Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  Yoshie wasn’t reticent, he just had a delayed reaction. He always had a lot to say about things, though rarely while they were happening. He wasn’t being cautious, he was simply terrified of being wrong. He’d sooner keep quiet than make a mistake. Before he spoke, he wanted to be sure that his opinions would outshine yours. That way he wouldn’t waste time on unnecessary debates. This made him a skilled businessman. Meanwhile, as a journalist, heated debates were an occupational hazard for me.

  He would alternate between lengthy periods of calm and sudden outbursts of rage. In that respect, we complemented each other. My moodiness was tempered by his typical serenity. On the other hand, when he did let off steam from time to time, he could do so without much opposition from me. My day was invariably punctuated with so many petty disputes that by the time I got home, I didn’t have the energy for any major arguments.

  Best of all were his roars of laughter whenever we made up. There was something primitively sexual about his exuberance after a fight. I’ve always thought that the way we laugh reveals who we really are. We can put on a face, adopt a tone, control our gestures. But it’s very difficult to laugh insincerely. I’ve known laughs that are nervous like their owners. Tight-lipped laughs that conceal more than they show. Or shrill laughs desperate for attention. Some are strangely long-winded and don’t want to end, as if masking pain, while others grow gradually louder as they gain confidence. Some are a single burst that cleaves the air before snapping shut like a knife. Others sound rough, because they’ve been through a lot. None of these describe his laugh.

  With other people, he hardly ever mentioned his native country. He had spent practically half his life abroad. I think it was a subject that was awkward for him to talk about with anyone other than his closest friends, he was fixated on the idea of assimilating as much as possible. He would often downplay the differences between our two cultures, and preferred to point out what they had in common. I saw this as a gesture of devotion, now I’m not so sure. There was always a part of him that he refused to share, something that ran much deeper. The one thing he consistently talked about was his aunt and uncle, whom he truly worshipped.

  * * *

  I knew he was a victim of the bomb practically from the get-go. He blurted it out that first night, when he showed me his scars. I was shocked. I couldn’t help feeling guilty, and grateful that he was telling me. His secret brought us closer together. Naïvely, I believed that if he was willing to tell me about something so big, then he was unlikely to hide the small things. I was so young, I didn’t yet understand that sometimes, revealing a difficult truth gives you more of a license to lie.

  Yoshie couldn’t bear people pitying him. Whenever he got to know someone better, he would reveal his secret so calmly. He’d let them pose the usual questions and answer succinctly. And then he’d never raise the subject again. That way he could avoid their lamentations or having to give further explanations.

  I admit I found it weird that an atom bomb survivor would choose to live in the United States. And that he could be so fascinated by our way of life and our music, particularly jazz. That was one thing we didn’t agree on. I preferred hard rock and protest songs.

  Another thing that surprised me about Yoshie was that he loved the Mets, whom I’d rooted for all my life. Of course, back then I had no idea that the Japanese adore baseball. And I would never have imagined that hamburger in Japanese is a hanbāgā, or that they call beer bīru. These were the things I learned right away. What took me longer to work out was that he saw assimilation as a kind of personal challenge. I think he thought that if he integrated successfully into the world of his former enemy, then maybe he could vanquish the ghost and leave it behind forever.

  Maybe there was another reason for Yoshie’s behavior, one that wasn’t so benign. Japanese companies were determined to overtake America and Germany, especially in the tech industry. Maybe outstripping Western brands was a question of postwar pride. I read the other day that Japanese companies are investing more than ever in American businesses. A famous life insurance company, for example, and a pharmaceutical company specializing in nervous system disorders. It occurs to me that both are related to war.

  Around the time that Yoshie and I started going steady, aspects of Japanese culture were becoming consumer items here. All of a sudden, Japanese products were equated with perfection and elegance. You know, the idea that any radio manufactured in Osaka would sound superior to some junk from Detroit. We were in the midst of the so-called Japanese economic miracle, which the finance section in newspapers talked about incessantly. I remember the articles were full of praise, but also a sense of alarm. Our former enemy and present-day ally was becoming a fierce competitor. Experts seemed to be hinting that there was something suspicious about this growth, and that we must do something to stop them.

  I doubt Yoshie could’ve risen so quickly through the ranks at his company at any other time. People who are lucky (and especially those who are unlucky) depend on hard work and chance as much as they do on politics. He was doing great at his job, and was extremely proud about his position at the company. He was marketing director of Me’s main office in Lower Manhattan.

  The name of his company obviously caught my attention, how could I forget Me? The word means “eye” in Japanese. Yoshie explained to me that the founder, with great commercial foresight, had taken advantage of that fact, ensuring that we foreign consumers would remember the brand while learning a simple word in his language. I don’t know if this also occurred to Me’s founder or if it was a coincidence, but it’s interesting that eye has the same sound as I. As though, just there, English had an intimation of Japanese.

  Yoshie was like a working machine. His own most efficient slave driver. He and his colleagues were a reminder of what capitalism could be. But I believe they had a totally different mind-set from that of American employees. Compared with the way things worked at my newspaper, for example, the Me employees stayed behind the scenes. Individual initiative seemed less important than teamwork.

  I found this philosophy very wise, if a little nerve-racking. It meant that nothing you did was entirely on you. It also meant you could never change anything alone. On the contrary, he replied, it’s the opposite that’s nerve-racking. Trying to change everything on your own. Believing that you should. Believing that you can. There’s no worse delusion.

  At first, I couldn’t help but feel flattered by what I thought was Yoshie’s deference. It was such a relief after all the pushy guys I’d dated, who were always trying to impose their will on me. It took me a while to realize that he just had difficulty saying no, and that this didn’t always mean he agreed with me. How the hell can a society function when insistence is considered poor taste, while failure is forbidden? That seemed to me an appalling combination. The amalgam of a Japanese problem and an American one.

  From the impression I got from the employees at Me, the Japanese had been taught to fight their foes to the death, only to show them respect, loyalty, and even admiration the moment they were declared friends. Yoshie introduced me to many of his compatriots, and I noticed they would do anything to change the subject so as to avoid mentioning the atom bomb to an American. He saw this as a token of goodwill. Apparently we could annihilate one another, but we couldn’t regret it together.

  As far as I can recall, there was only one time that I’d succeeded in getting one of his colleagues to mention the subject in my presence. It was his old friend Kamamoto, or Yomamoto, or something like that. Seeing an opportunity, I ventured to suggest that, considering what had happened, it was inevitable that his people should feel some bitterness toward Americans. Yoshie’s friend just kept shaking his head and smiling at me.

  It is the wish of all good people in my country, Yomamoto or Kamamoto said very solemnly, especially those of us who have endured the worst, that we be alone in experiencing this. What we desire, dear madam, Kamamoto or Yomamoto went on, is for the disaster to be a lesson to the world
, so that it may never happen again. (He referred to it as the disaster, which struck me as too vague for something as definite as the bombs.) It is our duty to serve as an example. That is why I consider friendship much more valuable than bitterness.

  Yoshie stared at him in silence while he spoke.

  No American school could have done a better job, I thought.

  * * *

  Even among liberals, Yoshie avoided criticizing our country. And he didn’t argue for pacifism when we socialized with my colleagues from the newspaper. Whenever we started to discuss international affairs, he’d look at me helplessly out of the corner of his eye, and then I’d feel the urge to hold him tight and take him to bed with me.

  But if ever anyone (including my beloved brother, Ralph) tried to defend the heroics of World War II, that was a different story. The slightest attempt to justify the bombings by invoking the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Potsdam Declaration, or the doctrine of necessary evil would turn Yoshie sober.

  He didn’t bother criticizing the monstrosity of nuclear annihilation, or to point out the difference between military and civilian victims. Didn’t argue that the bombs could have targeted only local infrastructure, or been dropped at a time when there were fewer civilians around. He didn’t cite the Geneva or Hague Conventions. He didn’t even mention his family, who were at the root of all his silences.

  He was simply content to remind us that, after decades of peace, our country still had many army bases in Japan. That, like the French, we continued to carry out all kinds of nuclear tests. And that those things didn’t stem from emergency circumstances, but from the same age-old political interests, which existed before and long after the war.

  Incidentally, some of my colleagues had no idea that American bases in Okinawa took up one-fifth of the main island. That its inhabitants were forced to live alongside the army of their former enemy and, worse still, its nuclear arsenal. It made me wonder what the hell our newspaper was even writing about.

  After meeting Yoshie, I admit I also had a lot of reading up to do. There were so many things we never spoke about here. I was amazed to discover that we still had jurisdiction over several Japanese airfields, even in Tokyo. It took us about thirty years to hand some of them back. If I’m not mistaken, Yokota is still an American base to this day.

  Facts like these, which I didn’t know or otherwise had long forgotten, made me realize that censorship didn’t occur only in Japan. In subtler, more veiled ways, perhaps, it also happened here. No one had told us the truth about what we did when we won the war. Or, of course, about the consequences of the bombs. Military secrecy has always been far, far more important to us than democracy.

  Given that we’re supposed to embody the great democratic ideal, we can never admit our very own authoritarianisms. Oh, not here. The quest for freedom, prosperity, and security (or at least one of the three) drives each and every one of our actions. And if things get really ugly, we resort to political assassination. Yoshie found this astonishing. He told me that he knew of no other Western power that had assassinated so many of its presidents. I don’t recall the exact stats. I think I prefer not to know them.

  I remember the tenth anniversary of the Tsar Bomba, at a time when I was growing increasingly committed to Yoshie. We published a special report about it that day in the Chronicle. It’s been long forgotten by now, but it was the most powerful explosion in the world. Three thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It’s a number so big that it sounds like a typo you make at the end of a long day, when your fingers are going too fast and you add an extra zero. But I know it’s correct because it was one of our headlines: THREE THOUSAND TIMES HIROSHIMA.

  The Cold War was at its peak, and the Soviets had been looking for a dramatic way to demonstrate their might. They’d wanted to respond to the missiles we’d developed and to our tests in the Pacific. To me this seemed to prove that the nuclear deterrence theory was a failure, a lie, or both. The only effect it had was to intensify the urge for self-preservation of the enemy, which in turn triggered our own. We call this vicious cycle military defense.

  The blast radius from the Tsar was big enough, I don’t know, to wipe several American cities off the map in seconds. The shock wave caused a tremor that registered on every seismograph on the planet. Yes, I know it didn’t kill anyone on that occasion, because it was just an experiment on an island in the Arctic. But knowing that didn’t allay my fears. It upset me to imagine all the pain it could have caused anywhere else.

  I wonder what kind of grief unborn tragedies deserve. The ones you know could have occurred. I feel that to answer this would be a political achievement.

  * * *

  Once he got comfortable with Yoshie, Ralph, who as well as being conservative is tremendously knowledgeable—yes, he’s that type of conservative—began to criticize Japanese imperialism. We Americans love to expose foreign acts of barbarism. I’d even go as far as to say we get a kick out of it, possibly because it gives us an excuse to go on committing our own.

  My brother would invite us to lunch, for instance, and between mouthfuls would speak of the tortures in Nanjing. Of the suffering the Japanese had inflicted in China and Korea. Including (and he looked at me as he said this, because he knew just how much these things freaked me out) the Korean sex slaves exploited by the soldiers. Apparently, there were about a hundred thousand of them. They called them comfort women. I admit that I’d never heard of them then and I wondered how the hell my brother had.

  Whenever I tried to talk to him about our military occupation of Japan, Ralph would mention the annexation of Korea. He reminded me that Japanese troops had appropriated its land, subjugated the farmers, and seized their crops. The inhabitants were prohibited from using their own language and were even forced to take Japanese names. Laws were changed to enable Japan to import huge numbers of Koreans, who were used as forced labor in its armaments and coal industry. What would you say, my brother asked me, if we were doing things like that in Vietnam?

  During one of these diatribes, Ralph even confessed to Yoshie how at the climax of World War II (that was the word my brother normally used, climax), everybody at his school had repeated the words sung by our Chinese allies against the Japanese invaders:

  Arise! All who refuse to be slaves!

  Let our flesh and blood become our new Great Wall!

  As the nation faces its greatest peril,

  All forcefully expend their last cries.

  Arise! Arise! Arise!

  Our millions beat as one.

  Brave the enemy’s fire, march on!

  Brave the enemy’s fire, march on!

  Braving the enemy’s fire!

  March on! March on! On!

  Having heard the song frequently at home when I was a child, I knew the lyrics by heart. Preppy girls would also chant it while raising money for charity in the city center. That same song would later be adopted by Chinese communists as their national anthem. How much more ironic can you get?

  My brother seemed oddly enamored of those World War II years. Of course, he was too young to be drafted, and, in any case, he would never have passed the physical because he’d wrecked one of his knees playing football. For a long time, I attributed this nostalgia to his political beliefs. Now I have a different theory. Those war years coincided with his coming-of-age. He was growing up fast. Starting to feel like a man. The world might get blown to pieces, but for him life was just beginning.

  Ralph had the nerve to say, in front of Yoshie, that the Japanese government was equally if not more responsible than ours for the bombs. It had ignored the Allies’ ultimatum. August 3 had been the deadline, my brother insisted, and the emperor had had an extra three days to surrender if the lives of his people mattered so much to him.

  From the get-go, Yoshie merely agreed. Ralph was astonished that he refused to counter. Then, in a whisper, Yoshie added that America’s reasons for dropping those bombs hadn’t been to protect Japan’s neighbors in A
sia, and even less to promote democracy in the region. After all, it had also killed many of the Koreans held hostage there.

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, my brother interrupted. Okay, so a few innocent Koreans died. How can you demand compassion from the enemy when…?

  And no massacre should be justified by a previous one, Yoshie went on coolly. Otherwise we’d be fighting the same war forever.

  The way I saw it, the bombs didn’t signal the end of World War II so much as the start of World War III. Which is why I often pointed out that since then, the world in general, and our country in particular, was less safe.

  Ralph argued that although the atomic bomb had been an extreme solution, objectively speaking it had saved many more lives (both American and Japanese) that would have been lost had the war continued.

  This line of reasoning drove me nuts. To compare real dead bodies with theoretical ones seems to me an obscene exercise. And above all, I don’t believe this problem should be reduced to a statistic, which is what we always do whenever anything gets too complicated. What about the ethics? The fact that the extermination was premeditated? Our leaders knew beforehand that a significant part of the population would die. Those people weren’t collateral damage, or unavoidable casualties of war, or anything. I saw a qualitative difference there.

  But my brother argued that there was essentially no difference between dying from a bomb, from a bullet wound, or from being run over by a tank. According to him, if every life was of equal value, then a death was just a death. It didn’t matter by what means. I remember him saying this to us one night, while my nieces and nephews were asleep.