The Souvenir (24 page)

The mayor's office in Suibara has established an ambitious schedule for my week-long stay. They have contacted a number of Suibara villagers who are war veterans or have memories of the war years in Suibara and are willing to speak with me. There also will be a gathering at Suezo's house. Masako has generously offered to travel every day from her home in Nagaoka to be the translator during these meetings.

Mr. Mihara, the mayor's energetic young assistant, meets us at the Suibara train station and we drive to the town's first guest house, the Rhythm Inn. Puzzled, I ask Masako, “Why ‘Rhythm'?” “From
tour-ism
,” she shrugs, laughing.

The banner over the front door reads “Welcome, Mrs. Steinman.” The manager, an officious man in a black suit and tie, rushes out to greet me. I am his first American guest. Though Suibara draws Japanese tourists in the winter swan season, it's not exactly a mecca for Westerners. After Masako and Mr. Mihara leave, there's no one around who speaks English, but the staff is friendly and we communicate through sign language and giggles.

Each afternoon, Masako and Mr. Mihara pick me up in the city van and we drive to the cultural center. In a bare white classroom, buoyed by cans of hot green tea, we meet our interviewees. Speaking to someone you have just met, across a table, with a translator, is an inherently formal situation. Yet in all these interviews,
there is the desire, on both sides, to transcend the limitations.

Our first guests are Mrs. Seito, an eighty-six-year-old farmwife, and Mrs. Nakayama, an eighty-eight-year-old former second-grade teacher. Both women were widowed during the war; they have outlived their husbands by more than fifty years. Seito-san has a wide face crisscrossed with well-earned wrinkles; her smile reveals a mouthful of crooked gold and silver teeth. Nakayama-sensei (“teacher”) is more regal, finer-boned than Mrs. Seito, though hobbled by arthritis.

Mrs. Nakayama's husband, Takeo, was drafted October 1, 1943, and died December 29 that same year, in Java. She learned of his death two years later. “When he died, I had two children and my mother-in-law to care for. I had a teaching job. We had to eat potato leaves, potato stems.” War widows did not have it easy; Japanese culture is traditionally unkind to women without men.

“Pearl Harbor Day was a day just like today,” Mrs. Seito remarks, “it snowed all day.” She glances out the window of the classroom at an overcast sky, snow dusting the bare branches of a persimmon tree. Mrs. Seito's husband, Hideo, was drafted in 1942 at the age of twenty-two. His submarine was sunk by a torpedo en route from Manila to Burma, in 1944. Three years later, his family received an official announcement. “I still have the envelope,” she sighs. “In those days we were told that Japan was doing the right thing, and the United States was our enemy. That's what we were told. But I never thought we could fight against Americans. I thought a country called America was a far-off place filled with rich, strong, very clever people.”

Eventually, the government sent her a box purporting to contain her husband's bones. “I was suspicious,” she says, “how could they have found his bones if he'd drowned at sea?” She opened the box and found dry twigs.

More than one bereaved woman told me there was a moment
when she intuited her husband's—or son's or brother's—death. There were omens: a bowl inexplicably breaking, a dog's melancholy howling piercing the silence of a snowy night. Mrs. Seito says, “There was some strange cracking sound near the portable shrine in my house. We went to look around the room, but nothing had happened. That was the time that my husband died.”

From the two widows, I learn how, during World War II, the military siphoned off Suibara's agricultural bounty. The storerooms of rice, the barrels of miso and soy, the mounds of huge green cabbages, the bushels of white daikon—all were requisitioned. “We had to give all the rice harvest to the government, even though we had nothing,” Mrs. Seito tells me. The people of Suibara ate tree bark and foraged in the mountains for wild greens. “You saw how a person could ‘grow thin like a mantis.' ” Suibara schoolchildren were dismissed from school to collect sap from the pines in the mountain foothills, part of a military scheme to make ersatz fuel for what was left of Japan's air fleet. Farmers watched anxiously overhead for American B-29s while tilling their fields and, in an era of virulent nationalism, watched their tongues lest the dreaded Kempetai (military police) suspect them of any unpatriotic utterances.

In the summer of 1945, the villagers began training for the ultimate battle, the American invasion of the mainland. Suibara villagers sharpened bamboo “spears” and practiced using them on bales of hay under the eyes of retired soldiers. Even though official propaganda concealed most news of Japan's defeats in the Pacific, many suspected their efforts would be useless against the weaponry of such a powerful foe.

Mrs. Seito was summoned by her neighborhood chief to listen to the emperor's historic surrender speech on August 15, 1945. Static obscured much of what the emperor uttered in a quivery voice. “But when we realized that Japan had surrendered,” Mrs. Seito recalls, “all the energy went out of our bodies. We became weak,
exhausted.”
Shikata ga nai
. What could they do? They had to reconstruct their town, their country, their lives.

On New Year's Day 1946, the emperor made another radio address to the nation, and, in a speech written by an advisor to General MacArthur, renounced his divinity. As the writer Ian Buruma has noted, “It was, perhaps, the first time in human history that God had to declare himself dead.” Later that spring, Suibara's men who'd survived the war began to arrive home.

Isamu Watanabe, a handsome, silver-haired seventy-four-year-old man and former mayor of Suibara, was an army private on Japan's southernmost island of Shikoku, where he'd been digging “octopus holes” along the coastline. Japanese soldiers were supposed to conceal themselves in these holes when the Americans invaded. From a distance of 150 kilometers, he'd seen the cloud from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. En route home to Suibara, he stopped in the ruined city to see for himself the extent of the devastation. Mr. Watanabe also made a stop in Niigata, where he saw bone-thin American POWs who'd barely survived the war.

“People criticized young men if they didn't join the army,” he says, “and the training was very very strict.” He touches his cheek where, he tells me, officers slapped recruits with their leather slippers. “We were educated from very young that we must fight against our enemies. Soldiers were told to say, ‘Heil emperor! Banzai!' when they died, but in reality, no one said that, they all cried for their mothers.”

My father, I tell him, could never talk about the war. “I understand that,” he responds thoughtfully. “Many Japanese soldiers could not talk about it either, because it was so cruel.”

Mr. Watanabe picks up a piece of chalk and draws a crude timeline on the blackboard. He marks off the prehistoric Jomon period; the Edo era, when the feudal Shibata clan built Lake Hyoko as a reservoir; Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan in 1853; the Meiji
Restoration that followed; the Manchurian Incident of 1931; Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941; and January 1945, when Yoshio died in Luzon. His timeline ends on April 15, 1995, “when Yoshio Shimizu's flag came home.” He wipes the dust chalk off his hands and sits down.

In 1947, Emperor Hirohito himself passed through Suibara, an orchestrated countrywide tour intended to humanize the “divine” emperor by having him personally greet his subjects. What most Suibarans remember seeing of him was the top of his gray fedora. That same year, Mrs. Nakayama, the teacher, joined one of the many volunteer brigades that journeyed to Tokyo to rake leaves and repair the gardens of the emperor's Imperial Palace. She remembers the great numbers of orphaned children wandering around Tokyo, sleeping under bombed-out bridges, scavenging for cigarette butts and scraps of food.

“One day in the barbershop I was very shocked and sad to hear a young man say that the war dead were very stupid people,” Mrs. Nakayama comments. “He said only stupid people died. It is quite difficult to tell the young people what the war was like, for them to understand what we went through.”

Young people I spoke to in Japan knew little about their elders' experiences in the war. In the collection of letters about the war written to the newspaper
Asahi Shimbun
was one from a thirty-one-year-old housewife named Kishida Mayumi. She had never once heard her father speak of his wartime experiences. All she had learned from her mother was that her father had gone to Manchuria as an army soldier, and that he had returned with an orphaned girl and three children of relatives who had died. She noticed that when by chance a Chinese person spoke to her father, he answered in Chinese. “I wondered what Father had seen and what he had done. I have no way of asking him now. But I wonder if his refusal to accept his military pension and his repudiation
of those who sang military songs were Father's way of expressing how he felt about the War—the war that Father never spoke a word about. What Father taught me about the War was the scar from a bullet passing though his thigh and the heavy, gruesome pain residing in his heart.”

In his book,
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
, John Dower describes the moral and psychological dilemma facing families like the Shimizus, widows like Mrs. Seito and Mrs. Nakayama, and former soldiers who'd lost friends in combat after the surrender: What do you tell the dead when you lose a war? That they were deceived? That their deaths didn't mean anything?

In Japan, one universally accepted way to mourn the war dead is to be a proponent of peace. A major tenet of the Japanese peace movement, Dower points out, is “to champion a nonmilitarized, nonnuclearized world.” Without exception, everyone I spoke to in Suibara and elsewhere in Japan professed their abhorrence for war, their gratitude for peace.

Over the five years following Japan's surrender, soldiers from Suibara who'd served in Manchuria, or on the Korea-Chinese border, returned from prison camps in Russia and China. Mr. Abe, eighty-four, a former hospital administrator, spent four years in a Siberian prison camp after just one week of active service in Korea. Mr. Abe, slight but powerfully built, is also a judo master. “When I was captured by the Russians, I never expected to see Japan again,” he says flatly. His family presumed he was dead. I ask cautiously, “Can you tell me what your life in the camp was like?” Mr. Abe does not respond at first, then he emits a quiet groan. “I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to remember—but I
will
tell you.”

He describes some basics of prison life in Stalin's Russia: little food beyond black bread and water, bitter cold, hard labor in a lumber mill and on construction sites. “What gave you the strength
to survive?” I ask. “My strong desire to go back to Japan, to home,” he replies. “I was very young. I didn't want to die in such a terrible place. Also, I have practiced judo since I was thirteen, so I had this strong wish not to be defeated.”

Russian citizens who were not prisoners worked alongside the Japanese POWs on construction sites. Mr. Abe learned some Russian and they conversed. “I found them quite open-minded,” he says. “We didn't feel that those people were our enemies. I feel that war broke out between the higher-ranking government officials, politicians—not between ordinary people.” He thinks Japan should apologize for its depredations in Asia to the Koreans and to the Chinese. “It is the right thing to do,” he says firmly. Then he sighs. “But apologies are the hardest thing for human beings to do.”

In 1949, when he was finally repatriated, Mr. Abe's family learned he was still alive, and Mr. Abe learned his father had just died. Five hundred and seventy-four of Suibara's young men perished in
Dai Towa Senso
, “The Greater East Asia War,” as World War II is known in Japan. More would never be accounted for. The town, Mr. Abe says, “was unrecognizable. Everything was in disrepair. And the people's minds were not at peace.”

W
E PULL OUT
of the parking lot of the community center, winding through the narrow streets of Suibara's central shopping district. Santa Claus cutouts decorate store windows and an ultracheery “Jingle Bells” trickles out from speakers mounted on street lamps. Mr. Mihara stops the van in front of an old rickety wooden building. “Come,” he says, “I want to show you something.”

The huge building was once a junior high school. I peer through cracks in boarded-up windows: inside, a rusted woodstove, the remnants of a blackboard, chairs and desks.

“Yoshio went to school here?”

Mihara-san nods.

On a lot behind the old school, a new building is under construction. I laugh as Mr. Mihara strikes an odd pose, standing on one leg with his arms outstretched behind him. He's showing me the architectural design of the new school, which mimics a swan in flight.

T
HAT NIGHT AT
the Rhythm Inn, I stay up late, waiting until everyone has taken their bath so I can take mine in private. Many villagers come in the evening to bathe with their children in the communal bath.

Near eleven p.m., too tired to wait any longer, I overcome my shyness and pad through the lobby in my slippers and yukata (robe) toward the women's side of the communal bathing area. I place my robe and slippers in a wicker basket in the changing room and push open the door leading to the tub. A grandmother, her grown daughter, and her two-year-old granddaughter are immersed in the sunken tiled bath. As my guidebook instructs, I squat on a plastic stool under a shower faucet to wash and rinse before entering the tub. Then, self-conscious, I ease myself into the blissfully hot water.

The two women smile at me. The young mother is pearly white with pendulous breasts; her daughter, whom the grandmother scrubs energetically, is plump and rosy. I can't help but notice the sculpted curves of these three generations, their comfort with their own bodies, with the water, with each other.