AFTER THEIR LANDING in Lingayen Gulf in January, the Twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment fought a fierce battle in the flat fields around the town of Umingan, which lasted until February 4. After that, they pushed inland over steep forested terrain toward the strategic Balete Pass in the Caraballo Mountains, where the troops of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army in the Philippines, were entrenched in the hills.
The men in the Twenty-seventh made the arduous climb in fierce heat through dense jungle, often tripping over thick vines and sliding off trails where monsoons had eroded whole chunks of mountainside. Five months of fierce fighting passed before the Americans could claim victory over Balete Pass. What close calls had my father been through?
The first mention of the Japanese flag came in a letter on February 13, 1945, after Umingan was captured and they’d begun the ascent up Highway 5 toward Balete Pass: “I have a Japanese flag now. My first thought was to send it to Hal Rubin, but then, I decided that I’ll probably sell it to some Marine for about fifty dollars. So I’ll hang on to it awhile.”
The envelope containing only the flag (no note) was postmarked March 3, 1945. Over the next several months, while the battle raged around him, my father apologized to my mother for sending it home: On April 24 he wrote, “I’m so very sorry that I sent you the Jap flag. It was a little boy use of bad judgment. I’ll never send any more such gruesome souvenirs home. I promise.” In June, after the battle was over, he fretted, “Don’t put the flag on display. I should have sold it to some rear echelon glory hunters.” On July 1, a full four months after he’d mailed the offensive article, he was still suffering over it: “It was an adolescent impulse that will only be rectified when I am home with you and have apologized personally.” Four days later, July 5: “Your letter today mentioned how upset Mrs. R was about George’s Purple Heart. Well, we all make mistakes. George is sorry that he ever mentioned it. Just like I was when I sent the Nip flag home. All George got was a scratch on his wrist from a piece of shrapnel and the medics put him in for it.”
Norman Steinman regretted the distress he had caused his wife when she opened the envelope and confronted the flag and what it possibly meant. But I wondered if there might be another explanation why he had such a difficult time forgiving himself for sending the flag home.
In his essay “On Moral Pain,” writer-philosopher Peter Marin describes the psychological damage done to a man when he must balance the obligation to kill with the guilt that results from fulfilling that obligation. As Marin points out, it’s a tragic catch-22: “The soldier is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.”
My father had violated his own standards of morality by picking up a war souvenir, and it troubled him deeply. He had done what soldiers have always done, taking what they have conquered.
Japanese flags were a common souvenir for many American soldiers. “We used to say that the Japanese fought the war for their emperor, the British for glory, the Americans for souvenirs,” wrote historian William Manchester. Souvenir is from the Latin subvenire, to come up again, to come to mind. Many of the men who took flags from the battlefield would later find, like my father, that they did not want the stories provoked by those old souvenirs to “come to mind.” Yet they couldn’t bear to destroy them, either. That would betray their memories of their dead friends, their own grief and anger.
Thousands of years of human warfare have made clear that men can be permanently damaged by their “temporary” transformation into killers, by months of constant shelling and bombardment. In the American Civil War, this damage was called “soldier’s heart”; in the Great War, soldiers who were “shell-shocked” were taken to a hospital where doctors zapped them with electrical current, insisted they renounce their symptoms and return to the front. In World War II, it was called “combat fatigue” and it was not uncommon, though the Pentagon brass insisted there was no such phenomenon, that anyone who claimed to suffer from it was a weakling or a malingerer. In 1943, in Sicily, General George S. Patton slapped and kicked a decorated soldier hospitalized with shell-shock and called him a “yellow bastard.”
After Vietnam, the phenomenon entered the psychiatric lexicon as “post-traumatic stress disorder,” which journalist David Harris, who was imprisoned for draft resistance during the Vietnam War, has perceptively defined as “undigested grief.”
For men who returned home from World War II, repression was the standard medical prescription. “Time will heal,” doctors told those men who thought to ask for help. The men who fought the brutal war in the Pacific—who’d seen their buddies ripped apart by Japanese bayonets, who’d filled their nostrils with the stench of death—buried their anguish. In refusing to speak of it, they might succeed in holding the horrors at bay.
For Norman Steinman, all those years of never crying, never venting his sorrow, trying to restrain his rage, to suppress the nightmares—all those years of placating his “soldier’s heart” must have clogged his arteries with grief. He couldn’t tell his wife the very worst that happened. He could send her the flag, but he couldn’t tell her how he got it.
My innately gentle father and his buddies allowed themselves to believe that the enemy they fought in the jungle was subhuman. How else could they have tossed white phosphorus bombs into caves where there were living men? How else could the Japanese have tortured and beheaded civilians, prisoners of war, unless they believed likewise? In contrast, once I knew that my father’s enemy had a name, was indeed a human being, he became human. Those simple words, “To Yoshio Shimizu,” brought a shade to life. I was not just in possession of a flag. I was in possession of a name. That name belonged to a person with a family and a history.
Though I trolled through his correspondence for a definitive answer, my father’s letters never described how he actually acquired the flag. I tried to imagine the battlefield meeting between my father and Yoshio Shimizu. My imagination balked at the image of my father killing someone.
In March of 1945, Private Steinman wrote of leaving the battlefield during combat in a jeep with two other Jewish GIs—Sam Wengrow and Morrie Franklin—for Passover seder at Clark Field. Taking a cue from the 23rd Psalm, which we’d recited at both my parents’ funerals, I mentally prepared a table in the presence of my father’s enemy. I constructed an unlikely scenario. What if my father and his buddies encountered Yoshio Shimizu on the way to the seder? What if it happened, say, like this: My father is in the jeep with his buddies Morrie Franklin and Sam Wengrow. They have an overnight pass. It’s two and a half hours over bumpy terrain to Clark Field. They navigate sheer drops more than thirty-five hundred feet, hairpin turns. After forty grueling minutes, my father says to Walter, the driver, “Can you stop here? Gotta take a leak.”
“No problem,” says Walter and he stops the jeep.
While my father pees, Sam Wengrow ventures farther into the brush. Out of the bushes appears a ragged Japanese soldier, waving a white flag. The man is jabbering. Sam points his rifle at the man. He could be booby-trapped, dangerous. He keeps babbling, follows the trajectory of Sam’s rifle and marches to the jeep.
“Look what I found,” says Sam to his buddies. My father takes some communication wire and ties the prisoner’s hands behind his back. “I’ll sit in the back with him,” he tells Sam and off they go. My father has his carbine pointed at the man’s side. They’ll throw him in the stockade at Clark.
The man is terrified, relieved, famished. Shaking like Jell-O. My father gives him a piece of salami from his own private stash; he gives him a cigarette. The Japanese soldier wolfs the salami down. Who knows what they’ll do with him, the prisoner must be thinking. He’s still alive. He might as well eat.
“Tokyo boom boom boom?” Sam says to the prisoner over his shoulder from the front seat. Does he know Tokyo is being bombarded with incendiary bombs? The man shakes his head, he doesn’t understand. The rhythm of the bumpy road makes him drowsy. He falls asleep with his head on my father’s shoul
der. “You’ve got a new friend, Steinman,” Morrie teases.
They arrive at the seder with the dozing prisoner. Inside, the chaplain is holding up a matzoh and the assembled are reading responsively: “Behold this is the bread of affliction our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat thereof. Let all in who want to observe the Passover. This year here, next year in Jerusalem. This year as subjects, next year as free men.”
The front door of the mess hall has been left open for the prophet Elijah, as is customary at a seder. There is even an extra wineglass on the table. On the “Amen!” Norm, Sam, and Morrie escort Yoshio Shimizu inside. The wine has just been blessed, is now being poured. The officers look askance at this breach of protocol. “They brought a shkutz,” says a captain, and the men all laugh. My father seats Yoshio beside him at the table and unties his hands. He grabs the Manischewitz and pours him a glass. The wine is sweet like plum wine. It is Passover; you’re supposed to recline at the table. You’re supposed to drink four glasses of wine instead of one. These are mnemonic devices to help us remember the significance of the story of Exodus told on this holiday.
The seder plate is passed around. There is a bare bone and a burnt egg to symbolize the burnt offering Moses made to God on Mount Sinai. The tradition is for the youngest son to ask the ritual Four Questions. But there are no children here, so nineteen-year-old Private Cohen from Schenectady is drafted for the job. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” How was this war different from all other wars? The men pray they’ll never invade the mainland, that God’s secret weapon will spare them for next year in Jerusalem. The men chant “Dayenu,” meaning “It would have been enough.” It would have been enough if the Red Sea had parted, it would have been enough if Moses’ staff turned into a snake. It would have been enough if God had spared the firstborn of the Hebrews. They drink more sweet wine. They sing Chad Gadya, that children’s song:
Then, the Angel of Death came
And slew the butcher
who killed the ox
that drank the water
that quenched the fire
that burned the stick …
All the men are high by now, even Yoshio Shimizu, who pounds out the rhythm on the table with a Navy spoon. My father is in such a jovial mood, he even sings that Russian song with all the “heys.”
After the last cup of wine is drained, Yoshio Shimizu rises from the table and faces my father. He presses his good-luck banner, a silk flag, into Norm Steinman’s hands, bows deeply, and is led away.
MOST PROBABLY, IT did not happen like that. A letter my father wrote in the Communications tent while a hard rain fell realistically depicts his attitudes toward Japanese POWs.
25 June 1945
The roads are really a sea of mud. When we take the Message Center run via jeep, I always get covered from head to toe with mud. People talk about the Pony Express Riders in our history—but I don’t think any of those guys had any more thrills or dangers than our twelve-mile ride daily. But as I’ve said before, it can’t go on forever. This paper is getting a little damp from the rain, but it will still be legible I hope.
Just got a call, that they are bringing a Nip prisoner in—if it isn’t too dark out I’ll take a picture of the little bastard.
I’ve written a letter to Mom care of your address. Trying to time it with her arrival. You’ll have to write all her reactions with Ruthie.
Time out. Prisoner just arrived. The usual crowd of hanger-oners sweating him out. I did take his picture—the bastard is scurvy looking. We told him to sit down and he squats or kneels—like he was praying to Shinto. Don’t know why I keep writing about the prisoner. Now the son of a——is staring at me while I’m writing. He probably thinks we’ll kill him. He does look scared.
Oh well—this is all in a day’s routine. I’ll write more tomorrow. So I can get this off in today’s mail.
Perhaps the flag was simply abandoned. After Umingan, my father describes a battlefield strewn with objects the Japanese soldiers left behind: “The Nips must have cleared out in such a hurry that they didn’t wait to take anything with them. Last night I slept on a Jap blanket and used a real pillow. George even had a mattress. We were all envious.”
Or, perhaps it happened like this: my father kneeled over the cold body of a young Japanese soldier who had fallen in front of his eyes in the fierce fighting around Balete Pass. In the yearbook of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division and World War II, published just after the war, there’s a description of Japanese dead “littering a battle-torn hill.” Perhaps my father noticed a scrap of silk still clinging to the lining of the dead soldier’s helmet, and plucked it out. Perhaps, in the dizzying heat, he folded that banner carefully and placed it in his pocket. It didn’t weigh anything.
CHAPTER SIX
The Gift
IT WAS A powerful impulse to imagine my father’s enemy as a real person. Of course, my life was not threatened by grenades or snipers. I had the luxury of speculating who Yoshio Shimizu was, what he might have felt, where he came from. I wanted to know if, like his enemy, Yoshio Shimizu had a young child he’d never seen. Did he have brothers, sisters? Did he come from a big city? A small village? Had he suspected that the emperor was not a god but a man? Had he somehow survived the war? Was he a grouchy executive who’d lived in Nagoya all these years? Was he a shopkeeper in Gifu, tormented by nightmares? Had he been a foot soldier or a commander? Had he beheaded POWs in Bataan? Huddled in a foxhole sharing stories about home?
As I imagined Yoshio in more detail, and as I read more about the history and ethics of the conflict, I contemplated what form might best express what I was learning about the war. For many years, creating a performance or dance/theater piece had been the way I gave order to my investigations.
I could create a performance piece or a one-act play about the imagined battlefield meeting between my father and Yoshio Shimizu. I could use images from my father’s letters, both real and imagined: the American GIs drunk at the seder with the Japanese POW; the two soldiers singing themselves to sleep at night in their foxholes; a meeting on the battlefield at night against a projected film clip of the emperor riding his white horse; scenes of my father parting from his young wife; and Yoshio Shimizu, reluctant to go to war, receiving his good-luck flag from his family in Japan.
Inspired, I applied to a foundation in Japan to create this dramatization of the two soldiers and the lost flag. Their rejection was swift and disappointing. It also turned out to be a gift in disguise.
The foundation had misinterpreted my project proposal to mean that I would actually perform with the flag. A program officer there took it upon himself to explain why this would be a bad idea:
If the Japanese audience realized that the flag was not in the possession of its original owner, presumed dead, they would find this repugnant. Should you return the flag, in fact, to the family of Yoshio Shimizu, it is my opinion that your efforts would bring a lasting reward to your soul—the supreme act of reconciliation between an American soldier and a Japanese soldier as carried out by the posterity of the conquering nation.
The program officer’s suggestion lit flares in my mind: What if what began as artistic speculation could instead become a physical gesture in the real world? What if it were possible to actually find Yoshio Shimizu or his family and what if I could actually return the flag to them?
I HAD NO clue how to begin locating a person connected to some fifty-year-old smudges of ink on a piece of Japanese silk. I tried the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, with no success. I was open to suggestions.
A friend who spoke Japanese came up with the address of an organization in Tokyo that sounded quite helpful: the Japanese War-Bereaved Families Association. If I wrote to them, she suggested, surely they would help me find the family of Yoshio Shimizu. I wrote immediately.
Months passed. No word from Tokyo. It was late 1994, and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II was just
half a year away. In the United States, as in Japan, there was considerable debate about how to commemorate this momentous anniversary. The argument about how to portray the dropping of the first atomic bomb was spilling across the Pacific, and igniting incendiary emotions. The politics of memory between the two sides of the Pacific War were deeply conflicted.
In the United States, the controversy centered on the Smithsonian’s proposed exhibition about the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), with veterans groups accusing the museum of revisionism and historians accusing Congress of pandering to veterans.
In Japan, the loudest controversy centered on whether or not the government should issue an apology for Japan’s brutal actions in Asia during World War II. (“A small dry cough of remorse,” is how New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof termed the government statement that was finally issued.) The newspapers were filled with new accounts of the Korean comfort women forced by the Japanese military to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during the war.
The Japanese War-Bereaved Families Association, I later learned, was one of Japan’s most influential nationalist organizations, a potent lobby that was putting its muscle behind the fight to block a war apology in the Japanese Parliament. Although opinion polls showed that the great majority of Japanese was in favor of an apology, the association supported the outrageous claim that Japan had fought “a war of liberation” to free Asians from the yoke of Western rule, and that to admit otherwise would dishonor the Japanese war dead.
If I had known that, I could have guessed their response to my query. Whatever the association discerned were my motives (at the time not exactly clear to me), they wanted no part of my search. They declined without offering any specific reasons.
The Souvenir Page 7