Lieutenant Nakahama gently laid the pointer across his desk and began to pace the perimeter of the classroom. “Continuing from yesterday, following the Great War in 1919, a convention was held in Paris to form the League of Nations and for the first time Japan was recognized and invited as a great world power. But was the League truly an organization for world peace – or just another means for Anglo-Saxon nations to extend their own power and influence?” Fuchida’s eyes followed the professor to the side of the room as he adjusted the angle of the blinds.
“To clarify things, Japan offered the Racial Equality Proposal which simply declared that all members be given equal and just treatment without regard to race or nationality. Despite the protests of some who declared that a colored person could never be equal to a white European, the proposal passed by a majority of votes – only to be set aside and defeated, when it was decided that an issue of this level had to be unanimous. Do you know who made that decision?”
Fuchida quickly raised his hand and the professor nodded. “Sir, wasn’t that by President Woodrow Wilson?”
“Indeed. The chairman of the committee – President Wilson of the United States.”
Fuchida glanced over at Genda with hidden disgust as Lieutenant Nakahama completed his circuit to the front of the class.
“Japan was invited to dinner, yes, but then given no place to sit.” He scanned across the faces of the cadets. “In the end, it was just as well that the proposal was defeated. The Yamato race has no equal on earth – unconquered for twenty-six hundred years.” For a moment the professor and Fuchida caught eyes, connected, and exchanged the slightest of smiles.
Etajima Island sits about three miles due south of Hiroshima, a major city near the southwestern end of the main island of Honshu. The island spans about six miles across at its widest and was about nine miles long with a wide inland bay – perfect for docking ships, boats, and seaplanes. The academy was built near the water’s edge, which is where Fuchida found himself the following morning.
The rumbling engines of a pair of gigantic idling flying boats nearly drowned out the instructions shouted by the officer as Fuchida, Genda, and the class of cadets huddled closely and strained to listen.
“These Felixstowe F-Five biplanes were built in England and have a wingspan of over one hundred feet. Outfitted with two Rolls Royce engines, each engine produces three hundred forty-five horsepower.”
Fuchida pressed nearer to the front and glanced enviously at the pilot in the open cockpit.
The instructor shouted on. “Now, are there any among you who might aspire to become a ...”
“Hai! Hai!” Fuchida shot up his hand without thinking. It had never crossed his mind to be a pilot, but the simple thrill of seeing the graceful aircraft taking off and landing in the bay sparked his desire for adventure.
“Fuchida! Hurry!”
As Fuchida squeezed through the herd, Genda gave him an envious swat on the back as an officer escorted him to the aircraft. After gingerly climbing up the side of the aircraft and plopping down in a back seat, one of the four places in the nose of the open air cockpit, he clumsily strapped on a pair of goggles and buckled himself in. Attendants shoved the idling plane from the dock and Fuchida gave Genda a “thumbs-up,” who responded with the same.
The engines wound into a thunderous roar, the vibrations sending a chill of exhilaration through Fuchida’s body, and the huge bird sped and skipped across the water as it accelerated, its engines straining until it skimmed off into the sky. Fuchida was in heaven.
Circling the island and passing over the academy, the flight gave Fuchida the opportunity to wave wildly to the cadets below and take in an expansive view of the land he’d never experienced before. Between long views studying the ground, he examined every feature of the cockpit as if he’d just bought the plane for himself. He kept asking himself, what do I need to do to be able to fly one of these?
Afterwards, Fuchida and Genda talked about the day like little kids over a newfound toy. Fuchida beamed. “Maybe the navy is about ships, but one day I’m going to be a pilot. That’s what I’m going to be!”
“I’ll drink to that! On me!” Genda replied, who was equally committed to a career in aircraft. “Aircraft are the future of the navy!”
Their paths had become one.
The naval academy was built on Etajima Island for good reasons – it was near the shore naval base of Kure, which was home to massive shipyards, and near Hiroshima, a military center as well. But the school also wanted to keep the underclassmen and officers separated from society as much as possible to immerse them in military life. In celebration of their new dream of becoming pilots, Fuchida invited Genda on a rare outing to Hiroshima. In the crisp evening air they stood out from the crowds in their blue officer’s uniforms as they strode down the busy sidewalks under wooden buildings plastered with signs and trimmed with gaudy lights.
“But we only had four battleships,” Fuchida said, “and Russia had, I think eleven, so don’t you think it was our training that led to victory at Tsushima?”
“We also had nearly fifty cruisers and destroyers to their sixteen,” Genda replied, “so that was a big factor as well. But Admiral Togo,” Genda shook his head, “he’s a naval genius. He’s the one who really handed us that victory. Togo. A pure warrior.”
The two came to a halt as Fuchida stared at a pair of attractive, young girls in kimonos who passed by from the opposite direction, chatting on, oblivious to the fixed gaze of their admirers.
After a slight pause, Genda asked, “So, Fuchi, what’s more exciting, airplanes or girls?”
Fuchida took a long pull on his cigarette. “I suppose it depends on which I’m closest to. Pilots control planes, but then, girls control pilots ...”
Genda smirked and put his arm around Fuchida as they continued walking. “Let me take you to that bar I was talking about. They’ve got a drink with three flavors that’ll set your tongue on fire. You’ll really like it.”
As they made their way down the sidewalk, Fuchida paused to look up at a tall stone church, his eyes seeming to search for something in particular. He unconsciously slid Genda’s arm off his shoulder. “You know, that would be a perfect place for an enemy lookout. If I had my way I’d tear those buildings down.”
“You think so?”
“Westerners. Dividing our people’s loyalty with their foreign god. Those people can’t be trusted.” He bristled with the intrusion of the beliefs of any other people than that of his homeland. Not particularly spiritual, but having been brought up with Buddhist and Shinto teachings, he was most offended by outsiders trespassing on his homeland. Foreigners and spies.
“No one should be called ‘Great Master’ but the Emperor alone.” Fuchida took a last puff of his cigarette while studying an elderly man gently escorting his wife up the stone steps to the church. “One day our empire will rise up while this old building, and everything it stands for, will crumble to rubble and ash.” He glanced over to Genda as he exhaled a cloud of smoke, then flicked his cigarette butt at the church, giving one last look up and down at the old stone building, shook his head, and walked on.
Chapter 2
September 3, 1923. Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan.
With sleeves rolled up and his hands on his hips, Jimmy Covell, a twenty-seven year old American, stood in disbelief before a smoldering heap of broken concrete and steel, once a building. Clouds of smoke wafted by as two Japanese men trotted past with shovels and wooden buckets. He slid off his smudged, round-rimmed glasses and rubbed them on his rolled up sleeve, wiped his forehead with the back of his arm, and put his glasses back on. It had been a long day already, yet it had just begun. “Has everyone been accounted for? Is anyone missing?” he inquired in English to the Japanese teacher beside him.
“We’re still checking. Sasaki and Ohashi were killed by the collapse along with a helper named Kaneko.”
Jimmy hung his head. He knew them all, but felt there
was no time for sorrow. He had to put it out of his mind for now.
“But I think all of the students are OK. At least classes weren’t in session.”
Two days earlier the Great Kanto Earthquake had leveled the Tokyo-Yokohama area, killing nearly 150,000 people in violent tremors lasting nearly 10 minutes. Fires afterwards completed the devastation.
With both a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Rochester and a Master of Theology from Brown University, Jimmy had volunteered to join the Baptist Overseas Missions Society three years earlier. They subsequently sent him as a teacher to the Kanto Gakuin School, founded in 1884 in downtown Yokohama, a sprawling industrial center southwest of Tokyo.
“How about Dr. Sakata’s house? Is he OK?” Jimmy asked.
“We’ve still got some fires going. I don’t know.”
Jimmy slung his rucksack over his shoulder and clambered up the hill past others rescuing books from the rubble. As he approached, enormous flames and billowing clouds of smoke erupted just beyond the ridge. Dr. Sakata stood passively watching the blaze among a small group of others likewise helplessly watching the fire creep toward his wooden home. At thirty-two, he was young for a school president. His taut face was adorned with a shallow, broad mustache.
“Dr. Sakata, are you all right? Is your house OK?” Jimmy asked.
Sakata shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s too hot to go in.” He looked back at Jimmy head to toe. “How’d you get here from Tokyo? I thought the trains weren’t running.”
“They aren’t. I walked.” Jimmy slid his pack off his shoulder and dug through it. He was relatively athletic and the half-day walk wasn’t much to him. “I bought some rice balls in town, which wasn’t easy to do.” He pulled out a paper bag and an envelope with some money he’d sacrificially scraped together and held them out to Dr. Sakata, who appeared puzzled. Jimmy opened the envelope to reveal the currency inside.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Sakata said as he turned away. “I couldn’t accept this from you. You’ll need this for yourself.”
Jimmy sighed at his American hospitality being blunted by Japanese propriety. “Now’s not the time to be polite,” Jimmy said. “Be practical.” He forced the items into Dr. Sakata’s hands. “The Mission asked me to help at the train station downtown, so I need to leave now to get there before nightfall.” He left the gifts with Dr. Sakata who gave a short bow of thanks, then looked back at the fire.
“We’re going to figure how to hold classes in a few weeks, so stay in touch.”
Jimmy nodded, glanced up at the column of smoke, and turned away.
As he approached downtown Yokohama in the late afternoon under a smoke-ladened sky, the streets thronged with a river of people pouring out from the city, their backs strapped with what goods they could save. Many had sooty masks or rags tied to their faces as they fled. Others carted the moaning wounded and the silent dead. Angry clouds of smoke and ash obscured the surreal view of the few stone and brick buildings left standing. Jimmy curiously eyed a four story lone brick wall with empty window frames standing defiantly among the smoldering rubble.
“Excuse me, please, do you have any water?” a woman said in Japanese.
Turning to the troubled voice, Jimmy saw a young woman with a baby boy fastened to her back pleading to passersby who only gave rude glances and pushed on with the exodus. “Please?! My husband is dead! Please, water, someone!”
Jostling through the mass of people, Jimmy made his way to the woman in her black-smudged pink kimono and attempted his best Japanese, “I have water.”
She began to turn with a smile, then was taken aback, not expecting to see an American. Regaining herself, she smiled and gave a brief bow.
Jimmy reached into his bag and felt for his canteen and continued in his clumsy Japanese, “I have water. More water and food at train station.” He prayed to God they had the water he’d heard about as he gave the canteen to the woman who clutched it and gulped the water. Jimmy gently stroked the hair of the content, little boy on her back.
The woman bowed again and spoke while panting from the long drink. “Thank you so very much.” She shyly motioned to her son on her back with a quizzical look. Jimmy smiled and brought the canteen to the little boy’s puckered mouth as the woman studied Jimmy’s face. The boy was fascinatingly beautiful to him.
He screwed the cap back on and motioned for the woman to follow him as he navigated upstream against the tide of the fleeing masses. “I take you to station. Come.”
One of the few structures to ignore the odds of destruction, the Yokohama train station stood intact when Jimmy and the distraught mother finally arrived near sunset, the dusk closing the sky with a melancholy reddish brown. Having heard of food and water, thousands converged on the terminal lit by oil lamps. Uncooked bags of rice, sandwiches, and drinks of water were being snatched up as fast as the volunteers could hand them out. Each table displayed folded paper signs in English and Japanese that read: Courtesy of the American Baptist Mission Society.
Jimmy escorted the woman and child through the crowd to a group ladling water into whatever containers people held out. “Water for you, and for beautiful child. Food, too. Sleep here tonight.” He gave a short bow and the woman reciprocated, only she held her bow and looked at the ground.
“Why have you done this?” She paused while still in her bow. “I cannot repay my obligation to you.”
Jimmy was caught off guard and shook his head. “I give what Father in heaven first gives me. So, no obligation to me, only to God. Thank him only, not me.”
The woman peered up, clearly touched.
Jimmy smiled and rubbed the child on her back. “My wife and I have child coming. I understand.” He, too, had to hold back his emotions.
She smiled, nodded, and looked into Jimmy’s face one last time, then blended into the line waiting for water.
The volunteers were a mix of Japanese and Americans, young and old, men and women. Despite the desperation of the circumstances, those seeking relief seemed to cooperate graciously. Jimmy felt overwhelmed by the immense needs of the people and the paltry goods the mission had for so vast a crowd. But he knew he should try to help however he could, at least, that’s what he told his pregnant wife, Charma, two days earlier when he left northwestern Tokyo.
As he came behind a table, a petite American female worker greeted him. “Hey, Jimmy. Our house is nothing but a pile of sticks. The place was completely wrecked. I’m staying with friends now. How about you?”
Jimmy handed out two bags of rice to an old woman who smiled, nodded, and said, “Arigatou gozaimasu.”2
“Oh, our house in Tokyo survived the quake all right, but not the fires,” Jimmy said. The house is gone. We just have our clothes, and our lives. Three people at the school were killed, but the city – wow. It’s unbelievable.” As an aftershock rocked the station swaying the hanging oil lamps, the crowds froze and looked up with anxiety.
The worker spoke softer under her breath. “A lot of folks are spreading rumors that Korean workers set the fires and then went and poisoned the wells.”
Jimmy shook his head and cautiously glanced around. He knew the Japanese wouldn’t understand her English, but he wanted to see if anyone noticed.
She reached back and grabbed another tray of rice bags. “Vigilante groups rounded up Koreans, beat them, and killed them. Lots of them. Some say hundreds.”
Jimmy stopped to look at her. “Who said that?”
She turned her back to the tables. “I saw it myself. Five or six Koreans tied to trees by a mob.” Her voice began to tremble and she held her hand to her mouth. “Their noses were cut off, eyes gouged out, covered in blood, still breathing.”
“Good Lord! Where were the police?!”
Her eyes filled with tears. She looked back at Jimmy. “They were the ones beating them.”
The next morning, filthy and exhausted, Jimmy hiked back to the home where he and Charma were staying with friends, a place outsid
e Tokyo on a narrow street lined with wooden homes packed together at the foot of a green mountain. Grateful for the fresh, smoke-free air, sheets on a clothesline fluttered in the wind as a dog barked at him. He glanced down at the wiry, yapping canine. “You have no idea, my friend.”
After taking off his shoes inside the doorway, he collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table.
His very pregnant wife, Charma, brought a bowl of noodles, being careful not to spill. “Where’d you stay last night? We were a bit worried.”
“Oh, at the station downtown,” Jimmy mumbled. “I was so tired I could’ve slept on a pile of bricks, and there were lots of piles of bricks to choose from. I made it to the school the day before. It’s an incredible mess. Three people were killed in the collapse. I don’t know exactly what happened.” Jimmy blinked slowly. “But we’re still going to open in a few weeks. I’m looking forward to teaching again.”
“The soup’s hot. Give it a minute to ...” Charma winced in pain and turned her head.
Jimmy jumped up. “No, no, no! Let me get that. You have enough on your hands, honey.”
Miriam, who owned the house with her husband, walked in with her chin up. “That’s it, Charma. No guests serve themselves in my house. I’ve got that.” Charma rolled her eyes as Jimmy helped her into a rather beaten-up easy chair. She took a deep breath and sighed.
“You’re so sweet,” Charma said. “Won’t be long now. What do you think of ‘Peggy’?”
“Well, Peggy’s a fine name,” Jimmy said as he squatted beside her and gently rubbed her belly, “but ... I thought you were giving us a boy.”
“Girls first. You know that.”
Jimmy took her hand and melodramatically kissed it. “Yes, indeed. How could I forget? ‘Peggy’ it is.”
Wounded Tiger Page 3