The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  He had nodded to me, his form of a grand compliment. “Good work, Jay. And make certain that you tell General Kawabe that I personally insisted that the emperor receive the respect of the royal Chin.”

  Isabela Ramirez had smiled softly as I told her this story. Her lined face held a map of knowing memories. And once I finished, she laughed softly, waving an arm into the air as if the whole thing were predictable.

  “So this is Douglas MacArthur. Just as I told you! Now that he’s going to Japan, maybe he will worship the emperor, too!”

  Again I remained silent. Finally, Isabela squinted at me as if this tale had affirmed her own disbelief. “So you are going to Japan with MacArthur? How can you live with us if he’s taking you to Japan?”

  “I’m not staying in the army,” I said. “MacArthur is bringing me to Japan because I speak Japanese. He needs me at the beginning of the occupation. But I’m a reserve officer. The war’s over. They can’t keep me forever. I should be released within the next six months.”

  I reached over and took Divina Clara’s hand, deciding it was time to boldly face Isabela. “I want to come back here and to be with Divina Clara. Mrs. Ramirez, I’m speaking to you from my heart. This is what will make us happy.”

  “What do you know about happiness, Mr. Marsh?” I saw her glance toward the batalan, giving the cook a subtle nod. “You’re a very nice young man, and you should know this—I trust Divina Clara’s judgment! But life has taught me some things. It has taught me that we rarely know when we are making a mistake. Only when we look back, perhaps years later, and see that we did.”

  Divina Clara leaned over the small table, taking Isabela’s hand. “I love him, Grandma! It is something I have thought about.”

  “You’re always thinking,” smiled Isabela, patting Divina Clara’s hand. “Sometimes you think yourself to death.”

  “Yes, it’s my curse isn’t it?” Divina Clara laughed lightly. “But I can feel its truth, Grandma. Sometimes it’s like the wind—truth, I mean. You can’t see it but you know it’s there! And I feel that way about Jay.”

  Isabela let go of Divina Clara’s hand. She grew silent, as if she were a judge mulling over the evidence. The cook brought in a tray of steaming food and set it on a nearby table. The food smelled delicious, a mix of rice and meat with vegetables and gravies. I was starving from the long trip. Divina Clara shifted in her chair, sneaking me a smile as she pretended to look over at the dining table. I could tell she was very happy from the way the conversation had turned. Her breasts pressed against her satin blouse and her hips tightened into her skirt as she twisted in the chair. In this intense, compressed moment I ached for her. She was five feet away, but as distant as forever.

  “Shall we eat?”

  Isabela rose from her chair and walked slowly toward the table. We followed her. The doting, flat-faced cook served us our food, smiling and nodding to me as she urged me to take an ever-larger portion. Isabela had become serene and did not lecture me again. As we ate we talked of her husband, Fidel, and of his genius for business, and how he had died in a summary reprisal taken by Japanese soldiers who had lost a friend killed by a guerrilla just down the street from their house. Isabela then spoke proudly of her son Carlos, Divina Clara’s father, retelling the stories I had already heard about how he had expanded the business into Manila, then left for the jungles and fought the Japanese with a special ferocity after his father’s death. But she was not really talking about the Japanese. Hidden in her words was an even stronger message.

  We are proud. We are capable. We have survived, not only the Japanese but the Spanish and, yes, the Americans. And we will prosper. So what is it that you are bringing to us once your uniform is in the closet and the war is in the past?

  And she was right. Who was I but an interloper who like my father and his fathers before him for the last two thousand years was willing to fall into a new unknown, bringing nothing but the brain between my ears and asking everything—to take her granddaughter into my genetic chaos as if she were the prize that might somehow belay all this Celtic wandering? I had no answers, and so I said nothing.

  After dinner she walked us out into the courtyard and to the jeep. She embraced Divina Clara deeply, almost as if apologizing. I stood sheepishly by, finally reaching out to shake her hand. She looked me over from toes to top and then took my hand in both of hers and held it tightly for several seconds. And then she surprised me by reaching up and embracing me also.

  “You are a very fine man, Jay Marsh. Are you really coming back?”

  I was so elated that I accidentally picked her up off the ground, causing Divina Clara to laugh delightedly.

  “As soon as I can,” I said. “As soon as MacArthur lets me.”

  I eased her back to the ground. She smiled as we climbed into the jeep, still holding back a piece of her approval. “When I see that you have come back,” she said, “we’ll talk.”

  I had never seen Divina Clara so happy as when we drove back to Manila. In the jeep she sang me all the songs her grandmother had taught her when she was a young child. I recited for her the turgid poetry and proverbs that had traveled with my father and sustained him even in the bleak remoteness of our dead-end swamp. We shared a packet of bundled food that the little hunchbacked cook had prepared for us. And I knew that we belonged together.

  At the wide river the bridge had already been repaired. We reached Manila just after dark. Back at the villa where I roomed we swam together in the pool, chasing each other and embracing underwater, our limbs sliding against each other and our hands teasingly touching secret, sacred parts. In my room she came to me, long-limbed and high-breasted from the shadows beyond my bed, and I devoured her as if this were the first and last time I would ever know her.

  Afterward I ran my hands lightly all over her golden body and her slim legs and then up to her beautiful, rounded breasts, finally covering my face with a veil of her thick and silky hair. I was committing every part of her to my memory. We dozed and then she began again, touching me and pressing against me as if she wanted to take all of me inside her so that only my apparition would escape on the flight to Japan.

  We slept again and when we awakened it was almost dawn. We knew her father would be furious and that her mother would be bent fervently over her rosary beads. But we had a broken bridge to blame and a seeming eternity apart to begin suffering through in a matter of days or maybe even hours. This was the last time we would be together until I somehow made it back from Japan.

  It surprised me that she was suddenly sulky and crying as I drove her to her house. She said very little to me as we passed through the somnolent, still-ravaged streets on the way to San Miguel. The perfume of night-blooming jasmine wafted against me and it made me sad, knowing the happiness and romance that its aromas had carried into my life. I really wanted to stay here. Manila had become my home.

  She looked over at me as if reading my thoughts and squeezed my arm. “I never thought you’d really leave. I don’t know how to say good-bye.”

  “I hate good-bye. I never say it.”

  She took her hand from my arm and arched her back, resting her head on the top of the seat. Her eyes were closed as if she were trying to sleep. “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She paused, her eyes still closed. I could tell she was working up the courage to ask some great and difficult question. “How will I know when you’re coming?”

  “I’ll find you.”

  She took a deep breath. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  It shocked me to hear her say that. I looked over at her. Her eyes were still closed. Tears streaked her smooth and golden cheeks. And I finally understood the harsh things that Isabela had been saying. What certainty could I offer, when I did not even know what my own life would look like in one week?

  “I love you, Divina Clara. This is where I want to be.”

  “How do I know?”

  A panic bega
n to seize me, as if my own certainties were being stripped away. “How can you doubt me?”

  “You haven’t even seen Japan. What if you like it?”

  We reached her house. She sat unmoving, looking away from me. I started to say something stronger, but then she turned and kissed me fiercely, briefly clutching me to her, and suddenly broke away from my grasp.

  “I believe you, Jay. I will wait for you.”

  Without warning she bolted from the jeep, running inside. I wanted to chase after her, but the thought of entering her home uninvited at five in the morning and trying to assuage her as her father and mother and brothers gathered to watch and possibly referee was too much. Finally I drove away, promising myself that I would come back that afternoon.

  But by that afternoon I was no longer living in my comfortable shared villa. I was at Clark Field, supervising the staging of a mass of equipment and files that would accompany MacArthur on the flight to Atsugi. I thought of Divina Clara constantly as we inventoried and prepared, checking and rechecking, knowing from our leaps to Hollandia and Leyte and Luzon how to make such moves and how unforgiving MacArthur would be if they were not done with precision. There was no way to contact her. I wrote her a note and posted it from Clark, telling her I loved her and that I would write her as soon as I reached Japan.

  And by the next morning I was gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  Winston Churchill would term the General’s unprotected landing at Atsugi and the first days at Yokohama to have been “the bravest single act of World War Two.” Beyond doubt, the supreme commander’s bold touchdown inside the heart of Japan ranks as a great moment in modern history. But Churchill knew nothing of the royal Chin. And in truth we were far from the first American occupiers to step onto Japanese soil.

  On August 28, 1945, a contingent of forty-five C-47s arrived at Atsugi, formally putting into motion the occupation. Once on the runway the first flight of Americans had deliberately taxied away from the operations buildings to the far end of the airfield, then disembarked from their planes with rifles at the ready. But hostilities were not what the Japanese military commander had in mind. He raced up to them in a truck and greeted them warmly, indeed with an almost arcane patience. He had brought along a Russian naval attaché to help break through the racial nervousness. And after the normal courtesies, he served the American officers a full lunch on white tablecloths, complete with fruit and wine.

  The Americans quickly finished their lunches, and then set to work with a precision and speed that astonished the Japanese. By that evening more than five thousand ragged and starving Allied prisoners of war had been liberated and evacuated to U.S. warships off the nearby coast, and one particularly sadistic doctor at the Shinagawa POW hospital north of Yokohama had already been taken into custody for the murderous experiments he had performed.

  All through the next day a continuous stream of C-54s poured into Atsugi, landing and taking off at two-minute intervals as the Eleventh Airborne Division took its defensive positions, which were in place by nightfall. That same afternoon the Fourth Marine Regiment, once disgraced by having lost its colors at Corregidor, had come ashore at Yokohama. Its first wave of landing craft consisted of, in the words of a grizzled and sarcastic Marine sergeant, “admirals trying to beat MacArthur ashore.” And most stunning to our former enemy, by the morning of the thirtieth a new fifteen-mile oil pipeline had already been put into place between Atsugi and the port of Yokohama.

  But this was all little more than a warm-up. The lingering stares of the Japanese and of the world would be on MacArthur. And no one knew better how to stage a main event.

  On August 30 we flew from Manila on board MacArthur’s personal C-54, on the side of which, just underneath the pilot’s window, he had predictably emblazoned “BATAAN.” As the hours went by and the engines droned, the sterile sameness of the military aircraft put my spirits into an odd limbo. A part of me could not believe I was really leaving the Philippines, and a part of me could not believe I’d ever even been there. I could hardly fathom that it had now been three years since I had left my own country, perhaps never to permanently return. Who had I been then, as I boarded a transport ship for Australia? I could not even remember. And it seemed equally inconceivable that in a few hours I would be landing in the ancient kingdom of Nippon, alongside the man who would be responsible for harnessing its energies and changing its directions. For who was I now, up in a cold drab space capsule, eating a box lunch sandwich and drinking rotgut coffee while the most powerful military man in the world paced up and down the aisle, near enough to touch, pointing with his corncob pipe and yelling out last-minute thoughts to his lawyer and political adviser General Courtney Whitney?

  Who was I? Jay Marsh, chopper of cotton, picker of strawberries and poke greens, raiser of banty hens, whose father’s greatest gift had been the liberation inherent in his death, setting a family free by the grace of its poverty. What would you think of me now, Dad, seeing the fruits of an athletic grace that would have gone unnoticed in Arkansas except for the strength of my hoe, and yet got me into college in California? And knowing that a war which took your other son has so rewarded me

  Not a fair trade. But in the incessant drone of the engines, I thought I heard both my father and brother singing just the same.

  And who had MacArthur become? A subtle change had occurred in the past few days. We all had stopped publicly referring to MacArthur as the General and instead had begun calling him the supreme commander, the short version of his new official title, supreme commander of the Allied powers. MacArthur clearly loved the nuance of his new moniker, sensing that it would set him apart from other military men, especially in the eyes of the Japanese. There were many generals, just as there were many government ministers. But there was only one supreme commander, just as there was only one Supreme Being. And only one emperor.

  We stopped briefly in Okinawa. General Eichelberger, who had just landed at Atsugi, radioed MacArthur that he was establishing a perimeter defense around the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama. Then he warned the General of fresh rumors that an ultranationalist rebel faction might try to assassinate him. Eichelberger recommended that we delay our flight for two more days to ensure complete security.

  Willoughby, the intelligence chief, joined the argument. “We have a report that someone tried to assassinate the emperor,” said Willoughby. “What kind of a target does that make you?”

  “Nonsense,” laughed MacArthur, ordering everyone back onto the plane. “They would never try to kill the emperor. And they will not try to kill me. A disappointed or rebellious Japanese would only make a scene and then kill himself. Trust me, gentlemen. I know the Orient.”

  On the flight from Okinawa it was the others who began pacing nervously, while MacArthur himself fell into a relaxed sleep. Over the Kanto Plain we approached Mount Fuji, all of us gaping at its beauty, and finally General Whitney nudged MacArthur awake. Seeing it, the supreme commander smiled as if he had found a long-lost friend.

  “Good old Fuji,” he said, his eyes going soft with memories. “It makes me miss my father, so very much. How I wish he were here for this moment! I first climbed it with him more than forty years ago, right after I finished West Point.”

  And so we had that in common, I thought when I heard his words. That this momentous journey made us both wish for dead fathers.

  MacArthur stretched, looking around him, and saw that General Whitney and several others had strapped on their pistols. He immediately frowned, pointing to the weapons. “Take them off, boys! If they were going to kill us, do you think a pistol would make any difference?” They sheepishly began unstrapping their shoulder holsters. MacArthur rose from his seat, newly agitated, pacing and pointing as he lectured them.

  “Don’t ever forget this! There will be no second chances! Everything I say, and everything I do, will be scrutinized in intricate detail by millions of Japanese. They will be searching for clues, analyzing and discussing me as if even t
he way that I hold my pipe might give them a clue to the future. And in the Orient, the man who shows no fear is king. Nothing will impress them like absolute fearlessness! Nothing! Fearlessness on the outside! Serenity on the inside! And certainty when you act! That is the Asian way! And the first time you or I blink, even for a second, it will be a new ball game.”

  He sat back down, pulling out his old leather tobacco pouch, and began refilling his favorite corncob pipe.

  “So, relax, boys. No one who rides with me carries a gun, because in peacetime a gun on a senior officer is a sign of fear.” He winked over at Whitney. “It’s been a long road from Melbourne, Court. But it’s over! This is the payoff.”

  The aircraft began its descent. In the fields below us I could see the red markers laid out by the advance party, marking the Atsugi runway’s landing approach. The C-54 hit the runway smoothly but soon bounced and yawed as it braked on top of huge cracks and recently patched bomb craters. We taxied past a hangar that already flew the American flag. In the hangar, American soldiers and airmen waved delightedly at our plane. On the ramps outside were hundreds of silvery little kamikaze aircraft, lined up in neat rows, their propellers now removed.

  The C-54 stopped near the operations terminal and began shutting down its engines. In front of the operations terminal I could see perhaps a thousand people waiting. Eichelberger had even flown in a military band, which stood at the ready, near our aircraft. The last propeller did its last turn and in the eerie silence that overcame us we could hear the ground crew yelling to one another as they chocked the wheels and called to the pilot.

  At the rear of the plane the loadmaster now unlocked the side door. A metal ramp was quickly wheeled out by the ground crew and he grabbed it, affixing it to the doorway. And then he cheerily called to MacArthur. “All set, General! Welcome to Japan.”