Wounded Tiger

by T Martin Bennett

  Lugging several books under an arm, Jake bit into an apple as he trotted down the steps of a brick building in his overcoat and hat in the chilly morning. Still in a state of wonder, he paused for a moment to look up at the tall, leafless trees. His every need was met as the government was paying his tuition, and every desire he had was being fulfilled. He was swept from the doorstep of death into a hallway of life.

  Back in September, he stopped by to see his sister, Helen, who happened to work for the president of Seattle Pacific College. The school was set up just before the turn of the century to help train missionaries for the field, but was also fully accredited in the liberal arts.

  Since she encouraged him to consider the school, he ended up meeting the president, who was only too happy to meet the “Doolittle Raider” featured in papers across the city for weeks. Jake wasn’t sure if he was going to be up to all the mental stress of college, having been out of school for some years and still recovering at the time, both physically and mentally. When the president offered him a spot and asked when he could start, Jake told him he thought he’d be ready by the winter. Instead, Jake was persuaded to start the very next day.

  “Hi, Jake!” a student said with a wave.

  “Oh, hi. How ya doing?” Jake responded, trying not to spit out chunks of apple as he spoke. It seemed like everyone on campus knew him, and he did his best to remember their names, but still couldn’t keep up.

  Two girls with matching blue scarves smiled as they came closer. “Hello, Jake.”

  Jake politely put his hand to the brim of his fedora. “Good morning, ladies.” The girls whispered as soon as they passed by. Attention from women was something he hadn’t really thought about when considering school, but now that he’d landed there, he didn’t mind it a bit.

  He ran up the steps into Anderson Hall, a four story brick building with twin octagonal towers capped with pointed turrets. He was anxious to finish school and get back to Japan and was even approved to get his degree in three years’ time. A bit tired from his relentless speaking engagements, often several times a week, he was excited to get to his next class, among his favorites.

  Coming into the classroom of students, Jake attempted his best Japanese, “Good morning Professor Tsuchiyama. How are you today?”

  With a smile, the professor kept writing kanji on the blackboard, then turned with a bow to Jake and responded in Japanese, “I am very well in the good care of the Lord. Thank you. Please take your seat.”

  It was his favorite class, all right, especially getting to sit next to Florence, a blue-eyed brunette. Jake had become “the” man on campus, and was more than ready to settle down, with the right girl, that is. He still had his good looks, a new car and back pay.

  But to Florence, he was someone she admired. She gave a coy glance, then pretended not to notice him.

  Professor Tsuchiyama came up to Jake and laid a set of type-written pages on his desk, marked with red ink. In English, he said, “It looks good, Jake, but we need to cut it down more if we’re going to print this onto a single piece of paper, then we can start to work on the Japanese translation. Why don’t you go over it and give me a new version in two days, OK?”

  Jake nodded. “Yes, sir, I mean, sure. I’ll get on it.” Having told his story countless times in the preceding months, more and more people wanted a copy of it and an organization offered to print it up and distribute it for free. On top of that, people wanted a book as well, a daunting task he really wasn’t up to, but the school president offered to help.

  “It’s a good title, too. I think it’ll intrigue people,” the professor said as he turned and walked away.

  Florence leaned over to see: I Was a Prisoner of Japan. By Jake DeShazer, the Doolittle Bomber.

  Chapter 120

  Summer, 1946. Kashiwara.

  Fuchida knelt before a sheet of paper while holding a calligraphy brush in his hand, studying what he had just written.

  “Are you going out to the property tonight?” Haruko said as she entered the bedroom stacked with belongings against walls. Realizing he was deep in thought, she gently knelt beside him.

  Shaking his head, he laid down his brush and sighed in frustration.

  Haruko’s eyes scanned the sheet: “Mankind must escape from this cycle of hatred generating hatred, of resentment breeding resentment. Only by translating destructive emotions into brotherly love can humanity be saved.”

  Their family of four was now crowded into the home of Haruko’s sister and brother-in-law who operated a drug store in Kashiwara, about twelve miles from where Fuchida grew up. The military was no more and he had taken what little money he had saved to purchase a small plot of land to grow rice, barley, fruits and vegetables, and to hopefully raise egg-laying chickens as well. But for now, they had no home of their own. When the gardens were done, he would start to build a home for his family.

  For the moment, Fuchida’s struggle was with thoughts and words. Watching his friends in the hospital die a slow, horrid death from the atomic bomb prompted him to shout in his mind, No more Pearl Harbors! No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis! The atomic bomb must never be used again! So he vowed to write a book on the way of peace, yet he discovered it a profoundly difficult undertaking.

  “Look at me,” he gently said to Haruko. “I should be dead.” He looked down at his half-written page. “A part of me feels I should be with my fallen comrades at Yasukuni,37 yet I somehow feel I need to say something about how we can live in peace. There must be a way. There must never again be another Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima.” He gazed back into Haruko’s face. “But I ...” He turned his head and looked back down.

  She tried to smile, but she had nothing to say to ease the pain on his face.

  Stars punctured the velvet-blue night sky. Fuchida positioned his son’s hands on a ten foot wooden pole and then looked straight up from the pole into the sky. A few stakes were tapped into the ground with strings tied between them.

  “You see it? You see it right there? That’s the North Star – Polaris.”

  Yoshiya seemed lost as he searched the sky.

  “My book says that the house should face fifteen degrees southeast for maximum sunlight during the winter.”

  Miyako stood a little ways away from her big brother so Fuchida could use the two of them as a kind of sextant. “But the sun’s not out, Daddy,” she said.

  “No, we use the stars. If you follow the two stars on the edge of the Big Dipper,” Fuchida continued, swinging his arm across the sky, “they point straight to the North Star. Right there.”

  “Oh, I see it!” Miyako shouted.

  “Me, too!” Yoshiya said.

  “I’ve done this a hundred times on the ocean. You can find your direction anywhere in the world with just the stars.”

  “Daddy?” Miyako said. “Who put the North Star there?”

  He looked at her innocent face, then turned his eyes up into the starry sky. His eyes seemed to drift to infinity. It had never dawned on him how useful that star had always been and that it seemed to have a purpose. It was so steady, so useful, and so beautiful. He, likewise, wondered who put it there. Still gazing at the sky, he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know who put it there, Miyako.” For the first time he sensed a starting point that might give him some sense of direction to find his bearings once again.

  A few weeks later, with a hoe over his shoulder, Fuchida stood beside his small, flooded rice paddy and examined a grasshopper perched on his finger. It, too was also beautiful to him. So perfectly formed and designed. As it leapt off his finger and flew to the ground, he looked up and around at the trees, the birds, and the sky. Everything in nature seemed to fit together in such harmony, in a way that only God could do it. Yet it all remained a mystery.

  Haruko sat a ways away on the porch of their half-built home, smiling as Yoshiya holding a chicken chased Miyako who screamed and laughed, with Lity barking at their heels.

  Fuchida reached down and pulled
up a single rice shoot and carefully studied it as the wet mud dribbled through his fingers. He could plant seeds and water them, but he couldn’t make them grow. The more he took in the world around him, the more he could see that it was good, and could only have been made by a good God.

  He squatted down and pressed the shoot back into the mud under the water. The more he felt that God must be good, the more he realized that man was not, that he was not good. He cringed as he remembered hearing the neighborhood boys jeer at his son, “Your father lost the war!” His son was innocent, and he had caused him to suffer. And what about the countless thousands of sons lost in the war? He shuddered to think of the pain he caused so many others. But these were things he could only think about in the recesses of his own mind. Never could or would he dare mention a whisper of this to anyone else. It was his burden to bear – alone.

  Turning toward his framed house without a roof, he walked down the pathway. He had been so proud and self-confident for so many years and was only now beginning to see that, like the plants and animals, he, too, must depend on the Creator for life. Everything that lives, lives because of him, he thought.

  Chapter 121

  August 29, 1946. Portland, Oregon.

  Mrs. Andrus, in her Sunday best, sat in the front pew of the church with her arm through her husband’s arm. Beside her sat all her grown children: Julie, Ruth, Glenn, and Helen. All her children but one.

  Jake stood at the front, beside Florence in her simple white gown and lace veil. He looked at his bride’s glowing face, then to his mom, who wiped a tear from her eye. For Jake, life seemed like it couldn’t possibly get any better.

  Part VII

  Why Are You Here?

  Chapter 122

  June, 1947. Osaka.

  Leaning his head back, Fuchida finished off another glass of beer and slammed it onto the bar table. “Victor’s justice! That’s all it is!” he yelled to Genda over the din of music and patrons in the dark drinking hole.

  Genda smiled with amusement at his tipsy friend and took a cool puff off his cigarette.

  “Justice?” Fuchida’s eyes grew wide. “What the hell ... the hell does MacArthur know about justice?!” Without waiting for an answer, he pointed his finger at his friend. “I’ve testified at war crimes trials in Yokohama ... Yokohama three times; in Manila; in Ambon; and in ...” Catching the bartender’s eyes, Fuchida motioned for a refill. “Genda, you know, you know, if we had won, we’d be putting the Americans on trial for how they treated our prisoners, because they’re guilty of the same things. The very same things!”

  Genda took a sip of his drink and smacked his lips. “How do you know that? How do you know that, Fuchi?”

  Fuchida smiled confidently and pulled a folded newspaper out of the breast pocket of his coat, then started tapping on the paper. “You see that? One hundred fifty prisoners to be returned at Yokosuka from America.”

  Genda picked up the paper and read the headline.

  “You know what I’m going to do?”

  “No,” Genda said with a patronizing voice. “Tell me. What are you going to do?”

  He leaned toward Genda. “I’m going to go down to those docks when they come in, I’m going to talk to them and get proof about American ... about American torture and starvation and death, and the next time I’m at a war crimes trial ... I’m going to fling it in the judge’s face and tell him if he convicts us, he’ll have to convict the Americans of the very same crimes!” Fuchida focused his attention on grasping his refilled glass on the first try, took it, and began gulping again.

  Uraga Harbor, SE of the Yokosuka Naval Base.

  With folded arms, Fuchida stood in his tan suit wearing a fedora, impatiently tapping his foot studying a string of ex-prisoners disembark from an American troop transport down the gangplanks onto the dock. It looked to him like the first group off were sick or on crutches and he knew he’d never know how they got sick or injured without interviewing them. He looked for a likely candidate.

  With his mind clearer than a few nights before with Genda, he gravitated to a subject he’d long turned over in his mind. Each nation in a war feels it’s justified in its actions. Victory is no guarantee of being right any more than a large rock is right in crushing a smaller rock. All military victories are victories of power. He felt that the Americans had no right to judge the Japanese.

  Who could possibly judge another person, anyway? To judge others, you have to know every intention of a person’s heart and mind, every action of his life; you’d have to have perfect knowledge and you’d have to have complete virtue as well in order to judge fairly. No man on earth could ever do that. No human had such knowledge, virtue or power. Only God can judge. The Americans should leave the Japanese alone.

  Suddenly, he saw a face he thought he recognized. He stood taller than the rest. He couldn’t believe his eyes. He mumbled out loud, “Kanegasaki?” It was true – it was his old engineer. He yelled and waved his hat, “Kanegasaki! Kanegasaki!”

  Lugging a bag over his shoulder, Kanegasaki’s face lit up and he waved back and broke into a trot. “Fuchida!”

  Coming together, they grasped each other’s hands and arms, both somewhat in disbelief in finding the other, but certainly Fuchida more.

  “We all thought you were dead!” Fuchida exclaimed. “There’s even a grave marker in your hometown. What happened? Your name wasn’t on any of the lists of prisoners from the Americans.”

  The two began walking together away from the ship in the stream of men finding their way back home.

  “I made it into the water after our ship sank at Midway and a few of us found a life raft. I was on the ocean for two weeks when an American seaplane rescued us.” Kanegasaki shrugged and hung his head. “I was ashamed to be a prisoner, so I gave a false name.”

  Fuchida smiled and shook his head, still in state of awe. He understood. All men vowed death over imprisonment as a matter of personal honor and integrity. It was drilled into them from the first day of training.

  “I wanted to kill myself and even tried to starve myself rather than face the shame of being captured, but some women from a church visited me in jail and brought me some tasty food and begged me to eat. I couldn’t resist. They saved my life.”

  Seeing a noodle shop, which he knew would fill fast, Fuchida grabbed his lost friend’s arm and pulled him ahead. “Let’s hurry to get a table. We have a lot to talk about!”

  Later, Kanegasaki tipped the bowl to his face and slurped his noodles voraciously as Fuchida exhaled the smoke of his cigarette. They were lucky to get a seat in the overflowing restaurant, now with a growing line of waiting ex-prisoners outside.

  Catching his breath, Kanegasaki looked into Fuchida’s face. “I think I missed Japanese food more than anything, besides my wife, that is. But, no, they didn’t torture us or put us in cells or anything like that. It wasn’t like a vacation, or anything, but we had decent rooms on a kind of large camp. We grew our own vegetables, had our own government, could go to town to shop sometimes, too. We even had baseball teams.”

  “They didn’t mistreat you in any way?”

  Reaching for his rice bowl, Kanegasaki paused and looked up for a moment. “If you consider bad food mistreatment, sometimes. They don’t have real rice over there, but otherwise, not really.”

  Fuchida’s face fell. He certainly wasn’t hoping that his friend was tortured, but neither was he expecting to hear no tales of suffering and deprivation.

  After stuffing his mouth again with rice, Kanegasaki set his bowl down. After a big swallow, he said, “But I need to tell you,” he said pointing at Fuchida with his chopsticks, “there was this American girl who was there at the camp.”

  Fuchida raised his eyebrows.

  “After we were rescued, we were taken to San Diego, then shipped off to the desert in Colorado to an internment camp called Camp Amache. It was big. There were about seven thousand people there. It was like a city surrounded by a flat desert of scrub br
ush. They had tall fences with barbed wire and watchtowers at the corners.”

  “It was filled with mostly Japanese-Americans who’d been relocated there, but we were among some of the very few prisoners in the camp. They had rows and rows of identical long houses, about a thirty-five meters by eight meters each with five or six rooms in each one. We lived in a couple of those rooms.”

  “Anyway, when a few of us were in the hospital they had there, there was an American girl who spoke very good Japanese and she always asked if there was anything we needed, if we had any problems.” Kanegasaki took a sip of his tea.

  “She brought us books and magazines in Japanese, she got us gum and, well, anything we needed. She helped us with sending letters and worked very, very hard and we were all so impressed with her kindness, especially when we found out that she traveled so far from her home to come there to work. She was like an angel from heaven ... and it seemed like she had a great debt or obligation to pay to the Japanese people, as if some Japanese had done her a great favor.”

  Fuchida poured himself another cup of tea.

  “We wondered why a Yankee girl would be so thoughtful to us and we kept asking her why she was there, but she would never give us an answer. So, one day when we were in our room and she brought us all a tray of rice cakes, I asked her again, ‘So tell us, why are you here? Why are you so kind to us?’”

  Kanegasaki had Fuchida’s full attention. He leaned forward. “She said, ‘Because my parents were killed by Japanese soldiers.’”

  “What?!” Fuchida’s mind crackled with confusion as he strained to comprehend the astounding words he had just heard. He looked away, then back at Kanegasaki. “The murderer of one’s parents should be a sworn enemy for life!” His mind raced. “She didn’t vindicate the honor of her parents? She traveled far and didn’t take revenge?!” Fuchida leaned back with disgust. “She had no self-respect. She must have been weak.”