Two nights and three days from Wonsan to Harbin the train clattered on, the lush greenery interrupted by trucks and depots manned by soldiers in military khaki. Despite the inspections and unexplained transfers, this man I shall call S remained impassive, shadowed by a dusky light that had nothing to do with the time of day or the dimness of the car’s interior; he sat leaning against the windowpane, face set, impervious to the din around him. Later, I would come to recognize this posture of self-recrimination, but at the time I had barely recovered from our initial journey from Niigata to Wonsan across the Sea of Japan, and I was in a contemplative mood myself, in no condition to pause over the state of others, much less engage with my colleagues, who by now had begun drinking in earnest, liquor still being plentiful then, oiling even the most reticent of tongues. So I excused myself and must have promptly nodded off, for the next moment it was dawn, the day just beginning to break, the length of the train still shrouded in sleep. I was the only one awake, the only one woken by the sudden cessation of rhythm, which drew me to the window, still dark except for my reflection superimposed on it.
We had apparently stopped for cargo, the faint scuffling I could hear revealing a truck ringed by soldiers, their outlines camouflaged against the paling horizon. Later I would learn the significance of this stop, but for the moment the indistinct scene strained my eyes, and I pulled back, hoping to rest for another hour.
Forty years later, this scene returns to me with a crispness that seems almost specious when so much else has faded or disappeared. Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to find. Most days I am spared by the habits of routine. But when the air darkens like this, turning the windows inward and truncating the afternoon, the present recedes, its thin hold on consciousness no match for the eighty-two years that have already claimed it. If hindsight were less truculent, I might have long ago been granted the famed view of belated clarity that might have illuminated the exact steps that led me into the fog of my actions. But hindsight has not offered me this view, my options and choices as elusive now as they had been then. After all, it was war. An inexcusable logic, but also a fact. We adapted to the reality over which we felt we had no control.
For what could we have done? After seven years of embroilment and two years of open war, the conflict with China had begun to tax the everyday, small signs of oncoming shortages beginning to blight the streets, thinning shelves and darkening windows, so that even menus at the fanciest restaurants resembled the books and newspapers blatantly censored by the Tokkō thought police. Then, when officials began making their rounds of sympathetic universities, seeking candidates disposed to patriotic service, our director submitted a list of our names, eliciting more visits from more officials, this time escorted by military men. Were we alarmed? Some of my colleagues were. But the prospect of a new world-class facility with promises of unlimited resources stoked our ambitions, we who had long assumed ourselves dormant, choked off by the nepotism that structured our schools and hospitals. If any of us resisted, I did not hear about it. Flattered and courted, we let ourselves be lured, the glitter of high pay and breakthrough advancements all the more seductive in the light of our flickering lives.
So the day we set sail from Niigata we were in high spirits, the early sky heavy with mist, the hull of the Nippon Maru chopping and cleaving as the sound of rushing water bore us away from our coastline, leaving us to wend our way through our doubts and worries to arrive in Wonsan, stiff and rumpled but clear in our convictions. After two turbulent days, we were grateful to be on steady ground, overwhelmed by new smells and sounds, the bustling travelers and hawkers broken up by the young, bright-eyed representative dispatched to meet us. This youth was energetic, if brash, and perhaps it was this, along with the sudden physical realization that we were no longer in Japan, that reminded me of my son, but it plunged me into a mood that would last the rest of the trip. Of S I have no recollection at this time, not until a few hours’ gap resolves into the memory of that cold window of the stilled train, my eyes pulling back from the soldiers and truck, their dark outlines replaced by the reflection of my face, above which I caught another face, its eyes watching me.
No doubt it was the hour, and the invasiveness of having been watched, but the shock colored all my subsequent encounters with S, so that even decades later I am left with an ominous impression of a man always watching as the rest of us adapted to our given roles and fulfilled them perfectly. Did we exchange words? I regret that we did not. For by the time I gathered myself, he was gone. Two hours later we pulled into Harbin, our Emperor’s celebrated new acquisition.
From Harbin we were to head twenty-two kilometers south to Pingfang. But we were granted a few introductory hours in the famed city, and we set about familiarizing ourselves with the cobblestone streets flanked by European shops and cafés still festive with wealthy Russians and a few well-placed Chinese, all of whom politely acknowledged our entourage. If people were wary, they did not show it, and we, for our part, acted the tourist, taking turns deciphering the familiar kanji strung together in unfamiliar ways on signs and advertisements as onion domes and minarets rose beside church steeples and pagoda roofs, obscuring the city’s second skyline: the “Chinese” sector of this once Russian concession city. Once or twice unmarked vans stole by, but overall our impression was of wonder and delight as we strolled through the crowd, the sun on our backs coaxing a healthy sweat despite the chill in the October air.
If not for a small incident, Harbin might have remained an oasis in my memory of China. But our young representative had irked me from the start, and the farther we walked the more he chatted, pointing out this or that landmark we must have heard of, and soon his loud, presumptuous voice began grating on me, and I snapped back with an energy that surprised even me.
My colleagues were quick to intervene, rallying around him like mother hens, clucking at my severity. But, you see, my son and I had been getting into it just like this, and I could not abide the youth’s hooded eyes; I lashed out, admonishing his temerity, his misguided courage and naïve ideals—the very things I believed had pushed my own son to run away, presumably to enlist. I would have lost my head then, save for the tether of my wife’s pleading face, which appeared before me, reminding me of how, despite her terror, she had refused to blame me each day I failed to find our son. I dropped my voice and let myself be pecked back, the sun-dappled street once again leading us on, this time to our first proper meal in days.
The day’s specialty was duck. Despite our meager group of thirty-one, the restaurant had been requisitioned, its large dining room conspicuously empty, its grand floors and walls echoing the stamps and scrapes of our shoes and chairs as we accepted the seats arranged around two tables set in the center of the room. S was observing us, his stolid face amplifying the garishness of our own as our tables began brimming with plates and bowls, flushing our cheeks and exciting our chopsticks. At last the duck was set before us, its dewy skin crisped and seasoned. For most of us, this was our first taste of the bird, and the pungent flesh, voluptuously tender, provoked our passions, prompting us to trade stories of our youthful lusts. But I for some reason found myself remembering the days I had spent toting my sister, who never tired of feeding the ducks that splashed in the pond behind our house. I earned my title as the group’s sentimentalist that day, but I believe it was at this moment that we fell in with each other, our shared pleasure piqued by our unspoken guilt at gorging on such an extravagance when our families back home had mere crumbs to support the patriotic frugality demanded of them. Perhaps this is why Harbin has stayed with me, nostalgic and laden, edged with a hysteria I would come to associate with this time.
* * *
—
I BELIEVE few of us forget what we keep hidden
in our memory’s hollows. True, many of us are capable of remaining professionally closed-faced, tossing out facts of our wartime accomplishments the way we toss our car keys, casually and full of the confidence of important men who have worked hard and earned their keep, rightfully. But forgetting?
My two colleagues and I have been debating this point over our yearly meals taken here in the rural outskirts of this wintry city in northern Japan where we converged eight years ago. They claim that if not for these meals, they might have forgotten these memories stowed for so long, buried by a present that discourages remembrances so that trace feelings, occasionally jostled, may surface, but nothing more. For why dig up graves from a banished past, selfishly subjecting all those connected to us to what can only amount to a masochistic pursuit? Isn’t it better to surrender to a world populated by the young, who, taught nothing, remain uncurious, the war as distant as ancient history, its dim heat kindling the pages of textbooks and cinemas, occasionally sparking old men with old grudges, but nothing to do with them?
I would like to disagree. But life did move on, the war’s end swallowing us up and spitting us out different men, who, like everyone else, slipped back into a peacetime world once again girdled by clear boundaries and laws meant to preserve lives, not destroy them. And yet, for me, S has continued to tunnel through time, staying in my present, reminding me of our shared past, which we, with all our excuses, have been guarding as tightly as the walls that surrounded us in Pingfang.
You must understand something: we had always meant to preserve lives. A few thousand enemies to save hundreds of thousands of our own? I hardly think our logic was so remarkable.
What was remarkable was Pingfang. Its imposing structure looming in calculated isolation, its vast grounds secured by high-voltage walls, its four corners staked with watchtowers overlooking its four gates armed with guards whose shouts were regularly drowned out by the clatter of surveillance planes circling the facility. Approaching them for the first time in jostling trucks, we watched the walls of the compound unroll endlessly before us, each additional meter contracting our nerves so that our faces, initially loose with excitement, began to tighten, eliciting a lustrous laugh from our young guide, who turned to remark, Of course, we don’t bear the Emperor’s emblem here.
Sure enough, when we stopped for authorization at the gate, we saw that the walls were indeed ungraced. In a world where even our souls were expected to bear the mark of the Emperor, the absence was terrifying, and perhaps this was when I saw Pingfang, its forbidding grandeur, cloaked by its unmarked walls, presaging what it was capable of. By then it was clear that the warning emanating from it made no exceptions, even as it opened its gates and saluted us in.
In increments we would become privy to the extent of Pingfang’s ambitions. But first we were dazzled. Our days snatched away by seminars and orientation tours, we scarcely had time to unpack, our bodies as well as our minds collapsing into white sleep that seemed to flood always too soon with sunlight, so that even the hardiest of us grew weary, dragging from conference rooms to auditorium, the occasional outdoor tour whisking us off in rattling trucks that clattered our teeth and fibrillated our brains until we developed an aversion to Pingfang’s astigmatized landscape. After a fortnight, we reached our threshold. We broke down, all of us mere husks of ourselves, our individual drives wrung out of us. Until then we had been accustomed to mild routines with little expectation; to be inducted into a life ruled by the exigencies of war proved transformative. We readjusted, our senses and sensibilities recalibrated to accommodate the new demand. After all, humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt. Time and again we would find ourselves reminded of this fact, which, I believe, was at the root of what came to pass at Pingfang.
* * *
—
HAD I understood what I glimpsed that night from the train window, would I have turned back, returned to the circumscribed safety of my home and career? I would like to imagine so; in my right mind I am certain of it. But here lies the problem: the issue of “transgression.” In peacetime all lines are clearer; one need only assemble one’s motives and evidence for the courts to make the determination. And even if proceedings are flawed and verdicts inconclusive, in one’s heart, one likely knows if one has transgressed. But in war? Does transgression still require intent? Or is it enough for circumstances to conspire, setting up conditions that pressure one to carry out acts that are in line with, but not always a direct result of, orders? I do not know. Yet I find myself looping through memory’s thickets for that exact bridge that let us cross our ambivalences to the other side.
My two colleagues believe Harbin was the bridge. They claim that, as tourists, we were set up to accept the exotic and so dismiss what would have been, in another context, obviously amiss. I do not dispute this view. Yet I wonder whether we hadn’t been set up—inoculated—long before we set sail for Wonsan. By then the mood of war, long since gathered in the air, had precipitated into crackdowns, the once distant patter of the jingoists’ tattoo literally pounding down doors to keep us spouting the official views. Even our mandatory participation in civil defense drills, as well as our patriotic duty to look the other way, had already become two more chores as seemingly unavoidable as the war itself. Resisting would have been foolhardy, the hardline climate a meteorological fact, its terrorizing power mystical in effect. Yet I am a man of science; I have never been swayed by weather’s mystical claims. Nor have I been captive to its blustery dramatics. So, when I was a young man, still proud of my own mind, I was arrested. My son, Yasushi, was six then, a bright child already righteous, susceptible to grand ideals. He never mentioned my arrest, but I believe it shamed him. He became rebellious, his puerile disobedience erupting into full-scale mutiny by the time he was fourteen. My wife urged me to confront him; I did nothing of the sort. How could I? I, who had ultimately recanted my beliefs. True, I was thinking of them, my wife and son, their torturous road if I refused to cooperate. But finally it was that I could not bear it, the dark shapeless hours sundered by clubs, water, electricity: I gave in.
Four decades later I do not have reason to believe Yasushi is still alive, but every so often there is news of yet another Imperial Army straggler emerging from the jungles in Southeast Asia, and I am unable to let go.
The latest straggler, one Captain Nakahira Fumio, widely speculated to be the last repatriate, is currently on the run. His hut, discovered on Mindoro Island two weeks ago, had evaded detection for thirty-five years. The authorities finally released his picture.
What could I do? I charged into the newsstand. The image, a grainy reproduction of a school portrait, showed a hollow-chested boy with an affable face, generic enough to be any youth. Could Yasushi have taken his identity? Because, you see, back then, when Yasushi was raring to enlist, he’d been too young. Needing my consent, he’d approached me with the forms. I, of course, refused, citing the importance of his studies, and worried that he’d try to forge my signature. But Yasushi, single-minded, was a step ahead of me. Realizing that forms are traceable and therefore retractable, he opted to trade in his identity. What name he assumed we never found out. Even then the military was eager for soldiers, and I, despite my connections, had a record: an official charge of treason.
Comparing the images for quality, I chose several newspapers and hastened into the street still burnished with morning light. That’s when I saw him—S—his now old man’s shape bearing the shadow of his younger self, his ornithic neck bobbing forward, his once languid gait sped up to a near footloose shuffle. I opened my mouth to address him. But what was there to say? Had I been a different man, able to withstand the gaze of those who’d surely be quick to condemn me for what they too might have done in my position, I might have braved the attention of the one man who may yet have the right to judge me. But I am not that man. Humans may be adaptable, but that says nothing about our ability to change.
* * *
ALL TOLD, I spent twenty-four months in Pingfang. Officially, we were the Bōeki kyūsuibu, the Anti-Epidemic Water Sanitation Unit, Unit 731, a defensive research unit. Materially, Pingfang spanned three hundred hectares, its fertile land dappled with forests and meadows, its innumerable structures—headquarters, laboratories, dormitories, airfield, greenhouses, pool—luxuriously accommodated within its fold. Locally, we were known as a lumber mill, our pair of industrial chimneys continually emptying into the impending sky.
I remember the first time I stood beneath one of these chimneys. Having finished a procedure, we had followed the gurney out, the damp air white with frost, the bare earth crunching underfoot. S, like the rest of us, was in a morose mood; our work, bacteriological in nature, was making useful gains, but we had not succeeded in developing the antidote we had been after, and I, for one, had become increasingly restless. By then it was 1940; the war, gridlocking in China, was beginning to fan southward, and I was convinced that if Yasushi had indeed enlisted, he would end up in the tropics, where the fruits of our work would be most vital.
I do not know why I risked airing these thoughts. Perhaps it was my way of acknowledging my son. I approached S. Until then we had all been careful to keep to the professional, repeating stock answers, but S was sympathetic. He chatted openly, agreeing with my prognosis, adding only that the war might reach American shores before pushing farther south—an unentertained notion at the time. I was about to press him on the feasibility, indeed the audacity, of such a course, but just then a flare of heat drew our attention, and the gurney, now emptied of our maruta—yes, that’s what we called them: logs—pulled us back to our duty.
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