in there

  geta Japanese wooden sandals worn with kimono or yukata

  Goku fictional character from Dragon Ball manga and anime by Akira Toriyama

  haafu or hafu half Japanese person; person of mixed racial heritage

  haka traditional Maori war dance from New Zealand

  hakama skirt-like trousers worn by practitioners of various martial arts such as kendo and in some traditional ceremonies

  hamaguri clams used in a soup to symbolize a happy marriage

  hanami flower viewing, usually cherry blossoms in the spring

  hanamichi in Kabuki, a raised walkway that runs through the audience from the back of the theater to the stage

  haole in Hawaii, a word used to describe a Caucasian or white person

  Harajuku an area of Tokyo especially popular with young people and known for street fashion trendy shops

  himesama or hime princess

  hiragana one of two phonetic syllabaries used in Japanese writing; the other is katakana, and they are sometimes called kana for short

  hoihoi Hey!

  honto ni really

  hora hey

  hyaku-monogatari one hundred stories, often of the supernatural, told as a sort of parlor game

  ichinichi one day

  inau whittled branches (usually willow or birch) that are decorated with wood shavings and believed to be popular with the Ainu gods

  irasshaimase welcome; shopkeeper’s call of greeting

  itai it hurts, ouch, painful

  jinbei traditional Japanese summer clothing consisting of a loose-fitting top and shorts

  jingu Shinto shrine

  joshiki common sense

  kakigori shaved ice often served with sweet fruit or green-tea syrup or sweet azuki beans and condensed milk

  kami a Shinto spirit or god, sometimes considered a deity, other times considered more like a spirit dwelling in nature, such as in a mountain or tree

  kana Japanese writing syllabary

  kanji Chinese characters adapted for the Japanese writing system

  kankei nai doesn’t matter, not related

  Kannon goddess of mercy

  kappa mythical water creature said to inhabit rivers and ponds

  kazo
ku family

  kendo a martial art based on traditional samurai swordsmanship

  keyaki Japanese zelkova tree (Zelkova serrate)

  kimon northeastern or unlucky demon gate

  kirei pretty, beautiful

  kodama a spirit thought to live in trees

  kodomo child, children

  maji de seriously, really

  mata later; mata ne see you later

  monpe simple Japanese pants for farming or outdoor work

  nabe Japanese type of one-pot stew often cooked at the table

  nagauta literally “long song,” a type of music sung for Kabuki theater accompanied by the three-stringed shamisen

  nakama close friends

  natto fermented soybeans

  nihonjin Japanese person

  noren fabric divider often hung in shop doorways, between rooms, or to mark bathing areas

  obake ghost or supernatural shape-shifting being

  obaasan or obaachan grandmother

  obi long sash tied around a kimono (bunko, fukura suzume, and otaiko are different ways of tying an obi)

  Obon Japanese summer festival when spirits of the dead are believed to visit the living

  ochazuke a Japanese dish of green tea over rice with various toppings such as nori, sesame seeds, salmon or umeboshi

  odaiko large taiko drum

  odango hairstyle in the shape of a dumpling made of mochi flour

  ohayo or ohayo gozaimasu good morning

  ohisashiburi it’s been a while; long time no see

  ojiisan grandfather

  ojiya rice gruel with miso and vegetables

  okaasan mother

  okonomiyaki a Japanese dish like a pancake filled with vegetables and meat or seafood

  omikuji fortune papers at shrines or temples

  onesan older sister

  onigiri rice ball or rice triangle, often wrapped in nori and containing a sour plum, salmon, or pickled seaweed

  oniisan older brother

  onsen hotspring bath

  otaiko drum (taiko) or drum-shaped knot