by Sarah Bird
“I stood motionless in that room in Rocker Four long enough for the three-hour incense stick smoldering in the corner to burn down to a pile of ash before Mama Pan-Pan held the door open and stepped aside so that an officer wearing a blue Air Force uniform could enter. In spite of all I had seen and lived through, I could not raise my eyes, and my gaze remained fixed on his black shoes, which shone as if they had been lacquered. The shoes circled me like a pair of panthers. My skin prickled as they slunk behind me. Mama Pan-Pan raised the back of my kimono to show my legs.
“ ‘She’s older than eleven.’
“ ‘Okay, maybe twelve.’
“ ‘Maybe thirteen.’
“ ‘Thirteen? Nebber hoppen! Twelve! Cherry girl! She cherry girl from country! All general want this cherry girl. They gonna be mad Mama Pan-Pan give you. I give General Harry.’
“ ‘Anderson? Anderson likes them young?’
“ ‘He pay takusan for cherry girl like this one. Like doll. You don’t want, I go get General—’
“ ‘No. Wait. Okay. Bring her to me at the Dai-Ichi. Just don’t let anyone see you. How much for the whole night?’
“ ‘No night. You take Only Contract. One week. Two hundred dollar.’
“ ‘Two hundred dollars! Are you insane? I could buy every girl at the International Palace for a month for that. I’m not taking any Only Contract.’
“ ‘Yeah, sure. Okay. You go International Palace. Stand in line. Everyone see. You be number thirty that day. Cherry girl you be number one of whole life. Only one first time. You got money. What about nice Ford convertible you bring from States? Inside you hide enough lighter flints to pay for car.’
“ ‘Who told you about that?’
“ ‘Who tell Mama Pan-Pan? Who not tell Mama Pan-Pan? Everyone have lighter. No one have flint.’ Mama dragged me toward the door. ‘Okay, I take cherry girl General Harry—’
“In three quick strides, the sleek black shoes overtook her. ‘screw you, Mama Pan-Pan. Here.’
“ ‘No screw me. Screw cherry girl.’
“The bills, the Military Payment Certificates, pink, turquoise, violet, beautiful play money with the faces of Greek gods and goddesses, passed from the officer to Mama Pan-Pan. Screw cherry girl. I’d once seen a girl, younger than me, still wearing the white middy blouse and navy-blue skirt of her school uniform, squashed against the stone blocks of a wall near the moat around the Imperial Palace by the khaki-clad body of an American soldier as he pumped against her. When he let her down, a trickle of blood ran along the inside of her leg to blossom crimson at the top of her white anklet.
“After the officer left, Mama took me to the Dai-Ichi Hotel, told me a room number, and pushed me up the stairs. The officer opened the door and took a girl he thought was twelve into his room, into his bed. What had to happen happened. I was glad I was not really twelve, and I was glad the officer did not have a penis like a beer bottle. I was like a kitten to the officer, a doll, a playmate. I walked on his spine. I rubbed almond oil into his fingertips and learned to use the Gillette razor to shave his beard. We played badminton with cotton balls on the big western bed. I squealed when he brought me presents from the PX: Baby Ruth candy bars. Tootsie Rolls. Tinkerbell bubble bath. Superman comic books. We shared the same secret: I wanted to be a child as much as he wanted me to be one.
“At the end of a week at the Dai-Ichi, the officer was in love with me. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t twelve. Because of the years of living on grass and roots, I had only the beginning traces of the things that made him hate and fear his wife back in the States: breasts, hips, hair between my legs. I didn’t even bleed yet like a woman.
“When Mama Pan-Pan came and demanded another two hundred dollars, the officer told her to fuck herself. Mama cut her price to one hundred. The officer told her she wasn’t getting another dime out of him. She said she would go to SCAP. He told her to be his guest. He was very sure that General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, would be very interested to know that she was pimping children to American officers.
“After that, he moved me to a room on the seventh floor in the Hotel New York across the Sumida River, where lots of other ‘onlies’ stayed, though the officer forbid me to talk to them. He put a lock on the door, something that was very rare in Japan at that time, and each morning locked me in.
“A month before Christmas, the base emptied out part of a hangar and filled it with toys for the children of the Occupation officers. The officer brought me a Betsy Wetsy doll with a hole between her legs so she wet her tiny square of diaper when I gave her a bottle. With Betsy Wetsy, I didn’t even mind anymore when the officer screwed me. If that was what women had to do to have babies, it seemed a small price to pay. In short, I was happy. I had nearly starved to death in a cave. After that, the room seemed a paradise. It was warm, the officer brought food. I came to love the officer. It seems a strange thing to say now; it didn’t then. He gave me my life back. Yes, I loved him.
“It was the officer himself, though, who destroyed his own secret desire. The rewards the officer brought me for being a child—hamburgers, T-bone steaks, orange juice, doughnuts, milk—were what ended my girlhood. Over the next months, I grew like a bamboo shoot. My breasts became sore, then swelled. Hair sprouted. I bound my chest and used the officer’s Gillette Blue Blade razor to shave the hair. The one thing I couldn’t disguise, however, was the smell. No matter how many Tinkerbell bubble baths I took, the smell would always return. I started to notice how thin the children begging in the street below my window were. I remembered how the cold wind cut at me.
“I tried to talk to the officer like a baby in a high, sweet voice, but my words came out desperate, pleading. I tried to giggle, and tears flooded my eyes. I tried to run gaily after the shuttlecock but tripped on my long limbs. Nothing I did fooled the officer. After he found the dark rose of my bleeding on the futon, I was not surprised when, one morning, without a word, he left but did not lock the door behind himself.
“For a week, I stayed in the room eating the last of the Hi-Ho crackers and smoked oysters. When the owner of the hotel came to tell me I had to leave, he didn’t recognize me. He asked what had happened to the other one, the young girl. I said I didn’t know. I packed every scrap that was left in the room, even scavenging through the trash to salvage the officer’s used razor blades. I tied them all in two furoshikis. I strapped Betsy Wetsy on my back, ombu-style, like a real baby. I knew I could make more from selling old razor blades than I could from selling my body.
“Outside, I found that my lungs had grown weak from months of breathing heated air and the icy wind sliced into them. I walked to the Shinjuku Station, where the largest black market, Hikari Wa Shinjuku Yori, The Light Shines Forth from Shinjuku, was set up near the main entrance of the subway station. Thousands of homeless sold pots, pans, kettles, plates, cooking oil, tea, geta, bayonets, uniforms with brown bloodstains, bullets, grenades.
“Fortunately, I knew enough to first find a representative of the Kanto Ozu gang that ran the market just as, in centuries past, they had run the festival vending stalls at temples and shrines. The underling I saw took me to meet the boss of all Ozugumi, Kinosuke Ozu himself. Ozu had a face as small and leathery as a shrunken head. Luckily, Kinosuke Ozu was tekiya, he lived by a strict code of chivalry like the samurai. In honor of my father’s sacrifice on Okinawa, he did not make me pay the usual tribute fee.
“Ozu gave me a wooden pallet that I placed next to a man who was selling boxes of American Beauty spaghetti and ornamental combs that he claimed had belonged to Chiang Kai-shek’s concubine. On my pallet I placed all the presentos the officer had given me except for Betsy Wetsy. Men fought to purchase the Gillette Blue Blade razor blades the officer had thrown away, and by the end of the day I had made enough to purchase five boxes of shoelaces from a crate containing hundreds, all stamped ‘supreme Commander of Allied Powers. For Use By US Military Only. All Other Use Forbidden By Law.’ I bough
t them. I would have bought anything. In those days, it didn’t matter what you put out to sell. Since the Japanese people had nothing, they would buy anything.
“That night, as I slept in the subway, a soldier tried to steal my shoelaces. I screamed, but no one helped me. Luckily, I had been eating hamburgers for the past months and the soldier had been scrounging in garbage dumps. After I drove the soldier away, I had to pay a boy to guard my shoelaces while I ran outside to throw up. I thought it was the strain of yelling in public that had upset my stomach, but it wasn’t.
“Over the next seven months of snow, wind, rain, and sun my face became almost as leathery as Kinosuke Ozu’s. It was July and sweat was streaming down my cheeks when I accepted that the officer’s child was growing within me. Most Japanese women who found themselves pregnant with a gaijin baby made a quick visit to the abortion clinic. Or, if they didn’t have two thousand yen, they killed themselves. I thought they were stupid. Though I knew keeping the baby meant I would be cast out forever by decent Japanese, I didn’t care.
“The birth was not easy. There was bleeding, scarring. This would be my only child. Though the midwives insulted me and my baby by taking their surgical masks off when they came to my bed and talking loudly in the hall about omajiri, comparing my baby girl to a thin gruel no one likes and joking about who would do Nihon a favor and throw the omajiri baby out with the trash, my own eyes told me how stupid they were. My baby was more beautiful than any child I had ever seen. The gold of my skin had combined with the pink of the officer’s and my child looked like a rose in candlelight. For this, I named her Hana Rose. She had even been marked with the most beautiful of treasures, the Mount Fuji hairline. The more I was scorned, the happier it made me. I had a treasure no one wanted to steal.
“I walked out of the hospital that night and, for the first time since the war, found Tokyo bright with light. So much had been rebuilt. I stopped to notice the new city that was being born from the rubble. Lanterns and small fires blazed at every house, every shack, every lean-to we passed. It was the final night of O-bon. In front of the few surviving old houses, in front of the astonishing number of new houses built from concrete blocks to look like concrete blocks, families feasted before the house altar. I smelled pickled plum, cherry blossom tea, garlic and leek dumplings, tofu with five sauces, all the favorite foods of the families’ dead ancestors being honored. Mixed in with the food smells were the fragrance of incense and the alcohol-and-ash smell of play money that had been sprinkled with sake and then burnt.
“I sat in a pocket of darkness and nursed Hana Rose, whispering to her that all the festivities were to welcome her, to welcome all the new life being born in Japan. I leaned in so close that my nose was in her mouth and I inhaled her breath. It smelled like caramel. Joy surged through me at that scent and the city tilted and fell away, leaving me and Hana Rose alone in our own perfect corner.
“At length, I began to walk again. It was late. The people had gone to sleep, many leaving their offerings on the altars outside. I went from altar to altar and ate all the foods I had eaten as a girl: udon, edamame, umemaki, aburage, anago tempura, onigiri, nasudengaku. I ate and ate, filling the long years of hunger past and stockpiling for the future, Hana Rose’s future. I swore she would never pull electricity from empty breasts the way my little brother had. Hana Rose would always have the milk that made her breath smell like caramel. When I was thirsty, I drank tea from pots hundreds of years old that had been buried in the family’s backyard to save them from bombardment and theft, pots that the dead who were being honored had drunk out of. I drank, and the ancestors’ thirst was slaked. Only the dead and I understood that it was right for the living to eat and drink so that the newborn might be nourished.
“We walked all that night. Without planning, we ended up in Awashi, the neighborhood where I’d grown up. The streets had been cleared and rebuilt. I found our old house. Two American military guards slept beside the gate outside the grounds. A station wagon was parked in front of the house. It had an eagle painted on the side clutching arrows in its claws. A basketball hoop had been bolted to the flagstaff where my father once put up a blue carp for me on March third, Girls’ Day, because I cried to have a flag like boys flew on their day. I wanted Hana Rose to see her grandparents’ house before I took her to the shack I lived in near the station. I promised her that we would soon have an apaato. I had almost saved enough.
“When I returned to The Light Shines Forth from Shinjuku market with Hana Rose tied to my back, all the other vendors shunned me because my baby had the despised pink skin of the conqueror. Hana Rose and I laughed about that. When they dragged their pallets away from mine, all it did was leave more room for customers to cluster around, since, whatever my competitors sold, I sold for a few yen less.
“I was always the first one at the station before dawn and the last one to leave at night. Then, with Hana Rose sleeping on my back, I would take my three-wheeled cart to visit my sources with PX contacts and see what they had to sell that night. Once it was four hundred pounds of pinto beans. Another time it was ten crates of Big Chief tablets. I sold three hundred rolls of Tums pill by pill by telling customers that they cut hunger pains. And they did. Whatever it was, I bought.
“At night, Hana Rose and I snuggled together in the little shack made from a wooden crate that engine parts had been shipped in. I sang to my daughter and traced the outline of Mount Fuji on her forehead, telling her of all the beauty the world held.
“Then, on September nineteenth, Hana Rose and I woke up to feel the chill of a wind blowing down from Siberia. That day, for the first time, I wrote to the officer. I put his name and rank on the letter and gave it to a sergeant I bought four boxes of Listerine mouthwash from. In my letter, I told the officer to write me in care of the Shinjuku stationmaster and send money for his daughter. I sold Listerine by the sake cupful for twenty times what I had paid to men desperate to drink anything with alcohol in it.
“Each day, I asked the stationmaster if a letter had come for me. Each day there was nothing and the winds grew chillier. I worked harder. I had to make enough to rent an apaato so Hana Rose and I would be inside when winter came. And we would have been, too, if General MacArthur hadn’t declared war on the Underground Government. When the Americans finally figured out what all Japanese already knew, that the real rulers of our country were men like Ozu—gangsters, racketeers, yakuza all in league with the police and the politicians—they cracked down on the black markets. Vendors with a box of Hershey bars were arrested and sentenced. A U.S. Army colonel was court-martialed for selling nine dollars’ worth of cigarettes. Meanwhile the leather-faced Ozu walked out of jail a free man when the public prosecutor testified that he was too sick to serve his prison sentence.
“While the raids continued, we vendors hid. For weeks, I had no money coming in and had to use my apaato savings. Hana Rose and I were not the only ones who suffered. It was impossible to survive without the black market. One man tried, Yoshitada Yamaguchi. He tried to feed his family on a salary of three thousand yen, seven dollars a month. ‘How can we break the law, even if it is a bad law?’ Mr. Yamaguchi asked his wife. He grew weak from hunger but insisted that his family live on government allocations. His wife begged him to let her sell her wedding kimono, the family altar. He refused. It was the talk of Tokyo when Mr. Yamaguchi starved to death. Maybe that is why the police raids stopped.
“Hana Rose and I went back. But it was too late. I could never save enough before winter came. By the end of October, the Siberian winds had blown into Hana Rose’s ear and she cried all day and all night with the pain. The market was in full operation again, but she was too sick to take outside. When green fluid oozed from her ear, I began to search for a nursery where I could keep my baby out of the cold until she was well. There were thousands of women in the same situation and all the nurseries within walking distance of the station were full. The ones that didn’t immediately slam the door in my face, did so afte
r they saw Hana Rose’s skin. The only nursery that would accept her was the Jusan-in halfway to Yokohama in Yanagi-cho.
“I had to change trains three times. The long journey was very tiring for Hana Rose, and the cigarette smoke that filled the trains made her cough continuously.
“Jusan-in was run by Mrs. Miyuki Ishikawa and her husband in their home. This I will never forget: Mrs. Ishikawa came to the door, wiping grease from her chin. The house was warm and smelled of frying pork. Food and heat, that was the most we could dream of in those days. There were children everywhere. Like all Japanese children then, they looked thin and hungry. But Mrs. Ishikawa was a grandmotherly woman in an apron that tied behind her neck. I looked for kindness in her face and believed I found it. She took Hana Rose, held her, and told me how beautiful she was. I did not realize how hungry I was to hear a countrywoman tell me what I knew until she spoke those words. Then she told me it would cost two thousand yen a month to keep my child there. I protested that that was almost enough to rent an apaato. Mrs. Ishikawa answered that if I had an apaato, I should take my child and go. If not, she would have to have a month’s payment in advance, and maybe she shouldn’t take Hana Rose after all. She was sick. She would make the other children sick.
“I said that many of the children already looked sick, and she asked me what I expected. She took the children that no one in Japan wanted. She started to hand Hana Rose to me.
“The thought of taking my baby on the long train ride back to my unheated shack frightened me. I vowed I would work night and day for the next month, find something, anything, then return to claim my daughter. One month, I told her, one month. And I would come as often as I could to check on my daughter. Every night if that was possible. I took the money out of my obi and paid her. Hana Rose cried when I left, but Mrs. Ishikawa told me to pay no attention. All the children cried, but as soon as the mothers were gone, they stopped crying. I knew this was not true because so many of the children were crying.
