Days later my brother Larry phoned and asked, “Would you be returning this flag if it were a German flag with a swastika on it?”
He had a point. Having grown up in a Jewish household where unnamed relatives had perished in the Holocaust, I wonder if I could have seen past that symbol to whatever humanness might have existed on “the other side.”
For many who had been caught in the maw of the Pacific War—American vets, Japanese citizens bitter about their country’s legacy of militarism, certainly many Koreans and Chinese who had suffered Japan’s barbaric occupation of their countries—the Rising Sun flag was just as loaded. In 1987, Shoichi Chibana, a grocer in Yomitan, Okinawa, was arrested for tearing down and burning a red sun flag at the opening ceremony of a national athletic meet. At his trial, Chibana argued that many Japanese on Okinawa still considered the flag a “loathsome symbol” of wartime militarism and sacrifice. In 1945, the Japanese Army had ordered the mass suicide of eighty-two Yomitan civilians as a gesture of loyalty to the emperor. My desire to return the flag, or the flag’s desire to be returned, was turning out to be more morally complicated than I’d bargained for.
WHEN I ARRIVED at my office the next morning after an agitated and sleepless night, I stared with disbelief at a fax on my desk from Amy Morita. The Ministry had located Hiroshi Shimizu, the younger sister of the soldier. Yoshio had died in the war, but his sister lived in the town of Suibara near the city of Niigata, on the northwest coast of Japan.
The Ministry had provided Amy with an address, but no phone number. Weeks passed without further word. Then Amy called from Tokyo around midnight. She had spoken to Hiroshi Shimizu. She had simply searched through the phone directory for Niigata Prefecture until she found the number.
She was thrilled with her detective work but sounded one major note of caution: “She sounds old and is rather confused about your visit,” Amy said over the crackling phone line. The morning after Amy’s call, I bought two round-trip tickets and nailed down my leave of absence from work.
I busied myself with travel details, like finding the right container for the flag. I wasn’t exactly sure what “right” meant. Not too big, not too small. Not flimsy, not cute. Dignified. Finally, in a fancy stationery boutique at the Beverly Center Mall, I saw what I wanted—an austere, flat, navy blue leather box, which contained very expensive Crane’s stationery. “Could I just buy the box?” I inquired hopefully. The clerk raised her eyebrows. I remembered suddenly that cranes are revered in Japan, and bought the box without further hesitation. I was, after all, alert to omens.
On the way home, my car drove itself to the cemetery. Not until I turned off the ignition did I fully realize where I was. I walked into the mausoleum, and sat on a stool in front of my parents’ crypt. I stared at the silent wall, at the incised words on the bronze plaque: NORMAN STEINMAN: A JUST MAN.
I tried to guess what my father would think of this mission, this obsession of mine. I was about to fly halfway around the world to give this flag to the sister of his enemy. Was I doing the right thing? I was planning to visit Balete Pass, the place he considered hell on earth.
28 March 1945, The Philippines
Dearest,
The days are really telling on everyone here. All the eighteen-year-old youngsters have suddenly begun to look years older. And many a gray hair has been added to my noggin.
This outfit has been overseas since Pearl Harbor, and every man here is bitter. They have been through every campaign from Guadalcanal on. And right now it seems that our division is striving to set a new record for the most consecutive days in combat on the front lines. I know I sound bitter, but those are the conditions. And I’m at the stage where I don’t give a damn. We’re all tired and suffering from combat fatigue. But I would probably still have the same sentiments even if I were well rested.
I’m still physically well—and a good soldier always gripes. So don’t worry about me. I really haven’t changed from the guy you know. Just a little harder and tougher to get along with. But I do love you—Norman
Was Sylvan Katz right? I couldn’t help wondering. Was my father angry, restless in his grave?
Japan
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bombs under Tokyo
ON APRIL 7, 1995, fifty-one years after my father crossed the equator on his way to war, I was crossing the Pacific for the first time, gazing out at clouds and water through the windows of a wide-body jet en route to Japan. In my backpack under my seat was the box containing the Japanese flag on which was written the name of my father’s wartime enemy. Beside me, my husband dozed peacefully, a magazine open on his lap.
I reclined my seat, closed my eyes, and tried to relax. For weeks, months now, I’d imagined possible scenarios of the moment when I would hand over the flag. I screened them now in my mind. In one version the American woman walks alone at dusk across a rice paddy, a mysterious pack on her back. The sky is blood red. Black clouds descend like swooping dragons. The woman knocks on the door of a small thatched hut in the middle of a deserted field. The door creaks open; a frail, stooped woman peers out. The American tries to speak to her but the old woman shakes her head. She closes the door, pushes the visitor away. Second version: The old woman lets the visitor come inside, opens the box, then faints when she sees the rust-colored speckles on the flag. In yet another, I’m standing alone in the town square of some remote Japanese village, clutching my box while curious villagers eye me from behind half-drawn curtains.
BY JULY OF 1945, my father assumed he was going to see Japan for the first time as part of a massive Allied invasion of the Japanese islands. He was dreading it.
The invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s home isles, was scheduled to launch on November 1. Half a million American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were to assault the island’s southern beaches, backed by an armada of three thousand ships, including twenty-two battleships, and more than sixty aircraft carriers.
It was the weary combat troops in the Pacific, including the Twenty-seventh Regiment, who were slated for the Kyushu invasion. My father was deeply depressed about the planned campaign and the obstacles still to be surmounted before he could come home safe and sound. “Maybe I ought to turn psycho,” he confessed. “That won’t be too hard. I’m pretty far gone already.”
In the summer of 1945, Peter Lomenzo was a twenty-seven-year-old army battalion commander with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division on Luzon. He vividly recalled the briefing session he attended for the Kyushu invasion:
Several hundred of us—Army, Navy, and Marines—were in a heavily secured gymnasium, on little folding chairs, like little card table chairs. They had these big photographs of the landing beaches in Japan. My battalion had a spot on one of those damned beaches. I knew it. And it was awful. Our first objective was to be a heavily fortified military air strip a short distance from the beach. You can imagine the kind of support around a military base. I’d been worried and scared before, but this was the first time I was really frightened. Was I up to leading 1,000 combat infantry men ashore?
All they kept talking about was the medical support. I thought, “We’re all going to get killed.” There were more medical units involved in the landings than anything else. It was going to be bigger than D-Day. Hundreds of thousands of troops. And we were going to be in those early landing waves.
There was good reason for Peter Lomenzo and Norman Steinman and all of the American infantry forces to dread a campaign on the Japanese mainland. The U.S. military expected the Japanese would be prepared, their beach defenses fortified with several hundred thousand soldiers and perhaps five thousand aircraft. Kamikaze pilots would dive-bomb the ships at anchorage. Japanese soldiers would pilot huge torpedoes, called kaiten, into American ships. The coast of Kyushu was studded with caves, and the mountains there were more rugged than Okinawa’s. Japanese civilians were prepared to fight to the death rather than dishonor their country. Mass suicide was not an unlikely scenario.
After the n
ews reached Luzon of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the entry of the Russians into the war against the Japanese, rumors of an imminent Japanese surrender circulated among the infantry. Infected with a new optimism, my father wrote on August 9:
I’ll start right in with the greatest news broadcast of my countrymen the Russians declaring war. That news was more exciting to us here than the VE broadcast. Why maybe now I can see my chances for getting home are a reality—and Lordy, I hope that it isn’t necessary to have an invasion. The Russians and the atomic bomb should be the combination to cause the Japs to surrender without losing their ugly face.
On August 11, the Twenty-fifth Division received the first report from San Francisco that the Japanese had accepted the Potsdam Ultimatum (in which the United States, Britain, and China announced the terms of a surrender) with the reservation that the emperor be allowed to keep his white horse, a phrase that sounds as if it were lifted from a fairy tale rather than from a sober political document.
Peter Lomenzo recalls how, on August 12, in the midst of a deadly serious discourse by a senior officer on the landing beaches for the invasion, “an officer walked briskly down the middle aisle up to the platform and said, ‘Men! I want your attention! The President has just announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.’
“The entire gang erupted in sheer joy and disbelief that anything like this could just up and happen. We did thank GOD.”
After all the tense anticipation, there would be no invasion of the Japanese mainland. The doggies on Luzon went wild. As my father reported: “From the Colonel down to the Privates—the boys in town really rioted—just helping themselves to all the liquor available. I detailed a cook to get up and serve coffee all night long. What a night.”
Drunken revelry continued around the clock. The beer held out for days on end. “We can’t seem to get back down to earth,” he wrote, also reminding his wife that when he finally got home, he would need “rest, plenty of rehabilitation. I always thought that term a great joke but it’s true. What is really the matter is that I can’t enjoy anything and the key to the answer is you. Also, it will take a long time if ever to forget the horrible things I’ve seen.”
I COULDN’T FEEL the plane’s movement through the air. It felt as though it were simply suspended in space. I thought of my father suspended in anticipation, waiting thirty-five days off the shore of Nagoya on a “Navy tub” called the USS Natrona.
By September 24, 1945, his regiment had boarded troop ships in Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines bound for Japan. Instead of invading the mainland in what he and his buddies feared would be a bloody nightmare, the Americans were about to join their fellow servicemen as the victorious and occupying army.
We’re on the same type of boat that we left New Caledonia to hit this beach but the situation is so very different now. There isn’t the tense feeling and the fear of going into combat for the first time and the thought that many amongst us wouldn’t come out of it. Now, not only do we know our destination but we know that no lead or shells or bombs will be thrown at us—and everything is clear sailing. Also, all the reports did state that not one soldier has been hurt in the occupation of Japan so far.
Nevertheless, the prospect of mingling with their all-too-recent enemies did not please the troops.
6 October 1945, USS Natrona
We are all annoyed at the idea that we have to be nice to the Nips. We would like to do to them as they did whenever they took over a city or country. The Nips will think us crazy for not doing what they would do under similar conditions. Why, we may even lose face.
Anyway we’re getting a unit of fire for our weapons before going ashore. I feel better already, I thought for a minute that we would just go in with empty rifles. But there is no chance of anything happening. The Nips are playing it smart. They’re really taking us for suckers, I do believe.
What am I getting mad about? The war is over—aren’t we supposed to kiss and make up?
In the weeks of waiting on the ship, the men watched I Married an Angel with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in the mess hall; they spent hours playing cards: “Insipid games like pinochle and we make the games so very important trying to concentrate on the playing and time goes by that way. Then we read anything we can get our hands on—magazines so very old, all kinds of trite fiction anything just to kill time and try to forget the rolling of the ship.”
There was constant friction on board between army doggies and navy men:
21 October 1945, USS Natrona
We were disturbed by the officers who just came in for a shakedown inspection. It seems that the boys have been taking the Navy’s spoons and forks from the mess hall for their personal possession and now the Navy is complaining and wants them back.
A Navy spoon is always an infantry doggie’s prize possession. A spoon next to one’s rifle is the most useful instrument of war. I own a Navy spoon that I got from the USS Oxford—the ship we hit the beach of Luzon on—but I wouldn’t give it up for the world. I intend to keep that as a souvenir of the campaign.
My father turned thirty on October 14, 1945. The army postal service came through, delivering to the tub nine letters from home (three from his parents in Los Angeles, six letters from his wife in Brooklyn), two pipes, and pictures of his little girl at her first birthday party.
This is my third birthday in the army. The one that I’ll never forget and cherish in my memories always, is the first one, when my Dearest arrived in Texas before I shipped out, the best present a man could ask for. I was the happiest soldier alive. The second one spent in loneliness in New Caledonia, wondering if I’d ever see you again, and the third one just marking time aboard a Navy transport and dreaming of coming home to you and Ruthie and being together for all our birthdays.
The ship was abuzz with rumors, including one (false) that they’d have to go ashore without their weapons. No soldier who’d faced the Japanese infantry in the jungles of Luzon was happy about that.
15 October 1945, USS Natrona
One of our boys who has been ashore told me of the strange reaction he had when he first saw the Nips. Some of them are still in uniform roaming the streets. He said, “I saw some that looked like those I shot at!” and some that looked like those he’d hit. He just hates the bastards hates them all—and he couldn’t stomach the sightseeing and dumb sailors who acted like they were on a joy cruise in a port. It was interesting listening to him because I’ve often wondered how I’d react.
ON THE DAY Lloyd and I arrived in Tokyo, the cherry trees were in bloom, the dollar had plummeted relative to the yen to the lowest point since World War II, and everyone was anxious about toxic nerve gas. The city was on high alert. Just a few weeks earlier, on March 20, the shadowy sect Aum Shinrikyo had released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-five hundred. In what one Cabinet minister described as “a war” between the sect and the Japanese government, citizens of one of the world’s safest countries grappled with unaccustomed fear whenever they took subways or went to public places. Members of the cult and their enigmatic blind guru, Shoko Asahara, had not yet been apprehended.
For our first two days in Tokyo, we stayed at the house of an American acquaintance whose husband was the Tokyo correspondent for network television. Marjorie’s home was extremely comfortable, lavish by Japanese standards: two stories, four bedrooms, three baths. With the devalued dollar, the network paid an unfathomable twenty-four thousand dollars a month rent on the house. In the local shops, Marjorie showed me the hundred-dollar cantaloupes, beef at fifty dollars a kilo. A large pizza cost seventy-five dollars.
That spring was also the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and Marjorie’s husband was on assignment in Vietnam. Marjorie had her hands full taking care of two young children, ten and two, in a foreign city.
I quickly became friends with ten-year-old Laura, a wise, dreamy child with long brown hair and an infectious grin. She went to an elite inte
rnational school in Tokyo and, like most kids in Japan, she was assigned hours of homework each night, an expectation that generated ongoing friction with her mother. Laura preferred to spend time making collages out of Japanese wrapping paper, creating imaginary stories with her dolls and stuffed animals, or drawing in her sketchbook.
Lloyd and I were offered the baby’s nursery for a bedroom. We fell asleep quickly that first night, exhausted from travel and time changes. I woke in the predawn, jet-lagged and dream-drunk. I dreamed I’d come to Japan to find the Japanese pilot who’d dropped my father, alive and naked, over the Pacific Ocean.
It was a stunning fall, in slow motion as falls in dreams often are. There was the shock of seeing my father’s pale flesh against the brilliant blue sky. He had a slight paunch and his black hair was gray, as it was at the end of his life. And he was falling, his legs tumbling over his head and then around again … what was the expression on his face? In the dream, I tried to see—but I couldn’t.
I lay still in the half-dark. My father did not die in the Pacific, I told myself. He came home, he raised a family with my mother. He ran a pharmacy. He cracked corny jokes. He wanted me to go to law school.
I rolled over next to Lloyd. His skin was clammy and hot. He was burning with fever, the onset of a nasty flu. I opened my eyes, disoriented. Humpty Dumpty leered in the half-light. The toddler’s rocking horse was an emperor’s ghostly white stallion.
I pulled on a robe and tiptoed down the hallway to the kitchen to make tea, to try and clear my head. Marjorie was already in the kitchen, herself jangled awake by a nightmare. “There were Asian men planting landmines all over the house,” she whispered loudly. “One of them was crouched over the kitchen sink.”
The Souvenir Page 9