On the evening in question, Clifford double-checked my uniform like he was sending me out on a first date, smoothed a hand along my cheek to check my shave. We rehearsed the script: He loved her, he was sorry, he was in bad shape without her, and he’d do anything to get her back. All of which proved beside the point. Namiki sized me up in the time it took to cross the dance floor. I was just getting started on my spiel when she whispered “OK” into my ear, and I understood that she had been expecting me, that she had made her decision long before I arrived. Probably she had known she would be going back to Clifford even as she packed her things and bolted for her mother’s house. Before that moment, I’d been a little bit afraid of her—she was beautiful and, like all beautiful women, inspired a degree of awe. But now, as we danced, I just felt rotten. For suspecting her motives. For doubting her virtue. It didn’t matter if I was right. She was out of options. But she was a woman and she was proud, and dignity required her to make a show of what power she had left.
Because the Oasis was situated in a basement, the air was perpetually humid. There were no windows and only two doors, the entrance on the Ginza and a second door that led to an alley behind the building. Both were open now, but the cross breeze died halfway into the room. When Namiki twitched her hips, I could feel actual heat rising from beneath her dress, quick warm puffs, like breath. Her left hand was draped over my shoulder. In her right hand, she held a paper fan printed with Japanese characters and she waved it listlessly but ceaselessly, out of time to the music and without hope of relief.
By the end of the week, before the lease was up, they were back in Oimachi and I was alone again in the barracks and still I hadn’t replied to my wife’s letter. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was that the idea of a reply had assumed such proportions in my imagination it was impossible to write.
Then, one afternoon, I received a thank-you note from Arthur MacArthur. My name and rank were printed neatly on the envelope. The note itself was penned in boyish cursive.
Thank you for the tin soldiers you sent for my birthday. I have an extensive collection of military toys and the samurais make a fine addition. Last night, they defended the gates of a forgotten mountain kingdom against a frontal assault by U.S. Marines. They fought valiantly but were defeated due to lack of firepower. Maybe you would like to join me one day to play with my extensive collection of military toys. Thanks again. Most of my other presents were clothes.
The diction was a shade sophisticated for an eight-year-old, and I couldn’t help picturing Bunny perusing early drafts and returning them with corrections. Arthur would be stretched out on the floor writing my note while his father smoked a pipe and read The Sporting News. There are few enough ways in life for a boy and his father to get along, but that doesn’t mean the father ever stops trying to teach his son to be a man. I imagined Bunny wanted to raise not just a man but a gentleman.
After work, I retrieved the Super Speed from under the bed, dusted it off, returned it to its place on the desk, and dashed off a letter to my wife. Dashed is the right word. I was afraid that if I let myself think too much about what I was writing, I’d lose my nerve. I told her I understood—what happened between us had seemed like part of what was happening in the world. I wished her happiness, her and the baby. When it was finished, I stuffed the letter in an envelope and rushed it down to HQ in the dark so I wouldn’t have a chance to change my mind.
V
The International Military Tribunal didn’t start making headlines until summer was coming to a close. That business up in Nuremberg was getting all the press. Even so, Bunny issued regular statements on the subject and we typed his dispatches, not without a certain morbid curiosity. The names of the defendants were recognizable even to enlisted men: Shimada, Nagano, Tojo. Especially Tojo. Plenty of military criminals had already been tried and executed in the Philippines. Most of us presumed this lot would be hanged as well.
Because he wanted to expose the locals to the impartiality of Western justice and to make them fully aware of the atrocities perpetrated by their former leaders, Bunny opened the trials to the public. Each morning, free passes were issued for half a day’s session, but industrious hustlers like Eguchi would spend the night waiting in line, grab up the passes first thing and sell them for top dollar like ticket scalpers back home. Still, the gallery was always full: farmers, students, merchants. People poured into Tokyo from all over to see humbled the men who had set in motion their national humiliation.
Then, in September, a Newsweek reporter stationed in Tokyo wrote an article questioning the decision to exempt Emperor Hirohito from prosecution. This reporter contended that the Emperor had made numerous public statements extolling the righteousness of conquest when the war was going well and exhorting his subjects to fight to the very last man when the tide had turned. Only after we’d dropped the bomb did he change his tune. How could he not be tried? What Bunny did was have the reporter ejected from Japan. He issued a rebuttal, arguing that the Emperor’s power had been nominal at best, that he was a puppet of the military and the merchant class. The Emperor was sacred to the Japanese, Bunny said, and good relations would be decimated if he was dishonored. The story that made news, however, at least back in the States, was that Bunny was putting a lid on freedom of the press.
A week later, there was a riot outside the Imperial Palace Gates. I saw the whole thing from a window in the office. Reports varied, but most newspapers agreed that around a thousand young men, perhaps inspired by the controversy, marched into Hibiya Park, everybody chanting and waving red communist flags. Lots of repatriated soldiers in the crowd. Still in uniform. Likely the only clothes they owned. Hard to tell who they were protesting, the army that had beaten them in the field or the Emperor they believed had sent them into battle in the first place. The march itself wasn’t the problem. The trouble came when a group of protesters got carried away and tried to cross the bridge, intending—or so it was reported—to drag the Emperor out of the palace and haul him over to the trials. A nervous policeman, a local, fired into the crowd, then a second, then a third, killing two men, wounding three more. Another dozen were injured in the stampede back across the moat.
It’s difficult to describe how it felt when I heard the shots. They sounded flat, like a hand slapping the water, and it took a moment before I even realized what I’d heard. Rudy Grand was watching over my shoulder. He said, “Jesus Christ,” and I said, “What?” and then I understood. The crowd surged against itself, half of them still trying to rush the palace and the other half in full retreat.
What most papers failed to report was that, the day after the riot, ten thousand women descended on Hibiya Park at dawn. Without making a single speech, without a word, really, no sound but the shuffling of their feet, they lined up along the length of the moat and knelt in the grass and stayed there until nightfall, a human barrier against those who would harm the Emperor. According to Bunny, the press wasn’t interested in silence. They wanted fireworks or nothing at all.
I was shaving one morning while Eguchi mopped around the johns and I decided to ask him what he thought about the trials. Talking to Eguchi was a bit like talking to a newsie in a mob film. There was something touching and comic in the way he blended actual youth with a veneer of premature manhood. He smoked like a fiend and he could drink more than most GIs and he possessed a remarkable vocabulary of American slang, particularly the bluer elements of the idiom. But he was also still very much a boy. He saluted everybody in the barracks and he begged combat stories from the men who’d seen real action. When he dealt for the Tuesday Night Poker Game, he did not sit so much as perch in his chair, elbows on his knees, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet and squinting through the haze of smoke from a cigarette clenched between his teeth, while he flicked cards around the table. The men in the barracks delighted in asking his opinion on everything from world events to women trouble. If he recognized the irony in our treatment of him, he played to our expectations like
a Hollywood savant. It’s also true that Eguchi was thoroughly patched into life in Tokyo, its real and beating heart rather than the surface shine of Little America, and though none of us would have admitted it, I believe we all secretly valued his opinion.
My face was about half shaved when I asked the question, and I watched his reflection as he stopped what he was doing and leaned his weight on the mop.
“You want pass?” he said. “I get pass. Special deal. Five thousand yen.”
“I’m just interested,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged and started mopping again. “Tell you what. You forget Pearl Harbor, we forget Hiroshima. Fuckin A.”
I waited, razor poised, for him to wink or laugh, to reveal that he was just pulling my leg. It is worth noting that often soldiers like myself, who manage to avoid combat and so are never made cynical or disillusioned by the reality of battle, are the ones who take the army most seriously, with the most pride and patriotism. I dragged the razor slowly down my cheek, rinsed it in the basin, brought it up again. Eguchi must have sensed something in my silence. He turned back to the mirror and arranged his features into a smile.
“You sure you no want pass?” he said. “For you, four thousand yen.”
All of the above might sound exciting by comparison to my routine, but it would be misleading to suggest that life in Tokyo changed much as summer bled into the fall. After the riot, there passed a day or two of respectful tiptoeing, but inside of a week the city returned to the business of rising from the ashes. Not surprising, I suppose, in a place so done in by war. A few dead communists were hardly worth the effort it took to dig their graves. The debate trickled on in the stateside papers but nobody was paying much attention, and the vast majority of typing that crossed my desk was of a bureaucratic nature too dull to mention here.
I was working on just such an assignment when Bunny himself marched in one day unannounced, trailing a pair of Honor Guardsmen. We were all so focused on our work that nobody noticed him at first. One of the Honor Guardsmen barked, “Ten—hut!” and we scrambled to attention, but somehow Rudy Grand failed to realize what was happening. His desk was at the back of the room, and he couldn’t see Bunny because the rest of us were on our feet.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“Watch your mouth, soldier.”
At the sound of Bunny’s voice, Rudy leaped so abruptly from his chair that he banged his knee on his desk, tipping a cup of coffee onto a stack of papers. He moved to rescue the papers then remembered that Bunny himself was in the office. He didn’t know what to do. You could see ripples of indecision playing out across his face.
Bunny sighed. “Go ahead. Clean it up.”
Rudy pinched the ruined papers between his thumb and index finger, shook coffee onto the floor, set the papers in the seat of his chair. He stared, perplexed, at the puddle on his desk. After a moment, Bunny fished a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Rudy. Rudy accepted, made a few nervous swipes at the spill, tried to return the handkerchief to Bunny.
“Keep it,” Bunny said. “Where’s your CO?”
“Lunch, sir.”
“Fine,” Bunny said. “Private Vancleave, remain at your desk. Everybody else get out. I need the room.”
The room emptied in a instant. Even Bunny’s escort took up a post outside the door. Bunny moved to the open window and gazed down upon Hibiya Park.
“Did you receive a thank-you note from my son?” he said.
“Yessir.”
“And in that note did my son not invite you over to play with his extensive collection of military toys?”
“Yessir.”
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and clasped his hands behind his back. His posture made me nervous, made the moment feel grave. He addressed himself to the park.
“I’m in a pickle, Private. I’ve hauled my family, who I love, all the way over to Japan, and it looks like we’re going to be here for a while. I want my son to have a normal life—as normal as possible under the circumstances. Currently, there are eleven officers in my command with families in Tokyo, but there’s a pecking order and it’s important, silly as that may sound. The British Ambassador has a boy about Arthur’s age and that would probably be all right, but Arthur’s tutor is English and my son is starting to pick up a British accent. He spends most of his time playing with the houseboys, and they always let him win and I have no intention of raising a jackass. You follow me?”
“Nosir.”
“What I’m asking is for you to come out to the residence and play with my son.” When I didn’t answer right away, he showed me his profile, that long aquiline nose. “You have a question, Private? You’re wondering if this is an order?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“What then?”
“I’m wondering why me, sir?”
“You’re white. You’re American. You’re an enlisted man, so it won’t look like I’m playing favorites. My wife is from Tennessee. If my boy is going to have an accent, I’d rather it be a southern drawl than a prissy British lilt. More importantly, you got him a birthday present. You got him a present. One he liked. Not something you thought I might like.”
Again, I didn’t answer.
“Spit it out,” he said.
“Does Arthur want me to come, sir?”
“He said so in his note, didn’t he?”
“Yessir.”
“There you have it.”
“Yessir.”
“Then you’re amenable?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Report to the residence on Saturday at 0900. We’ll see how it goes. You will tell no one about our arrangement. Arthur is to believe you are present at his invitation. Understood?”
“Yessir.”
He exhaled, then, and the stiffness went out of him.
“You can see the moat from here,” he said.
“Yessir.”
“You ever read the Emperor’s poems?”
“Nosir.”
“The Pine is brave/that changes not its color/bearing the snow.” Bunny tipped his head back while he recited, and now he let his chin fall to his chest. “Funny little guy. Zero charisma. I’m here to tell you the man is about as charming as a glass of water. Truth is, I intended to use him more sternly but he’s like a forty-year-old child. There’s an innocence about him. Until we arrived, he hardly ever left the palace. And most of the Japanese had never laid eyes on him. They believe—or they did til we showed up—that the Emperor is a direct descendant of the gods. What interests me is how they’ve adapted, how they make due. Except for the Reds, these people have got the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but to my great relief he didn’t require a reply. Before I could say a word, he rapped his knuckles on the windowsill, bringing our meeting to a close. He about-faced and I saluted and he was gone. For about ten seconds, I was alone. I’d never heard the office so quiet. I walked over to my desk and started typing. I didn’t want to be standing there like an idiot when the rest of the men returned.
I spent the remainder of afternoon fending off questions about what he’d wanted. I said he needed some last minute corrections on a report. I could tell no one believed me, but the flimsiness of my excuse, the secrecy behind it, had the effect raising my stock. I was wise to information beyond their ken.
Just before quitting time, Captain Embry called me in. He was sitting at his desk with his feet propped up, a plug of tobacco in his cheek.
“Close the door,” he said.
I did and he said, “All right now. Enough bullshit.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir.”
“Knock it off, Vancleave. I’m not gonna tell nobody.”
I started to repeat my explanation, then realized that the more I repeated it the less anybody believed me and the more I sounded like a jerk. I decided to go with a portion of the truth.
“I’m sorry, sir.
Bunny ordered me not to tell.”
He sized me up with a squint. He spit into a coffee cup.
“You old cocksucker,” he said.
By the end of the day, this new explanation had made the rounds. Captain Embry told somebody else and that person leaked it around the barracks. I could feel people staring in the mess hall. The truth, the full extent of it, was bound to come out before long and I’d be in for no end of ribbing when it did, but in the meantime “Bunny’s orders” seemed to do the trick. At least people stopped asking questions.
It was under these circumstances that I started out for Bunny’s residence a second time. The morning was all dew on the grass and birdsong in the trees. Mosquitoes. As I was passing the baseball diamond, it dawned on me that this day marked the anniversary of my arrival in Japan. The occasion called for something, but I didn’t know what. At the residence, the guards—none of them Clifford—put me through the same rigmarole as before and the same houseboy led me inside and down the hall to Arthur’s room and rapped softly on the door. After a moment, I heard Arthur say, “What do you want?” The houseboy told him his guest had arrived and my face went hot. Twelve months in Tokyo and here I was.
Arthur MacArthur had his father’s nose and what I would come to recognize as his mother’s sharply tapered eyes. On his father, that nose looked distinguished and on his mother, those eyes looked mirthful and mischievous. On Arthur, the two combined to make him appear petulant and mean.
He hadn’t exaggerated about his collection. The walls of his room were lined with display cases all filled up with cast-iron soldiers. He had Spartans and Roman Legionnaires, Persians and Carthaginians for them to fight. He had crusading knights and infidel Moors. He had Minutemen and Hessians and Redcoats. He had Wellington’s dragoons and Jeb Stuart’s cavalry and doughboys from Belleau Wood. The soldiers were so beautifully painted that many of the generals were recognizable: George Washington and Napoleon and Robert E. Lee. I was half surprised not to find his father on the shelf. In addition to the troops, he had a wide array of engines of war, catapults and siege towers, howitzers and Sopwith Camels and Sherman tanks. He had submarines and Viking ships. He had gunboats from the Spanish Armada. The tin samurais I’d given him were shabby-looking next to the rest, but Arthur didn’t distinguish according to quality. He’d situated the samurais on the shelf in their proper place in history, and I was pleased to find them there.
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