by James Webb
Watching his face, and hearing the almost mathematical certitude of his approach, I was left with an eerie certainty. Win or lose, this was a man whose vision and strategic grasp was on the scale of MacArthur’s. And for the first time I comprehended the powerful effect that Tomoyuki Yamashita’s moral leadership and simply put examples of lost strategic opportunities might have on the emotions of most Japanese if he were allowed to return to Tokyo for a proper trial.
We sat quietly for another moment, digesting the possibilities that Yamashita had laid out. I really had nothing else to say. MacArthur had told me to inspect him, and I had done that. I felt awkward, oddly overpowered by his contemplative presence, and still stung by Frank Witherspoon’s angry tirade.
Near me on the desk was a fresh-clipped pile of fingernails. Yamashita noticed that I had glanced at them. He smiled whimsically, as if sharing a joke.
“I am facing a soldier’s dilemma. Perhaps you would have some advice. It is our custom when we are cremated to send fingernail clippings and locks of hair to the family. But as you see, I shave my head every day. If I keep shaving my head, I will have no hair to send to my wife. But if I stop shaving my head, or leave one spot growing, my soldiers might think I have lost my self-respect.”
He continued to smile, and I found myself smiling with him. The issue had increased our sense of camaraderie. It was a riddle that we might solve together. “You should wait until the trial is over,” I finally decided. “Perhaps there will be no need.”
“We should speak honestly about these things, Captain.” He had not lost his smile. “But perhaps it would be better to wait, anyway. I would look foolish in the courtroom if I were growing hair.”
“I must go,” I finally said.
“You will please tell General MacArthur?”
“Tell him what, General?”
“That I do not understand these charges against my honor.” His eyes continued to hold mine, as if he could peer through the retinas and read the message traffic in my brain.
“I will tell MacArthur,” I said, reeling inside from my own dissembling.
“I thank you for that, Captain. If nothing else, General MacArthur is a fellow soldier. I know he dislikes me, and perhaps—may I say this?—he is somehow jealous of me. But I am certain he appreciates the place that honor holds in a true soldier’s heart.”
“Yes, he does,” I said. “And now it is time for me to go.”
I rose from his little chair, and he stood up from the cot and bowed again. “I hope you understand that it is not dying that worries me. In Japan we have a saying, ‘life is a generation, but one’s honor is forever.’ I will die. I have now accepted that. But it is important to me that I not be remembered as one who failed in his honor.”
“I understand,” I said, waving good-bye to him as I left the dim-lit room. “I will tell MacArthur.”
I was gloomy in the car on the way back to Manila. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that in a few hours I would again be in Divina Clara’s arms, but that usual consolation did little to stifle a growing uneasiness. For I had decided that I did indeed understand it all, and especially Douglas MacArthur’s true motivations, far too clearly.
Sam Genius was not wrong—shifting attention from the rape of Nanking, with Sam Genius’s hit list of royal conspirators, was important, both to MacArthur and to the emperor. But the possible impact of Tomoyuki Yamashita’s return to Japan, where he might state his case before the same international tribunal that General Tojo and the others would face in a few months, was more than the supreme commander or the emperor, either one, could bear. Dead or alive, the stoic, patient Yamashita would survive that forum as a national hero, one whose vision, dignity, and exploits might overshadow every other figure in the Pacific war.
Every other figure. The imperial government might never live down Yamashita’s clear-eyed predictions that the course they had chosen for the war was doomed from the beginning. And more important, Douglas MacArthur could never destroy Yamashita’s reputation as a principled and brilliant battlefield general. So instead, Yamashita would be kept in the Philippines, to be tried before a panel of nonlawyer military careerists, whose very purpose would be to destroy his honor.
CHAPTER 18
Marquis Koichi Kido was struggling, climbing up the steps. Many, many steps, carved into the mountainside. A thousand steps, at least. They curved slalomlike as they terraced up the steep, rocky slope, swaying back and forth past ancient pines and through the shade of endless, big-leafed hardwood trees. Stone toro lanterns bordered the walkway, like miniature street lamps. Shinto prayer sticks lettered with kanji blessings mixed among the rocks. We were not the first to make this silent pilgrimage.
We were near the top. The sky was cloudless, as blue as robin’s eggs. The air was crisp and cool, the freshest I could ever remember breathing. Far below us I could see the sparkling beaches of the famed resort town of Atami and after that the endless and inviting sea. Looking south, in my fresh nostalgia I could imagine the sea growing warmer and more turquoise, filling with flying fish and giant eels, then rubbing up against the edges of Luzon, where at this time of year the rain-laden rice fields seemed to melt back into it as if the island were tilting, water meeting water. But from this hallowed point of origin, the sea in Kido’s mind went further west, not south. He had brought me here to talk about Nanking.
Kido would climb perhaps twenty steps at a time and then stop, sucking in the cool mountain air with deep gulps as he caught his breath. Ever the peacock, he was wearing puffy-thighed, tight-ankled English riding pants and a rich brown woolen sweater. He had tucked the bottom of the pants into well-polished, knee-high leather boots. When he had arrived at my hotel to pick me up that morning, I had not been able to suppress a laugh as he stepped out of the emperor’s plum-colored Daimler limousine, dressed in such fanciful garb. But my laugh seemed actually to have pleased the lord privy seal, causing his shocked eyes to widen and a smile to crease his own face. He clearly did not mind seeming to be almost a caricature of Western aristocratic taste.
Now Kido gulped in more air. His skin was going ashen. The nearer we came to the top of the mountain, the more ghostlike he had become. I was beginning to realize that only a part of this hesitation was physical. A surprise awaited me around the next few turns, something powerful and even monumental, and the lord privy seal had bet an emotional bundle on the impact it would have on me.
“Are you feeling all right, Lord Privy Seal?”
“Of course I am,” he answered. He stiffened his back, raising his chin into the air as he breathed. “I am stopping only for my health, Captain Jay Marsh. The air is so clean here that I am washing out my lungs.”
“I have noticed that,” I answered. “It is a great feeling after the constant dust of the city.”
“A worthwhile journey, yes?” said Kido. He pointed upward. “And now we are almost there.”
Resolutely, he put his head down and marched forward, and again I followed in his trace. Kido had told me nothing of our destination. In a curious mix of flattery and cunning, he had said only that it would allow me to “understand.” Up the endless steps we went, heading for the mountaintop. The mountain narrowed near its crest. On the far side I began to hear faint music, the low, melancholy plunking of hands against a hollow bamboo tube, accompanied by a sad, high-pitched female voice. In the lonely isolation of the mountain, the music and the woman’s voice seemed to be emanating from the trees and rocks themselves, fluttering inside the gentle wind.
The steps ended. We had reached a level, graveled terrace. Kido stopped for a moment, catching his breath again, and then bowed slightly to me. He gestured invitingly toward the other side of a rocky knoll, from which the music was coming.
“So,” he said. “We are here. And now you will see. Go ahead!”
Hesitantly, I began walking through a thick stand of young pines, in the direction he had waved. The music and singing grew louder, as if some unseen hand w
ere turning up the volume. On the far side of the pines I reached a clearing, where an open, houselike shrine revealed itself. The shrine fit naturally into the mountain. It had been built low and wide out of dark, hard wood. A polished wooden prayer rail ran across its entrance, flanked by two large, smoking pots of incense. On the far end of the rail from where I walked was a lectern, and on the lectern sat a thick, well-signed guest book. Strands of brightly colored paper dangled like kite tails from the roof’s wide and curving eaves. The dancing strands were sending messages of comfort to the spirits of the dead.
The shrine’s entrance was open, without windows or doors. On the walls inside were countless mementos of Japan’s war in China—photographs of towns and camps and long-dead soldiers, pieces of uniforms, maps that clearly showed the imperial army’s invasion route from the port of Shanghai up the Yangtze River to Nanking. And in the center of the room, cradling the bamboo tube as she knelt in the seiza position on a white cushion before the altar itself, was the singing, chanting woman.
Her long face remained perfectly still as her eyes followed my approach to the altar. She seemed leery and yet unbending, as if she were a she-wolf protecting her den. She wore a flowing white kimono, which covered her traditional red hakama slacks. Her grey-streaked hair was very long, pulled away from her face and down until it ended in one large, gathered curl at the base of her hips. I sensed immediately that she was the priestess of this shrine.
Even in this isolated place I knew that it would be shameful to fail to respect the dead. Nearing the prayer rail, I stopped first at one of the smoke pots. As Yoshiko had taught me on other journeys, I leaned into the pot, curving my arms around the smoke, waving my hands and pulling it toward my face to cleanse my presence. Then I stood solemnly at the prayer rail, clapping my hands three times to awaken the spirits of the dead, and bowed to the priestess.
Watching this foreigner present himself, the old woman’s face lit with a flash of surprise and even fear. But her hesitance quickly abated when she recognized the lord privy seal, who had finally reached the top of the mountain and was now standing in my wake. She smiled, ceasing her music, and bowed nose-down on the shrine’s wooden floor.
“Marquis Koichi Kido, adviser to the emperor, keeper of the lord privy seal,” she sang with the same chant she had been using in her singing, “I welcome you once more to the Shrine of Remorse. On behalf of all our ancestors and the family of Iwane Matsui, we are deeply honored that you are again visiting us.”
Kido had also embraced the smoke. Now he returned the slightest of bows, not much more than a nod, indicating his high position. “I have brought my American friend,” he said simply. “He is the only man on General MacArthur’s staff who truly understands our culture. It is important that he comprehend the measures we have already taken to atone for the suffering of Nanking.”
Raising her face, she now looked fully at me, moving her head this way and that as if peeking around the corners of my body into my soul. Her aged, opaque eyes twinkled for a moment. “I have never met an American before! He is so big! And look, he does have red hair! But I think this boy is too young to understand our enlightenment, Lord Privy Seal.”
“To start with, he understands every word we are saying,” said Kido, bringing an embarrassed shock to her face. “And he is much older than he looks. Did you see him present himself to the altar? Wait until you hear him speak! No foreign accent, only a slight Osaka dialect! May I explain to you that he has already sat in the presence of the emperor himself?”
At the mention of my meeting with the emperor the priestess again bowed deeply, looking to the floor for several seconds. When she raised her head, she was watching me with new respect as Kido continued.
“The divine spirits work in mysterious ways,” said Kido. “I believe he has been Japanese for two thousand years, and American for only twenty-four. I believe he has been sent to us by the emperor’s ancestors to help us explain ourselves to the supreme commander.”
Watching Kido’s stern face as he made this comment, I struggled to discern whether he was belly talking to me or pandering to the priestess. And then it occurred to me with a chill that he actually believed what he was saying.
And so did she. She scrutinized me for a few more seconds, then bowed deeply once again, this time to me.
“Ah, so. It is in our teachings. Such miracles do occur. I welcome you also, sir. And tonight I will pray for a blessing from the spirits who showed you to us.”
Standing with them in the temple on top of the mountain overlooking Atami, I felt suddenly vested with enormous power. A part of me wanted to believe that this fantasy which Kido had mentioned and the priestess had accepted might actually be true. It had its logic. After all, what do we really know about spirits? At that moment the mountain wind pressed against me, unseen but real, a force of energy that brought heat and cold, that carried dust and pollen from one village to the next. Could not the invisible journeys of the soul do the same thing, carrying forward the energy and memories from generations past? And if the Japanese had believed sincerely in the kamikaze, the divine winds that had repelled the massive Chinese invading fleets from their shores—not once, but twice, in 1274 and 1281—could they not also conclude that a divinely sent spirit might now inhabit the body of a young American?
Perhaps so, perhaps not. As for me, I could not help but think that if the spirits had planned to inject themselves into an American body to help save Japan, they could have started in a better place than the wilds of eastern Arkansas. But it did not matter. I had gained new, real power, just from the reality that Kido might even pretend to think it. Either way—if the lord privy seal was sincere or if he was merely maneuvering me with such awesome flattery—he also was deliberately putting himself into a position of attaching some great, symbolic importance to my presence. I had been chosen, and an odd drama was about to play itself out.
I returned the old woman’s bow. “In truth, gentle priestess, I am here only as the lord privy seal’s guest. But I am deeply moved by the confidence he has shown in me, and awed to be in your presence at this shrine.”
“Indeed,” she said, peering at Kido, “he speaks with no accent.”
“I speak your language poorly,” I demurred. “But I am flattered that you so fully understand.”
“Ah, so.” She smiled broadly, nodding again to Kido, a recognition that I knew how to accept a compliment properly.
I waved toward the emptiness that surrounded us. “What is it that you do here, all alone on top of this mountain?”
“I weep,” she said simply.
“For whom?” I asked.
“For the dead of Nanking.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Since 1938,” she answered, looking west toward Nanking on the far end of the distant sea. “More than seven years. Every day, from dawn to dusk. This is my temple.”
“Why do you weep?” I asked.
“Because it is my duty.” She glanced at the mementos that lined the shrine’s inside walls. “And the duty of my family.”
I remembered the way she had greeted the lord privy seal. Her welcome had been made on behalf of the family of Iwane Matsui. “You are of the family of General Matsui, who was the commanding general in central China.”
“Yes,” she answered quietly. “I weep on his behalf, for he is in truth a most honorable man. A great man, who has been misunderstood. A friend of the Chinese people. I weep to remove the shame and to purify the future.” She slowly turned away from me, beginning a hymnal chant.
I felt a moment of confusion. I had heard Sam Genius speak of Matsui’s having been pulled out of retirement and posted to China, of his tubercular illnesses that had hospitalized him once he arrived, and of the “promotion” that had actually removed him from any direct authority. And of Prince Asaka, the emperor’s uncle, having commanded the troops inside Nanking itself.
“But General Matsui was not the commander at Nanking?”
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She continued the chant, not answering.
Kido stepped forward. “Yes he was!” he interjected quickly. “Yes, also at Nanking!”
She finished the chant and began singing again, completely ignoring us as she slapped low tones out of her hollow bamboo instrument. Kido took me by the arm, pulling me toward the far side of the shrine.
“There is more. You must see it,” he demanded.
We left the terrace, walking for a few hundred feet along a dirt path that had been worn through the underbrush. To our left the mountain dropped sharply down. A thousand feet below us the vista opened up, showing the pristine beaches and bustling seaside of Atami. Kido pointed earnestly in front of us as we walked toward some object that I could not see. We made a tight turn past a column of large boulders. And then with an abruptness we were standing at the feet of a large, glazed statue.
“Kanon,” said Kido as we reached it. “Do you recognize her? The goddess of mercy.”
I stared at the statue for a long time, trying to appreciate its power. It lacked the intricate detail that informed so much Japanese art. The ugly, mustard-colored clay that was its base showed crudely through the glaze. Nonetheless, its place on the hillside, with the mountains surrounding it and the sea-swept vista below it, gave it a grand, breathtaking aura. From her promontory the robed Buddhist goddess was gazing off into the distance, far to the west. Just as the singing priestess of the shrine wept only for atonement, here Kanon, the goddess of mercy, stared eternally out to sea, forever focused on Nanking.
“It was made in 1938,” announced the lord privy seal. “At the same time the shrine was built. We are on General Matsui’s family grounds. This is his personal expression of apology, to the Japanese people and to the people of China as well. Half of the statue is made from Japanese clay. The other half is made from mud taken out of the banks of the Yangtze River. The mud was carried back to Japan in sacks, after the unfortunate incident at Nanking. The mud of China was mixed in with the mud of Japan until the two soils were undistinguishable, just as our two countries will always be different but intertwined. From this clay was carved the goddess of mercy. They are baked together, inside the same glaze. It is our way. Do you understand, Captain Jay Marsh? Do you recognize the importance of what I am saying?”
