The Souvenir (12 page)

Sylvan Katz's resentment toward the Japanese was still evident, though he was focused on works of good will—bettering the lives of the Igorots, Filipino highlanders with whom he'd made close ties during the Luzon Campaign. These tribal peoples had carried mail to the troops, helped ferry out the wounded on stretchers. Sylvan personally maintained a scholarship fund to send the children and grandchildren of these Filipinos to college. He spoke animatedly about his protégés, and told me about the extent of the brutality the Japanese exhibited toward their enemies as well as the civilians of the countries they occupied during World War II. He sent me articles clipped from magazines, copies of interviews with Filipino villagers, and a videotape of the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, who airdropped fleas carrying bubonic plague on random Chinese villages and subjected men, women, and children to vile medical experiments worthy of anything Mengele dreamed up at Auschwitz. In a note accompanying the videotape, Sylvan wrote, “These images are gruesome, but I know you
do want to know the truth.”

During one conversation at Sylvan's comfortable apartment in Santa Monica, we took a break after an hour and a half of talking. As I walked down the hallway to the bathroom, I noticed a framed Japanese flag, just like the one I'd discovered with my father's letters. This one was in pristine condition. The Japanese calligraphy on it was even more elegant than on Yoshio Shimizu's flag. When I returned to the couch beside him I gently asked, “So, Sylvan … what about the flag?” The judge's handsome face grew instantly somber. The apartment was very quiet except for the ticking of the clock. Sun streamed through the bay windows. We sat in silence for several moments.

“I will
not
talk about it,” he said. “And I do
not
plan to return it.” He paused before adding, “What's more, your father is probably turning over in his grave right now.” I could hear the pain in this good man's throat, the warning to pry no further. More secrets. I had zeroed in on a wound. Sylvan had zeroed in on my own naivete.

Days later my brother Larry phoned and asked, “Would you be returning this flag if it were a German flag with a swastika on it?”

He had a point. Having grown up in a Jewish household where unnamed relatives had perished in the Holocaust, I wonder if I could have seen past that symbol to whatever humanness might have existed on “the other side.”

For many who had been caught in the maw of the Pacific War—American vets, Japanese citizens bitter about their country's legacy of militarism, certainly many Koreans and Chinese who had suffered Japan's barbaric occupation of their countries—the Rising Sun flag was just as loaded. In 1987, Shoichi Chibana, a grocer in Yomitan, Okinawa, was arrested for tearing down and burning a red sun flag at the opening ceremony of a national athletic meet. At his trial, Chibana argued that many Japanese on Okinawa still
considered the flag a “loathsome symbol” of wartime militarism and sacrifice. In 1945, the Japanese Army had ordered the mass suicide of eighty-two Yomitan civilians as a gesture of loyalty to the emperor. My desire to return the flag, or the flag's desire to be returned, was turning out to be more morally complicated than I'd bargained for.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
at my office the next morning after an agitated and sleepless night, I stared with disbelief at a fax on my desk from Amy Morita. The Ministry had located Hiroshi Shimizu, the younger sister of the soldier. Yoshio had died in the war, but his sister lived in the town of Suibara near the city of Niigata, on the northwest coast of Japan.

The Ministry had provided Amy with an address, but no phone number. Weeks passed without further word. Then Amy called from Tokyo around midnight. She had spoken to Hiroshi Shimizu. She had simply searched through the phone directory for Niigata Prefecture until she found the number.

She was thrilled with her detective work but sounded one major note of caution: “She sounds old and is rather confused about your visit,” Amy said over the crackling phone line. The morning after Amy's call, I bought two round-trip tickets and nailed down my leave of absence from work.

I busied myself with travel details, like finding the right container for the flag. I wasn't exactly sure what “right” meant. Not too big, not too small. Not flimsy, not cute. Dignified. Finally, in a fancy stationery boutique at the Beverly Center Mall, I saw what I wanted—an austere, flat, navy blue leather box, which contained very expensive Crane's stationery. “Could I just buy the box?” I inquired hopefully. The clerk raised her eyebrows. I remembered suddenly that cranes are revered in Japan, and bought the box without further hesitation. I was, after all, alert to omens.

On the way home, my car drove itself to the cemetery. Not until I turned off the ignition did I fully realize where I was. I walked into the mausoleum, and sat on a stool in front of my parents' crypt. I stared at the silent wall, at the incised words on the bronze plaque:
NORMAN STEINMAN
:
A JUST MAN
.

I tried to guess what my father would think of this mission, this obsession of mine. I was about to fly halfway around the world to give this flag to the sister of his enemy. Was I doing the right thing? I was planning to visit Balete Pass, the place he considered hell on earth.

Was Sylvan Katz right? I couldn't help wondering. Was my father angry, restless in his grave?

 
Japan

O
N
A
PRIL
7, 1995, fifty-one years after my father crossed the equator on his way to war, I was crossing the Pacific for the first time, gazing out at clouds and water through the windows of a wide-body jet en route to Japan. In my backpack under my seat was the box containing the Japanese flag on which was written the name of my father's wartime enemy. Beside me, my husband dozed peacefully, a magazine open on his lap.

I reclined my seat, closed my eyes, and tried to relax. For weeks, months now, I'd imagined possible scenarios of the moment when I would hand over the flag. I screened them now in my mind. In one version the American woman walks alone at dusk across a rice paddy, a mysterious pack on her back. The sky is blood red. Black clouds descend like swooping dragons. The woman knocks on the door of a small thatched hut in the middle of a deserted field. The door creaks open; a frail, stooped woman peers out. The American tries to speak to her but the old woman shakes her head. She closes the door, pushes the visitor away. Second version: The old woman lets the visitor come inside, opens the box, then faints when she sees the rust-colored speckles on the flag. In yet another, I'm standing alone in the town square of some remote Japanese village, clutching my box while curious villagers eye me from behind half-drawn curtains.

B
Y
J
ULY OF
1945, my father assumed he was going to see Japan for the first time as part of a massive Allied invasion of the Japanese islands. He was dreading it.

The invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's home isles, was scheduled to launch on November 1. Half a million American soldiers, sailors, and airmen were to assault the island's southern beaches, backed by an armada of three thousand ships, including twenty-two battleships, and more than sixty aircraft carriers.

It was the weary combat troops in the Pacific, including the Twenty-seventh Regiment, who were slated for the Kyushu invasion. My father was deeply depressed about the planned campaign and the obstacles still to be surmounted before he could come home safe and sound. “Maybe I ought to turn psycho,” he confessed. “That won't be too hard. I'm pretty far gone already.”

In the summer of 1945, Peter Lomenzo was a twenty-seven-year-old army battalion commander with the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division on Luzon. He vividly recalled the briefing session he attended for the Kyushu invasion:

There was good reason for Peter Lomenzo and Norman Steinman and all of the American infantry forces to dread a campaign on the Japanese mainland. The U.S. military expected the Japanese would be prepared, their beach defenses fortified with several hundred thousand soldiers and perhaps five thousand aircraft. Kamikaze pilots would dive-bomb the ships at anchorage. Japanese soldiers would pilot huge torpedoes, called
kaiten
, into American ships. The coast of Kyushu was studded with caves, and the mountains there were more rugged than Okinawa's. Japanese civilians were prepared to fight to the death rather than dishonor their country. Mass suicide was not an unlikely scenario.

After the news reached Luzon of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and
the entry of the Russians into the war against the Japanese, rumors of an imminent Japanese surrender circulated among the infantry. Infected with a new optimism, my father wrote on August 9:

On August 11, the Twenty-fifth Division received the first report from San Francisco that the Japanese had accepted the Potsdam Ultimatum (in which the United States, Britain, and China announced
the terms of a surrender) with the reservation that the emperor be allowed to keep his white horse, a phrase that sounds as if it were lifted from a fairy tale rather than from a sober political document.

Peter Lomenzo recalls how, on August 12, in the midst of a deadly serious discourse by a senior officer on the landing beaches for the invasion, “an officer walked briskly down the middle aisle up to the platform and said, ‘Men! I want your attention! The President has just announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.'

“The entire gang erupted in sheer joy and disbelief that anything like this could just up and happen. We did thank GOD.”