“Got me there. All I hear is, they’s good people, nice and friendly,” reports the village voice.
“S’posed to be fun torchin’ houses,” sniggers a kid one seat over from the old man.
“Not for normal people it ain’t. Wouldn’t put it past you, though” says the big mama.
“Don’t look at me. You’d hafta be brung up twisted. Or from somewhere else.”
“There was this fireman in Manila liked to set fires. Kinda makes sense,” interjects the lanky fellow, letting everyone know he spent some time in the Philippines.
“Maybe they got the wrong house? Who lives next door?” asks the old man.
“Just regular folk. Mind you, regular folk can sneak their hands where they don’ belong. Maybe eye the other guy’s woman, put a little hex on the neighbors, but otherwise …”
“No political hokum? Nobody in Tamang’s camp?” the old man presses on.
“Come to think of it, three doors down’s that family Bonhomme Tamang’s niece married into, but who’d set a fire for that? An’ even if, they shouldn’a got the wrong house.”
“Shouldn’t and wouldn’t, ’cept that’s Island Security for you, heh heh,” the old man chortles, which starts everyone laughing.
“Yah, but okay, why now?” blusters the old ma’a woman, stopping everyone short.
“Yeah, and what about that flag burnin’ at the airport?” asks the kid.
“Strange, mighty strange, but it don’t got the Tamang touch. Most of them Tamangos are modernizers, do things American-style. Wouldn’t even know how to use no magic. You even hear they been up to much lately? Sure ain’t called to reopen the assembly, so why burn flags?” says the old man.
“C’mon, everybody’s anti-Jap. But that don’t make us all Tamangos,” says the kid.
“Somebody got it in for the President. Bet this is just the beginning,” says the skinny fellow ominously.
“How long’s it been?” wonders the kid after a moment’s silence.
“A year,” says the big mama. “One whole year for Guili to shore hisself up nice ’n safe.”
“Good thing too. Damn good thing. Politics shake, everything go to pieces. Next thing you know bombs’re flying and houses burning, can’t be no good,” grumbles the old man.
“Least damage anybody could do, that fire in Xulong. Makes you think like maybe Island Security got orders to send a little message to Tamang’s camp, probably on account’a that Jap flag.”
“Yeah, and that torii gate thing too,” the kid chimes in again.
“Just the sort of stunt the President and Chief Katsumata might dream up. But hey, them Island Security boys’d never pull it off. They get their orders, they ain’t got the guts. Like they go burn the wrong place. Bet the family even knew what was coming off, so they get out in time. Probably got money out of it too, or an Island Security barrack air-con gets installed by mistake in the new house they build. Who knows?” The man has all the answers.
“You really are Mr. Know-It-All, ain’t you. Keep spreading them big ideas around, gonna get you a air-con by mistake too, eh?” sneers the big mama.
“I wish. But from what my cousin in Island Security tell me, them jokers can’t keep anything straight. Still haven’t heard from him ’bout this one, though. Just a gut feeling.”
“Think Guili maybe ordered the fire?” asks the lean fellow, rocking back and forth.
“Probably,” says the kid. “That’s what his Island Security’s for. And that’s the President’s politics, keeping us down. Hardly matters what we all think about Emperor Matías Guili.”
“Not emperor, Guili wants to be dictator,” explains the young man, flaunting his powers of analysis. “He’s looking for an opening, but nobody couldn’t care less how he rules. For him to crack down, people gotta get all hot and bothered, gotta rebel. But government’s like winds up in the clouds. Blow this way, blow that way, don’t matter to us. Money breeze in from overseas, it just circle around and never even touch the ground. ’Cause he can’t rightly pinch our bananas or fish, now can he? A dictator need a secret police, but them boys don’t know even know how to keep a secret. Good thing Guili’s pro-Japan and Tamang’s side’s pro-America, otherwise Island Security wouldn’t have no work at all. Still, things been awful quiet since Tamang died. Guili’s just waiting for us to act up, throw bombs, tack up slogans, something to give him an excuse.”
“Interesting, I’ll say that. Real interesting, but it ain’t got no reality. You make us out like simple folk ain’t never seen money, but those days’re long gone. Ain’t nobody here that principled. We all want our radio cassettes. We want our blue jeans. And specially, we want our rice. The best thing them Japs ever did was teaching us the taste of rice,” preaches the big mama. “Worst thing too. ’Cause you can’t grow it here, you gotta buy it.”
“You said it!” seconds the old man. “I’m from the generation what first tasted rice. Same as Guili. Couldn’t believe it, thought I died an’ gone to heaven. Make a man go crazy, that taste. Better we shouldn’a known it at all.”
“Isn’t the President’s job to protect us?” argues Mr. Know-It-All. “Keep the big countries outside the reef?”
“But the rice bomb done dropped anyway. President Guili’s not gonna stop no tide. Even Tamang did a better job of seawallin’ Japan,” says the lanky fellow.
“Hamburgers ’stead of rice. Big diff’rence,” says the old woman, perking up at the thought of the island’s one and only burger joint, though she’s never actually tasted a hamburger. If only her grandson would go buy her one.
“Well, maybe not. Isn’t easy being a small country,” echoes the old man feebly.
“Take away the country, we still got the people,” says Mr. Know-It-All.
“But that’s just what this global-ation today don’t allow,” says the lanky fellow, proud of the big words he knows. “Just like we don’t like people to leave the village, big countries don’t like us little islands floatin’ off alone. They got to work us in somehow. Give us aid, sell us junk, send us tourists, build bases, an’ we just gotta put up with it. Just the way it goes nowadays. That’s why we need somebody like Guili to do the troubleshooting with the outside world.”
“That’s right,” seconds the old man. “Somebody gotta do the dirt work. Even if he is a crook.”
“Hang on, don’t you think we’re all maybe just a little too smart for our own good? Know-nothing island folk talking like regular experts!” says Mr. Know-it-all.
“ ’Specially since we forget ever’thing soon as we leave this here market an’ go right back to being good little villagers, glad to do what our President tell us. Something special ’bout this place,” says the lanky fellow, thinking of his time in the Philippines, “even if our soundin’ off don’t carry far. Could say it’s these benches do the talking, not us.”
“Yep, the gab goes on, only the speakers change. Our behinds get smarter every day, but we don’t never do nothing,” the old man sighs with resignation.
“Yah,” the old woman tags on, “but what d’ya make of them handbills all over town?”
Few would disagree that World War I marked the real beginning of the twentieth century (much as the nineteenth really began with Napoleon’s defeat in 1814). By 1914, local turmoil was building toward “world” turmoil, albeit limited to European battlefields—a singular moment in time and space for people all over the planet. Only with the twentieth century is everyone implicated in one world, like it or not.
The War to End All Wars may have been confined to Europe, but surrogate skirmishes flared up in colonies all around the globe. In a corner of New Guinea known as Kaiser Wilhelmland, a British Army brigade wiped out a defenseless German reconnaissance unit comprised mostly of natives; while in Tanganyika, German East Africa, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn’s t
iny riverboat did battle with a German gunship. In Micronesia, the Empire of Greater Japan, having severed diplomatic relations with Germany on August 23, landed its First Naval South Seas Expeditionary Force in the Marshall Islands on October 6. This was followed on the twentieth of the month by a Second Expeditionary Force to the Carolines and Maríanas, and a third to the Navidads on the twenty-fifth. The Germans put up almost no resistance. Germany lost territories five and a half times the size of the Fatherland, and Japan gained vast spoils with no actual fighting. It was like picking up a dropped wallet.
And so the inhabitants of these islands were pocketed into the twentieth century. Considering all that followed, that fateful day was either the beginning of a new era or the end of good times. For whereas the Spanish and Germans had endeavored to edify and manage these colonies, never intending to actually live there, the Japanese wanted to emigrate. Japanese settlers came crushing in en masse, as if the islands were uninhabited. They dried katsuobushi bonito fillets, they planted sugar cane, they brought rice and soy sauce too. Like the dirt-poor Spaniards who shipped out to the Americas in the seventeenth century, or Irish to New England in the eighteenth, or Chinese to California in the nineteenth, early twentieth-century Japanese headed either to Manchuria or the “Domestic South Seas.”
When people move, cultures move with them. So when these “domesticators” came, it goes without saying (yikes, those words again!) the natives found themselves overtaken by Japanese culture. The new landlords built Shinto shrines on the islands, established Japanese schools. Unlike the British who never made the Queen’s English mandatory for the whole Indian population—only those ambitious individuals seeking employment with the ruling class—Greater Japan required all the islanders, now second-class imperial subjects, to learn the Japanese language, pray at Japanese shrines, and ultimately—if male—be drafted into the Japanese military.
Among the waves of Japanese who flooded into Navidad at the time was a katsuobushi maker from Kochi, across Osaka Bay on the backwater island of Shikoku. A bonito fisherman in his youth, he’d lost three fingers of his right hand to a tangle of rigging, which dry-docked his career. Up to that point he’d caught fish; now he went over to the processing side and mastered the art of curing them. In 1929, hearing that a new bonito-curing plant was to be set up in the Navidads, he left behind a wife and child and made for Namidajima, the “Tearful Islands” as they were then called. Formerly mere ports of call for taking on food and water and bait, these Domestic South Sea islands were now producing great quantities of sugar and katsuobushi, and technical skills like his were in high demand.
Matías Guili believes this Chujiro Miyakura was his father. He’s never told anyone, nor is there any official record of his father being Japanese. Still, the idea is not as farfetched as it might sound. Not that he ever met the man or even heard anything about him from his mother. She herself was from Melchor Island, far away from Gaspar and Baltasár. When her parents died one after the other, the orphan made her way to the capital and found employment at a Japanese-run barbershop. Which is where, her son Matías supposes, she met Miyakura. Supposes, because when Matías was only three, she succumbed to a Japanese tuberculosis epidemic.
His mother’s younger sister took the child back to Melchor and entrusted him to the care of distant relatives, where he received little attention and, after finishing three years of public school, was thrown out on his own. An unruly boy, he headed back alone to Baltasár. There, an aunt found him living hand-to-mouth and gave him a box—keepsakes from his mother, she told him. Cheap Japanese perfume, a few pencil stubs, a dirty handkerchief printed with a Japanese landscape he would later recognize as the Ama-no-Hashidate shoals, a hairclip made of hibiscus wood and shell … and, tossed in among all this, a single dog-eared calling card:
Chujiro Miyakura
Chief Manager
South Seas Fisheries Company Ltd.
Navidad Katsuobushi Division
That’s the size of it. His mother bore him and died unmarried. There were no rumors about this man and his mother; his aunt knew nothing about how her sister came to be with child. Still, Matías found a father in that box. Mere conjecture, embellished on a name card? As far as he was concerned, the card was his father. The figure behind it was up to him to invent. No card can make a woman pregnant, but it can beget a father.
Whatever connection existed between this father and his mother he could only imagine. To that ruling-country male who left behind a wife and children to come to the South Seas, was she merely a local mistress, a “shadow wife” in the parlance of the era? Was there mutual affection? Was it a one-night stand, or worse, a roadside rape in broad daylight? Feelings notwithstanding, it might as well have been rape. At a time when the islands themselves were being ravished, how could there be consenting sexual relations between Japanese men and island women? Or so teaches the ideology of anti-colonialism. Matías tried hard to convince himself of the rape scenario; he felt no sympathy for the man. Only—since a boy needs a father—he had to manufacture one. No need to color in a personality; the more abstract the figure, the better. No need, even, to wonder whether a man who raped a woman would then give her his calling card.
Whatever his reasoning, much later, during the several years he spent in Japan as a student, Matías took off one spring vacation and made a special trip to Kochi to find out about this Chujiro Miyakura. With nothing more than the card and snatches of hearsay to go on, he finally managed to locate the address, but unfortunately Miyakura himself was long gone. After just two years in Navidad he’d returned to Japan at the very end of the war, only to be conscripted despite his disability, and shipped off to his death. All Matías eventually heard from a nephew of his, who received him with cool suspicion, was that Miyakura had been a katsuobushi maker and a bonito fisherman before that. On the long ride back to Tokyo, changing trains countless times, Matías asked himself what in fact he’d learned. That the man really existed. That he indeed did come to Navidad. That he probably was good at his trade, but returned to Japan two years later because he missed his wife and children. That his family had since split up, whereabouts unknown … but was this what he wanted to know?
The truth was, there was only one question he wanted to ask: “Did you rape my mother?” It probably didn’t even matter what the man’s answer would have been. No, it wasn’t like that at all, or I don’t remember the woman, or I never had a single woman the whole time I was on the islands, or Yes, I did take advantage of her, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her—anything to clear up what Miyakura’s name card was doing among his mother’s things. He’d just wanted to sit in that tiny house in that tiny fishing village in Shikoku, and put it straight to the wizened shrimp of an old man before him—“Did you rape my mother?”
Maybe he was so insistent because he badly wanted just to distinguish himself from all the other island boys. He was willing to be the bastard product of rape. He wanted living proof that half his blood came from superior Japanese stock. The chances were his father was just a Navidadian with no name card to leave behind. The boy’s facial features and skin color could cut either way. Whatever the case, his mother died without telling a soul who the father was. That in itself was not uncommon, but the record was never set straight after her death. Even after the boy grew up and became president, no father ever surfaced. Which gave him the unique freedom to choose one for himself.
It also helps explain what made the boy so bent on success in a place where, given the traditional island lifestyle, he’d never go hungry. Even orphans enjoyed some fat of the land. The local standard of living may not have included rice or soy sauce or soap or cans of Geisha-brand mackerel, but any good Catholic would come into Sunday Mass clothes. He’d still be given a patch of earth and allowed to make his own canoe. Still guaranteed a back row seat at ceremonies. That should have satisfied anyone, but no, Matías made up his mind to renounce the land of plenty.
<
br /> The good thing about the South Seas is maybe just a little too good: if you don’t really have to work for your food, why stake your life on rebelling against foreign domination? Not that colonial administrators ever got around to oppressing the islanders into starvation. But if the drive for change is altogether foreign, where did Matías get his social-climbing ambition? That achiever mentality could only have come from a Japanese: a vision channeled into the mind of a Navidad orphan by an imaginary rapist father. And so it was, urged on by Chujiro Miyakura, the boy began his long ascent to the office of president.
What, then, of his mother? Where did she figure in the inner life of the boy Matías? We know she was from Melchor Island, the third distant light in the Navidad trinity. Relations between these islands are a story in itself. Ordinarily, two large island twins might be expected to overpower a third smaller one, but here the isolated, less populated, not especially prosperous Melchor has always held spiritual sway over Baltasár and Gaspar. The other two even sent tribute. Not because of any organized religion or political clout, but the clairvoyance of the Melchor Council of Elders. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Ponape islanders revolted against the Spanish, and Navidad debated whether to take up arms as well, the Melchor Elders advised against using force. Spanish rule, they said, wouldn’t last much longer, and their pronouncement proved correct: Spain lost the Spanish-American War and abandoned its colonies in the Pacific (although other foreigners moved in to take their place). Everyone was mystified. How had the Elders known what historical changes were afoot?
Like a homebound sister who develops visionary powers while her able-bodied brothers go out to farm and fish, Melchor left everyday concerns to Gaspar and Baltasár but would reliably divine the right path in times of serious crisis. Thus, anyone coming from Melchor to the capital was treated with a certain respect and often called upon to solve difficult situations, for it was widely believed that everyone born on Melchor had this sixth sense.
The Navidad Incident Page 6
