The Souvenir

by Louise Steinman

  The mayor then presented me with four large wrapped boxes, explaining that they were a gift of appreciation from the town. I started to open the first when the room began to clatter and shudder. No one budged. I sat frozen to the tatami mat.

  After what felt like a full minute, the room ceased to vibrate. Everybody cautiously smiled at one other. There. We’d been through something together. Instead of ratcheting up the emotional tenor, the earthquake lent the room a new calm. We all sat quietly without speaking for several moments, a mutual acknowledgment of forces beyond our control. When it was clear that the temblor was over, smiles broke out on many faces.

  I opened the boxes. Inside the first box were three traditional “Dharma” dolls, made by a hundred-year-old Suibara craftsman. They were shaped like the conical hats Suibara children traditionally wear to ward off snow. In the second box, a dozen beautiful pastries shaped like swan eggs. In the third was a brooch in the shape of a swan. Inside the fourth box was a framed photograph of swans in flight.

  Three of the men in the room stood and introduced themselves. Masako translated: “We were all the same age as Yoshio. We lived in the same neighborhood. Yuko was the oldest and Yoshio was the youngest of the four. But Yoshio was the tallest and was one of the nice-looking young men and he was most popular with the girls! He was a very gentle and kind person.” Yoshio was eighteen when he left to fight in the Japanese Imperial Army. He was twenty-one when his family received word he had died. His sister told me, “We didn’t know if he was killed on a ship or on the land. It was quite difficult to learn how he died, how he was killed. At that time it was difficult to get any kind of information.”

  Masako had warned me the family would probably want to know how my father got the flag. One of the elderly men posed the question. “I can’t say for sure. I wish that I could,” I said. I explained that my father regretted sending the flag home. That he informed my mother of his regret over and over again. That he probably gathered it up from items left behind in a cave by retreating Japanese soldiers. No one pressed the issue, yet the question hovered in the air. Perhaps, I thought in hindsight, I was fortunate not to possess a conclusive answer.

  Masako translated one man’s thoughtful offering: “You must understand. For those of us who were in the war, when we see the flag before us, it makes our hearts ache.” I looked at these aging men. I wondered what horrors they had endured or possibly, in the name of the emperor, might have inflicted on Chinese or Filipino civilians, or British POWs. I wondered what conflicts from their war service continued to plague their minds and dreams. One man had served in Manchuria, another in Mindanao. They possessed memories they had probably never shared with their wives or children. I couldn’t assure these men that my father had not been the one who killed their friend Yoshio Shimizu, that he hadn’t taken that flag from his dead body. The “tragic irony of war,” as Amy Morita had called it, resonated throughout the room.

  The mayor asked Lloyd to say a few words. Bleary with fever, assailed by emotions, and constricted by the formality of the situation, he managed a few sentences until his gracious hosts let him off the hook.

  After the speeches, the women working behind the scenes brought out an enormous banquet: platters of colorful sushi, tempura, crab’s legs, and red-bean rice, made specially for auspicious occasions. The men chain-smoked American cigarettes. Bottles of beer and carafes of sake appeared. The tone in the room changed. There was laughter, joking. The men came over to slap Lloyd on the back. Our glasses were always full.

  The flag was fondled, caressed, examined. “Do you remember where you signed? Look here!” Several people found their names on the flag, where they signed fifty years ago—offering the young soldier good luck as he departed for a foreign land. This kind of flag is called yosegaki, which means a collection. A collection of names.

  The Shimizu family had embraced the advice that Amy Morita had given them—to think of us as the long-lost friends of the missing soldier. Heady from my never-empty glass of sake and the thrill of this gathering, I felt as though we were.

  I remembered that it was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover and we were the honored guests at the banquet, just as I had imagined Yoshio Shimizu as the honored guest at my father’s seder in the middle of a war.

  The words we repeat each year at Passover as part of the service took on new meaning: “Since you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt, thou shalt love the stranger as thyself.”

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, the gathering finally started to break up. The house emptied as everyone left and assembled in the driveway for a group photo. Two lawn chairs were brought out for Lloyd and me. Yoshio’s three sisters knelt down on the ground to my right. The elder men, including Suezo and the mayor, squatted to Lloyd’s left. Yoshinobu, his two-year-old perched on his shoulder, stood directly behind us. In front of him, between Lloyd and me, his wife cradled their youngest. Four of Yoshio’s old friends held the flag, each one gripping a corner of the silk square. Masako took the left flank. Click. The moment was recorded: We now shared a common history.

  THE SHIMIZUS AND the mayor were eager to take us to Lake Hyoko, Suibara’s premier tourist destination, and introduce us to the Swan Uncle, one of the town’s most respected citizens. Masako filled me in on the story of Suibara and its swans.

  Until the late nineteenth century, Suibara had been the seasonal home to five-foot-tall whooper swans that arrived each fall from Siberia to escape the rigors of the northern winter. They wintered on Suibara’s reservoir lake, limned with pine trees that created a natural windscreen. The townspeople considered the birds “honored guests”; hunting them was strictly forbidden. Each spring, the swans migrated back to their nesting grounds in the Siberian tundra.

  After Japan opened to trade with the West, firearms, originally introduced by Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century, were distributed widely throughout the country. The villagers of Suibara began to hunt the once-protected birds. Tokyo shops paid high prices for swan meat, which was considered a delicacy. About the same time, noisy factories sprouted up on land that had been rice paddies, their waste emptying into lakes and wetlands in Niigata Prefecture. The combination of hunting pressure and habitat loss ultimately proved too much for the whooper swans. By the early 1900s, they disappeared altogether from Suibara.

  In 1950, inexplicably, after an absence of four decades, eight whooper swans returned to Hyoko Lake from their summer nesting grounds in the Siberian tundra. The villagers were amazed to see the spectacular birds adrift on their lake. They crowded along the shoreline, shouting. Some ran for their guns. The shy birds, alarmed, took off. If it hadn’t been for one very determined man, a farmer named Jusaburo Yoshikawa, they might never have returned.

  Yoshikawa dedicated his life to persuading his neighbors to leave the swans in peace, and persuading the whoopers to stay in Suibara. He patiently patrolled the lake day and night, exhorting villagers to avoid frightening the swans. When the lake froze over, he hacked through the ice with an ax, wading out in hip-high boots to clear away the shards so the swans could forage for oat grass on the lake bottom.

  Yoshikawa’s single-minded efforts originally earned him the title of Swan Fool from his fellow villagers. His wife, whom he persuaded to make daily requests of local grocers for discarded greens for the swans, was called the Swan Widow. But he eventually managed to get Lake Hyoko declared a protected zone, officially the “Winter Habitat of Wild Swans at Suibara”; and that same year, 1954, he received the title of Swan Father. His son, Shigeo, who carried on his father’s tradition of caring for the swans, is known as the Swan Uncle.

  The magnificent whoopers are now little Suibara’s main claim to fame. Their return was Suibara’s good omen and then its postwar recovery miracle, bringing thousands of Japanese tourists to the town each winter. The townspeople are both grateful and protective. Schoolchildren in Suibara form swan patrols to assist with feedings, and to insure that the birds are not harassed.

/>   We sat in the observation room at the lake’s feeding station with Shigeo Yoshikawa, the bespectacled Swan Uncle. Nori machi, a green tea that tastes like chicken soup, was served. Exhausted from the emotion of the afternoon, no one ventured small talk. We all stared out the windows, looking one way toward a field of purple irises, the other way toward the lake and those few swans still in spring residence; their black-beaked beauty was startling against the pale reeds. “Louise-san must come back in swan season,” Shigeo announced, with a voice of quiet insistence. The Shimizus all nodded enthusiastically. The idea appealed to me, unlikely as it seemed. Then it was time to go.

  The Shimizu family insisted on driving Lloyd, Masako, and me the forty minutes to the Niigata train station. Once we’d located the right track and the right shinkansen train and seated ourselves inside on the correct seats, the family assembled outside the window, the colors of their sweaters and jackets making a somber study in mauves, blues, and gray.

  They did not wave, but stayed in their places as if a portrait photographer were taking a long exposure. The women were in the front, the men behind them. Hiroshi, Hanayo, and Chiyono—the three sisters of Yoshio Shimizu—stood elbow to elbow, their hands clasped together and their pocketbooks over their forearms. Behind them: Hiroshi’s husband, Suezo; cousin Yasue, the farmer; and beside him, the new patriarch, young Yoshinobu, Yoshio’s nephew.

  I kept my eyes on the assembled family as the train pulled out of the station. I was relieved that Yoshio’s flag was now in their possession—home where it belonged.

  The Philippines

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The American Cemetery

  A FEW DAYS later, on the plane to Manila, I kept thinking about the Shimizu family, standing outside our train compartment window.

  I tried to sleep. Lloyd and I were both exhausted. Lloyd was barely recovered from the flu. I wasn’t sure we had the stamina for Manila in the hot season, and for the journey to the site in the mountains of northern Luzon, where my father assumed guardianship of the flag.

  Reading the warnings in The Lonely Planet guidebook did not do much to spark our enthusiasm for travel: “Beware of pickpockets, thieving cabbies, strangers who offer drugged sweets, or drunks.”

  I’d already inherited an antipathy to the Philippines, reinforced by my father’s letters.

  10 September 1945

  When I get home, I never want to be reminded of the Philippines. Everything on this island will always bring back sad memories and remind me of six long months of hell—living in fear—seeing such horrible sights day in and especially the nights of being awake and always on guard wondering and waiting.

  That same September, in Luzon before his division left for Japan, he made a sobering trip to the cemetery in the barrio of Santa Barbara. He brought his camera: “Many of the pictures I took were of the boys that I knew and some of the entire cemetery as a whole.”

  He went to visit the still-fresh graves of friends like Sam Wengrow, “the Jewish lad from Florida.” Sam had been killed by a sniper on May 29, 1945, after the Battle of Balete Pass was officially over.

  17 September 1945

  Yesterday I went on that trip to the cemetery in Santa Barbara. I’m very glad that I went. It will always remain with me. The thousands of symmetric white crosses and Stars of David sprinkled in between. It was very impressive and very sobering.

  Richard’s and Sam’s graves didn’t even have their names or dog tags on their crosses—we just figured it out by the sequence of numbers and then I went to the office and made sure that they’ll change Sam’s cross to a Star of David. Not that it matters much to Sam now—but since his faith was Hebrew—I thought it would be more fitting.

  Some of the graves were just marked unknown—quite a few of them—and as I’ve said before there really are many Stars. Most of the boys that came out of my outfit didn’t know what the Stars were for. So I explained that to them.

  After the war, the American Military Cemetery in Manila was designated as the permanent resting place for Americans who died in the Philippine campaign, and soldiers buried at several sites around the Philippines, including the cemetery in Santa Barbara, were reinterred here.

  OUR ACCOMMODATIONS WERE reserved at the Midland Plaza Hotel in downtown Manila, an unlovely modern behemoth, thirty floors of gray concrete with a shiny marble lobby, uniformed elevator men, and its own coffee shop.

  The hotel was a leftover from Marcos’s heyday, and tourist business must have been slow. No other guests in that vast building ever revealed themselves to us during our entire stay. No one else appeared in the coffee shop, no one else but us cashed traveler’s checks at the front desk. The management must have rented out the rooms to long-term guests. We smelled curries simmering and heard families arguing behind closed doors in the long carpeted corridor.

  The security guards chatting in the lobby were armed with semi-automatics. There had been a recent spate of bank robberies in Manila, which were thought to be linked to the guerrilla movement on the southern islands. The hotel porter, a sweet young man named Louis, insisted on walking us the half block to the 7-Eleven, where we bought midnight snacks before turning in. The security guard at the 7-Eleven was fondling a semiautomatic as well.

  Our room was really a suite, with two huge rooms and a balcony overlooking Manila Harbor. In Japan, all of the hotel rooms we stayed in would have fit inside this one. And it was cheap, too, by American standards. In fact, after Japan, where buying a cantaloupe was like trading in stocks and bonds, Filipino currency was like Monopoly money. Our first night we both slept fitfully, each waking up several times to the sound of the rasping air conditioner.

  In the morning, we had coffee and toast in the Midland Hotel coffee shop, which doubled in the evening hours as a nightclub. Its most distinguishing feature was the painted mural of American movie stars—Marilyn on the ski slope, James Dean lounging, Fred and Ginger (who sported a chapeau resembling a plate of scrambled eggs) dancing the night away.

  When we stepped outside the air-conditioned hotel, the force of mid-morning heat nearly knocked us over. We made our way toward the bay, past tiny foodstands selling snacks I wouldn’t dare eat: pickled pigs’ feet and jars of large eggs glistened in the hot sun. Whenever we stopped, a jeepney—one of Manila’s garishly decorated local vans—slammed on its brakes beside us, the driver shouting out, “Want a ride?” As tourists, we stood out.

  Trying to get across a boulevard took nerve. None of the stoplights were working, and the flow of jeepneys and taxis and buses was constant and thick. So was the air, wretched with exhaust.

  A nine-year-old in rags, his scrawny brother on his back, darted among the cars with his hand outstretched. Lloyd pressed a twentypeso bill into it, and the boy retreated to the shade of the crosswalk. Maybe it bought him a few minutes’ rest. Another boy working the intersection dragged his withered leg. A third beggar had no legs at all, just a crumbled stump of a torso. Acupuncture needles adorned his ears. Manila was a carnival of pain.

  On the bay side of the boulevard, families rested under the scraggly coconut palms. People were swimming in the murky water. We passed several horse-drawn carriages, intended for tourists. The ponies looked half-dead. They shifted their weight from front foot to back, their shaggy heads held low. The driver ran after us: Did we want a ride? No? Maybe later? No? How long were we staying? At what hotel?

  We wandered into the old Malate cathedral, a colonial leftover, just before Sunday morning mass. Portable fans purred away, stirring the air around the parishioners. Doleful statues of suffering Christ watched over them. I was relieved to sit down and rest on a hard wooden pew in the peaceful sanctuary. Sparrows flitted through the interior, perching on the unlit chandeliers. A plastic bag floated down the aisle, propelled by the breeze. I watched the neatly dressed families: young mothers and fathers with four, five young children each, each child’s hair combed and braided. The priest announced in an Irish accent, “Christ is alive and Christ loves
us.” A neon sign by the altar—“Jesus Loves You”—blinked on and off.

  In Japan, after Lloyd became ill, I had taken the lead, making sure he got sleep, procuring hot drinks, coercing him into seeing the sights, making sure we got to our trains and got off them at the right time. Here, light-headed from the heat, I was the more fragile one. Lloyd, beginning to feel normal, took over the practical details: He navigated, checked timetables, consulted maps, paid taxi drivers. I sat in the pew and concentrated my thoughts on the story Masako’s husband told me.

  After leaving Suibara, Lloyd and I had stayed overnight at their home. On the train ride there, Masako had mentioned that her husband, Norio, an engineering professor, had an unusual war story. “But he never talks about it,” she said.

  When we got to her house, Norio met us at the door. He had a boyish grin and wore at-home clothes—jeans and a comfy sweater. After a spaghetti dinner, we settled into conversation. Norio was listening intently to the story of the flag and our visit with the Shimizu family. At one point he excused himself and returned with a tattered photo album. He set it down on the coffee table, then lifted out a photo of a young couple and their infant son.

  The couple was strikingly handsome. The husband had a crisp part in his hair. He wore an elegant suit. His delicate wife wore a traditional silk kimono. Norio stared at it before handing it to me. “These are my parents,” he explained.

  The photo was taken in 1939, three years after his parents had been posted to Manchuria. His young father was an official of the Manchuko (puppet) government, established by the Japanese to rule over China. Settling in Manchuria was considered both a patriotic duty and an adventurous opportunity.