The Souvenir (11 page)

The people in my workshop had all suffered great losses. Even if their own children never learned the specifics—how Naz's mortally
wounded father slumped over in the street in front of his newspaper office, or how Lucy's dad was buried in a mass grave of headless corpses behind their village, or how Mark's mother was carefully photographed by her torturers before she was executed—their lives would reverberate with the loss of their parents in ways their parents might never have imagined. They would become part of their dream life, their heritage—the way my father's experiences in the mountains of northern Luzon were part of mine, though he had never spoken of them.

Part of my heritage is a gift I received from my Russian grandmother. She managed to bring with her from Ukraine an exquisite set of ceremonial silver wine cups, each incised with the spires and rooftops of the Jewish quarter of Zhitomir. Three of the five were kept in a glass hutch in my parents' condo, and were stolen in a robbery four months before my grandmother died. The theft of these family valuables—the loss of this slender link to the past—demoralized my entire family.

I sometimes take one of the remaining silver cups that my grandmother bequeathed to me from my top bureau drawer. I close my fingers around it; it fits snugly in the palm of my hand. This cup traveled with my father, my aunt, and my grandmother through the maelstrom of a civil war. Yet what, really, are the family valuables? The silver cup I've admired so many times would mean little to me without my grandmother's stories. The silver spires etched on its surface would be merely the generic outlines of a town somewhere in the Old Country, not the complicated terrain inhabited by loyal in-laws, gossiping cousins, a tender grandfather. The Japanese flag would be the generic banner of an enemy army if I did not possess the name of its owner, who, like my father, was no doubt dreaming of his family through many a long night on Luzon. The name on the flag was the key to Yoshio Shimizu's history, his place and his time.

S
IX MONTHS LATER
, the letter from Mr. Chitaru Satake finally arrived. I ripped it open with trembling hands and stared at the incomprehensible Japanese script—trying to will it into meaning. I could not wait another minute to find out what it said. Hurrying out to the street, I searched for pedestrians with Asian faces. Seeing none, I scanned the storefronts on either side of the post office: Gap, Pottery Barn, J. Crew. I glanced inside a Banana Republic and rushed up to a young Japanese American clerk. “Me? Read Japanese? No way!” she said in a Valley Girl accent.

A banner hanging outside a Japanese restaurant caught my eye. I ran inside the sushi bar clutching my precious letter. “Can I help you?” asked the manager. Could she read Japanese? I asked. No, but the sushi chef did. After wiping his cleaver on his apron, he translated the letter on the spot. The search for the family of the soldier looked “promising,” wrote Mr. Satake, “but there is more research to be done. Do not be disappointed,” he cautioned me. “Sometimes, in cases such as these, the families do not wish to be contacted.” The sushi chef handed the letter back and, without ceremony, resumed gutting his mackerel.

To help facilitate direct communication with the ministry, a friend, who had lived in Japan, referred me to a young woman in Tokyo named Amy Morita. She took a personal interest in the flag,
perhaps because of her own complex family history. Amy grew up in the Philippines after the war, when anti-Japanese sentiment was quite strong. Her grandmother was a Japanese American woman who married a Japanese national and moved to Japan before the war. In Japan, Amy's grandparents were arrested several times by the military government for being “American sympathizers.” On the other hand, across the Pacific, her grandmother's Japanese American family members were interned by the U.S. government. “I believe that war is full of tragic irony,” Amy wrote to me, “and the stories I heard during my childhood have given me the opportunity to think about the war and many of the sad dramas created by it.”

The weeks passed. There was still no definitive word about the family. Perhaps they belonged to the Japanese War-Bereaved Families Association and would find my request distasteful. Amy had explained to me that the process used by Mr. Satake's office was painstaking. Records from World War II were handwritten. Shimizu was a common name, so other identification—primarily the names of those who had signed the flag—must be confirmed. I imagined a huge roomful of clerks in a gray government building dutifully sifting through numberless boxes of yellowing documents, and thousands of Shimizus all over Japan receiving a solicitous call about some crazy woman in America bent on returning a flag to their family.

T
HROUGH MY NEW
job at the downtown library, I met a large community of writers. A Filipina novelist invited me to a reading of her new novel. Cecilia and I had talked about my father's letters from the Philippines, my desire to better understand his war experiences, the flag, my hopes of returning it. Her book was based on her parents' experiences as
guerrilleros
, fighting the Japanese in the mountains of northern Luzon during the war.

The reading was scheduled in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore in a minimall called Luzon Plaza. I drove by the mall every day on my way to work, and had never once considered stopping, though the word
Luzon
flashing in red neon always brought to mind my father and the war.

Entering the little bookstore was like stepping into another world. The people there, most of them Filipino American, switched from Tagalog to English and welcomed me warmly.

Before Cecilia began, the bookstore manager announced, “Afterwards we will all eat together. We've brought Filipino food.” My stomach flip-flopped at the thought.

Even though my father never named the specific source of his aversion to Asian food, it was so dramatic that I intuited the reality. I even came to believe it had been passed on to me genetically. I'd read about Filipino delicacies like
balut
(unhatched duck embryos), pigs' ears, skewered chicken intestines. To mention the Philippines at all in my father's presence was to elicit a grunt of disapproval and discomfort.

On the trays were lovely buns with bean paste, spicy chicken empanadas. “Spanish and Asian, our two culinary influences,” the bookstore manager said. After the reading, I made chitchat and then sidled up cautiously next to the tray. I picked up a golden pastry and, thinking no one was looking, sniffed at it gingerly. Cecilia silently appeared at my side. She'd been observing me. “You know,” she began with a smile, “if you really want to understand your father's experience in the war, you should go to the Philippines.”

The Philippines was not a country I'd ever had any desire to visit. Reading my father's letters had only reinforced my antipathy: “No matter what I look at in the Philippines, be it a rice paddy, stream, or hill or dale it reminds me of something sad and bitter. Through my eyes I can't enjoy anything this island on the Pacific
has to offer. It's always associated with the boys who will never come back.”

Nevertheless I knew immediately that Cecilia was right. I nodded as my teeth bit down on the flaky bun to the salty, slightly sweet taste inside. It wasn't bad.

That night I decided to ask Lloyd if he intended to accompany me on the trip to Japan.

It was my obsession to return the flag, not his. Why should he go on a trip that was bound to have its share of awkward and uncomfortable moments? Though he was passionate in his own life and work about the need to build cultural bridges, his feelings about the Japanese were conflicted. Thirteen years older than I, he remembered wartime blackouts in Los Angeles. Among his first drawings was a cartoon of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito behind prison bars, kamikaze planes on fire. As a child, he'd been exposed to the prevalent American war propaganda and had internalized the resentment most Americans felt toward Japanese during the war. Those feelings lay there, unexamined, alongside his more humane impulses.

I was pleased when he decided, on his own, that he would go. I wanted his support, but I wanted it freely given. I was also relieved. I liked to think I could make the trip alone, but having my husband as a travel partner gave me more courage.

“Then, what would you think about going to the Philippines as well?” I asked, though I wasn't exactly sure just what we would do there.

“We'll go to Balete Pass!” he answered without hesitation. “We'll find the marker on the battlefield where Norman was in combat.” Of course! It was obvious that was what we would do. We'd rent a car in the mountain city of Baguio, and drive up to Balete Pass ourselves. It sounded entirely plausible.

T
HERE WAS STILL
no word from Tokyo. The disastrous earthquake in Kobe dominated the nightly news, filling me with foreboding. Just a year earlier, the disastrous Northridge quake had flung us from our bed onto the floor. I'd seen firsthand the devastation an earthquake could wreak. I had no idea where in Japan the Shimizus lived. What if they lived in Kobe? As my nighttime worries amplified, I began to question my entire venture. What was driving this obsession to find this family?

Others questioned my obsession as well.

Through an informal network of friends and relatives, I'd located three Pacific War vets in the L.A. area: Peter Lomenzo, a retired Arco executive; Baldwin Eckel, a retired high school physics and math teacher; and Sylvan Katz, a retired administrative judge. They had all seen combat in the same area of the Philippines as my father had.

Peter had been a lieutenant with the Twenty-seventh Infantry Wolfhounds, my father's regiment, from Pearl Harbor through the occupation of Japan. He'd been a battalion commander in the battle for Umingan, and a staff officer in the battle for Balete Pass. Baldwin, who grew up in Japan, was a missionary's son, and learned Japanese as a child. He worked in Army Intelligence interrogating Japanese POWs in Luzon. “I wasn't a typical American soldier,” he told me. “I was an American who grew up in Japan, as a Japanese, with all of the stresses, joys, and sorrows of that experience.” Baldwin had even interrogated General Yamashita after the surrender. Sylvan served with the army's Thirty-second Red Arrow Division, which had engaged in fierce combat with Japanese troops on the rugged Villa Verde trail in Luzon.

Each of them was, in varying degrees, skeptical of my impending mission to return the flag. But they all responded supportively to my desire to understand what they had been through, and all three agreed to meet with me.

I interviewed each of them. Over the subsequent years, these three men continued to share their often painful stories and feelings with me. I'd phone Sylvan or Peter if I had questions about military terms or protocol, the logistics of the infantry, the geography of northern Luzon. Baldwin, with his profound grasp of Japanese language and culture, could answer questions about words like
shakata ga ni
, or explain the Japanese code of
bushido
.

Our exchange filled a gap on both sides. For me, it was a vital opportunity to ask questions I'd never been able to ask my father. For these men, it was an opportunity to tell stories they'd yet to reveal to their wives or children.

I first visited Peter Lomenzo just months after his wife of fifty years had passed away. He showed me a picture of a radiant young woman: “This is the place where I met Marie on the docks in New Zealand. Three girls came over to ask for dates to go for a dance, and I picked Marie.” Marie, a native New Zealander, had been one of those “distractions” the army command had been worried about when they moved the Twenty-fifth Division from New Zealand to New Caledonia for training. Together, Peter and Marie had raised a family of nine children.

I noticed a samurai sword on the mantel. “My grandson is interested in that,” Peter commented. “He asked me, ‘Can I have that sword, Grandpa?' I said, ‘No, that's from Japan. It's very sharp and heavy. I keep it up there. I can't get it down for you.' ” He paused, smiled slightly. “He said, ‘Well, can I have it when you're dead?' ”

After my first visit with Baldwin Eckel, he followed up with a letter. Opening up to me about the war was not without emotional hazard: