The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  “Then the women came back in and told us to go out to the truck. The women, our hostesses, would no longer meet my gaze. The village chief gruffly ordered us into the back. I felt his shame and knew that whatever was about to happen to us would be worse than anything that had gone before, because none of them had felt shame for what they had done to us until then.

  “We sat for a long time in the back of the truck while the men worked to make it start. At last the truck shuddered to life. Belching backfires and rattling, we drove slowly down the narrow country lane. The chief rode in front with the driver. The rest of the men followed on foot, easily keeping up. When we came to the road that led to Tokyo, we stopped and waited. Rivulets of soot-darkened sweat ran down my mother’s face. She wiped them away with the loose ends of her furoshiki. After many hours, we heard the clatter of chopsticks against the metal obento boxes the men had brought their lunches in. When they finished, they handed the leftovers to us without a word and went back to squat in the shade.

  “Late in the afternoon an Army truck the color of river moss came, crushing the bamboo stalks that lined the road. The villagers stopped the truck. I had seen photographs of Amekos, but they were much uglier in person. One of the village boys had once thrown an old tomcat into the pond with stones tied to each of its paws. Days later, swollen with gas, it floated to the surface. That was what these gaijin looked like to me, like humans bloated to hideous proportions, their faces, puffy and pointy at the same time, bleached of life.

  “The headman went to speak to the driver, who told him to wait. Then he called a soldier out of the back of their truck. When the men of the village saw the soldier who raised the flap and stepped out, they gasped. He looked Japanese and even spoke an odd sort of Japanese, but he wore the uniform of the enemy and followed their orders. After he and the headman exchanged formal greetings, the headman begged to be excused for a moment.

  “His face pale, the headman huddled with the other men to decide what to do. Though terrified, they were relieved because they now understood how their country could have been defeated: The Amekos had the power to steal souls. The man who had just spoken Japanese to them was, obviously, the ghost of a loyal defender of Nihon captured by the Amekos, enslaved now for all eternity. This was both much worse and much better than they had imagined. Though they understood how Japan could have been vanquished, they knew then that they were battling not just for their families’ lives but for their souls.

  “The headman, stiffened by cries of Gambatte, ‘Try hard, persevere,’ returned to the ghost boy. My mother and I could not hear what they said, but the headman repeatedly gestured toward us. The ghost boy translated his words and the other soldiers laughed. The headman, so polite and supplicating when he spoke to the ghost boy, ordered my mother and I out of the truck in the harshest of tones, as if it were our fault that the exchange was not going well.

  “We stood in front of the men of the village as well as the Amekos, who had climbed out of the back of the truck. I stared only at their feet, the huge feet of monsters. I did not have the courage to look at them. I was proud of my father and all Japanese men for keeping these monsters away from us for as long as they had.

  “The headman and the ghost boy spoke. The headman told the ghost boy that he was making the unworthy offering of me and my mother if the exalted Army of the Occupation would spare his village. The ghost boy translated and the Americans’ laughter filled the air, a different kind of laughter than I had ever heard before. As unconscious as the grunts of pigs, this laughter proved to me that Amekos were not human. The ghost boy told the headman that they did not want us. I stole a glance at my mother. At her ugly, spiky hair. If she were still pretty they would have wanted us.

  “The headman insisted, saying we were pathetic, wretched excuses for women unworthy of the smallest modicum of their attention but women all the same, equipped as all women were, and the esteemed Allied Army of the Occupation would do them a great honor by taking us with their blessings along with one sho of sake and three kin of rice. The village men brought forward the small barrel of sake and three precious, hoarded bundles of rice wrapped in straw.

  “The men of the village were confused and shamed when, in return, the gaijin hauled immense burlap bags out of the back of the truck and slung them contemptuously at the feet of the headman. It was rice, not the silvery-white rice of Japan, but a great quantity of rice nontheless. Four to five koku of rice. Enough rice to feed the entire village. The Amekos didn’t need our rice, and they didn’t need my mother and me.

  “As the village men prattled among themselves, a sound soft as a dove cooing fluttered about me. It took me and the ghost boy several moments to realize that my mother was speaking. For the first time since my father left, she spoke in the high, fluting voice of a wellborn Japanese woman.

  “ ‘Take us with you,’ she asked the ghost boy. My mother told him that our home was in Tokyo and all we wanted was to return to it.

  “As we left the village men kneeling in the dust, my mother sat rigid, looking straight ahead, holding the folded bundle of her white wedding kimono on her lap, stroking the golden threads. After a long time without speaking, she whispered to the ghost boy that she would like to be cremated wearing the wedding kimono. When one of the other soldiers asked what she said, the ghost boy shrugged. When my mother wasn’t looking, he wound his finger around his ear to tell the other soldier that she was crazy.

  “But with each kilometer the Army truck put between us and the village, with each kilometer that none of the soldiers paid us any attention, my mother’s fear lifted. The gaijin confused me. They put their thumbs in their ears, waggled their fingers, and stuck their tongues out, trying to make me laugh. Then they peeled silver paper from slabs of a sweet brown food, handed one to me, and gestured for me to do as they were doing. The soldiers happily ate their slabs. When I smelled mine, I wished that they would have given me one that wasn’t rotten, but I ate the sweet food that they called Hershey. When it became clear that they were not going to do what the villagers had assumed they would do, my mother became positively gay, her spirits brightened as much by having her opinion of the villagers’ stupidity confirmed as by knowing we were safe.

  “As we approached Tokyo, a shiver passed through my mother so forcefully that, sitting next to her, I could feel it. It was her spirit, missing since my brother died, returning to her body. She put her arm around me, hugging me tightly, and I thought I would faint from the pleasure of a touch from her that was not a slap or a pinch.

  “ ‘We’re going home,’ she whispered, as much to herself as me. Home to the fairy city. We had left a magic castle of paper and wood homes. The joy in my mother’s face made me forget my questions about how our fairy city could have survived the long weeks when the sky above Tokyo glowed pink as the city burned. She told the ghost boy where our neighborhood was. How many important people lived there. She hummed ‘sakura’ under her breath, the first song I ever learned. It was as though we were starting all over, returning to the time when I was a little girl and my father dressed in a suit every morning to eat breakfast and my mother wore an obi twelve feet long wrapped about her waist.

  “From the opening at the back of the truck we could not see what lay ahead, but as we drove into Tokyo we saw what lay behind. Devastation and ruin. The B-29 raids which had turned the sky pink had left behind only gray and black. No tree, no green blade of grass survived. No blue tile roof. No paper house. The truck rumbled off the road again and again because it became impossible to tell the road from the rubble of shattered roof tiles and the ash and cinder of burned paper and wood houses. Here and there, a piece of charred black timber poked out of a gray flatness that went on for as far as I could see.

  “We passed hundreds, thousands, of homeless survivors, their faces pinched by hunger, living in shelters of cardboard, rocks, tarps pulled over bomb craters in the middle of the street. Everywhere we looked were shattered blue roof tiles, just like the til
es that had been on our house, tiles that were supposed to fool the god of fire, making him think the home was a blue lake. By the time we reached Shinjuku Station, far to the west of our neighborhood, my mother’s spirit died again and for always. Her arm sagged away from my shoulders.

  “When the truck stopped at the station, a mob of women as vulgar as Koreans swarmed the back, reaching up to the men, yelling, ‘Fuckee-fuckee.’ ‘You fuckee-fuckee me.’ The ghost boy asked if we wanted to get out, but my mother didn’t answer.

  “When even the threat of returning to the village could not make my mother speak, the ghost boy looked at the other soldiers and asked what they should do with us. Someone said, ‘There’s always the International Palace.’ They all laughed. Then one of them said they had to make a drop-off there anyway. And, after they threw the last of the bags of rice to the crowd, that is where they headed. As we drove away from Shinjuku Station, I watched a skinny man in a dirty uniform kick a woman in the head and grab away the rice she held cupped in her hands.

  “ ‘Japan is dead. There is no Japan.’ Though she stared straight ahead at the canvas side of the truck, my mother spoke my own darkest suspicion.

  “We drove east to Funabashi. The International Palace was an ugly old Imperial barracks building where a line of American soldiers, boys like the ones in the truck, waited outside. The ghost boy handed me our furoshikis and told me in Japanese to take my mother inside. That they would know what to do with us because he sure didn’t.

  “There were no walls inside the barracks. Sheets hanging from the ceiling divided the long, narrow building into hundreds of cubicles. It stank of the DDT the Americans sprayed on everything, especially our hair. The sheets fluttered constantly as one barefoot soldier came out, collected his shoes at the back exit, shined while he had been occupied, and another came in from the front and took his place.

  “An old woman with a face like a dried plum, her teeth the color of old tea, stopped us at the door and asked if the Recreation and Amusement Association had sent us. Everyone called her Mama Pan-Pan, she told us, because she was the most famous madam in Tokyo. When my mother only stared as if Mama Pan-Pan weren’t there, I answered yes, we had been sent by this association she mentioned. Mama Pan-Pan looked at us, shut her eyes tight, and cursed her fate, having to run the largest brothel in the world with the worthless trash, pathetic amateurs, that the government sent her.

  “As she showed us to a cubicle she asked if my mother spoke. Before I could answer, Mama Pan-Pan said it didn’t matter. The men who came to the International Palace weren’t looking for conversation. The futon on the floor took up almost all the room. There were rust-colored stains in its center.

  “ ‘They won’t let you work,’ the woman told me. ‘The Americans are strict about that. No children. You can’t stay. MPs catch you here, they’ll shut me down. You can come in the morning to collect what she’s earned. Early. Before dawn.’

  “A woman bellowed for towels and Mama Pan-Pan told me I had to leave. I didn’t want to know what my mother would be doing in this place, but the sheet dividing my mother’s cubicle from the next jumped and billowed, a man grunted, and I could not pretend I did not know. I left my mother there and the next morning when I returned, Mama Pan-Pan handed me the wedding kimono and said that the MPs had already cut my mother’s body down from the metal beam from which she had hanged herself and taken it away to be burnt so it wouldn’t spread disease.

  “Since there was no body to bury in the gold-embroidered wedding kimono, I traded it for a box of powdered milk and eight cans of C-rations. When the cans were gone, I joined the pack that scavenged for scraps behind mess halls, that stole provisions that had been stockpiled by the Imperial Army. I slept in subway stations, parks, and bomb craters, covered with burlap rags, terrified of the ones who would slice your throat for a radish.

  “We did what we had to to stay alive. The moat around the Imperial Palace was so clogged with used condoms that a man came once a week with a big wire scoop to clean them out. For a pack of Old Gold cigarettes, women gave themselves in jeeps, in stairwells, in front of the Imperial Palace itself. They didn’t care who watched. I swore I would never be a pan-pan girl.

  “But months of hunger drove me back to the International Palace. I told Mama Pan-Pan I was ready to work. She laughed in my face and asked me how old I was. Ten? Eleven? I lied and told her I was sixteen. A gleam lighted her eyes. Something could be done with me. There was a major with certain ‘particular’ tastes very dangerous for an American officer to have. She bound the small buds of my breasts, dressed me in a pink kimono, put my hair in pigtails, painted my cheeks with a rosy powder, and took me to Rocker Four, a five-story club that had sprung up amid the rubble on the Ginza 4-chome intersection.

  “Rocker Four was the showplace of the Shawa Dakai, the Dark Society that ruled the sprawling Tokyo underworld. Every day two thousand hostesses converged there from all over the starving city to extract as much money, chocolate, soap, rubber, beer, sugar, cigarettes, salt, C-rations, and powdered milk as they could from the GIs who flocked to the club. The club was surrounded by three-wheeled cabs, rickshaws, and charcoal-burning trucks. An Army bus pulled up and Japanese women all trying to look as American as they could streamed out. Their hair was frizzed by bad permanents. They painted their lips with waxy lipstick made of fish oil cooked up in pots over bonfires and wore short skirts made from kimonos that had been handed down for generations before they were ripped apart and stitched into American clothes. The most beautiful girls, those who made the best tips, had the shortest skirts to show off the biggest prize a hostess could earn, nylons. Baggy, webbed with runs, worn out at the heels, it didn’t matter; the few who had nylons wore them proudly. Gum was the one American item they could afford and all the hostesses chewed it. The most daring had cigarettes and they smoked them the way they’d learned from the GIs, letting them droop insolently at the corner of their mouths, never bothering to tap the ash off.

  “The women laughed and talked too loudly in the American way as they filed into Rocker Four, attracting the attention of a group of Japanese veterans. By this time it was unusual to see more than a solitary veteran walking the streets in public, so many had died, so many had killed themselves. Most had simply found ways to hide. The leader of the group, a one-legged man, wore a great cape and walked on crutches, his single leg swinging in the middle like the clapper of a dusty black bell. Three or four other old soldiers followed in grimy caps that laced at the back of their heads, their uniforms reduced to dirty, patched memories of uniforms.

  “The one-legged man stopped and hissed curses at the women, calling them gaisen, a terrible insult, someone who sleeps with gaijin. The other veterans joined him. Most of the women stopped their loud talking and lowered their heads in shame. I suppose I lowered my head as well because I noticed a legless man sitting on a dirty square of cardboard trying to light the butt of a cigarette he’d plucked out of the gutter by magnifying the milky rays of sunlight through a piece of shattered lens from a pair of glasses.

  “Mama Pan-Pan strode over to the veterans, called them kusojiji, old farts, and told them, ‘You are the army that lost the war. These women are the army that will win the peace.’ She added Kuso shite shinezo, that she hoped they would die shitting, and pulled me past the veterans and the hostesses and into the club.

  “The first floor was reserved for American privates, new recruits, all the teenagers General MacArthur had selected for the Army of Occupation instead of old battle-scarred veterans who might seek revenge. With the young GIs were Japanese farm girls who’d either come on their own to escape starvation in the country or, more often, been sold to Mama Pan-Pan by their families.

  “On a low stage, lighted from underneath, a Japanese woman in red-white-and-blue shorts and sailor top, red-sequined tap shoes on her feet, danced the Charleston to the music of a Japanese combo wearing red-striped vests and straw boaters. Mama Pan-Pan told me to stop gaping and jerked me
to a door guarded by an MP. The military policeman stepped aside and let us into a private stairway. Mama Pan-Pan hurried me up metal stairs that clattered loudly beneath her wooden geta.

  “On the next floor were the street prostitutes, still young but never pretty. The lower-grade NCOs could go up to the second floor. The higher-grade noncoms went to the third floor, to be greeted by the pretty street prostitutes and prostitutes who used to work in houses before the war. The fourth floor was reserved for junior-grade officers. The young and pretty prostitutes, former hostesses at bombed-out clubs and bars, and make-believe geishas were allowed on this floor.

  “The fifth floor was for field-grade officers only, major and above. Real geishas worked there. All the women wore nylons. The entire floor smelled of Chanel No. 5. There were no bad perms. Women pulled gold Revlon compacts and Max Factor Cherries in the Snow lipstick out of small beaded bags stuffed with gaudy military payment certificates and packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. The band on this floor wore tuxedos. A tall man with silver hair and stars on his shoulders glided around the dance floor with a Japanese woman in an evening gown the color of milky jade, her bare back covered by yards of silken hair held back at one ear with a gardenia.

  “A gardenia? To walk out of a world where legless men lighted their cigarettes with pieces of glass into one where a woman’s hair was held back by a gardenia was to glimpse life after death.

  “Mama Pan-Pan took me to a private room and arranged me like a doll in a glass case, fluffing out the hem of my kimono, tightening my obi, pinching my cheeks, smoothing my hair. She told me I’d be back pawing through trash behind the Nomura Hotel if I dared to move before she returned. If the officer she was bringing did not want to take out an ‘only’ contract on me for his exclusive use, she could do nothing with me. She didn’t want me around drawing attention to the underage girls she had who could pass for older than they were.