The Navidad Incident

by Natsuki Ikezawa

  No, it can’t be, he thinks, taking a closer look. It’s not a portrait but an archetypal woman’s face, chased of all extraneous detail save the essential femininity, with the result that the two faces give the same impression. That’s the only explanation. And yet, this Améliana sat looking straight at the likeness the whole time and didn’t bat an eye. Matías is mystified. Who painted this picture? Who hung it here?

  Late in 1947, Matías made up his mind to go to Japan and wrote Lieutenant Ryuzoji a letter. Word had blown in that the defeated Empire was in total chaos, but however unrealistic his hopes, he badly wanted to believe that he could make his way in that big country. There was every reason to hesitate. Wasn’t life good here in these islands? It never even occurred to the locals to leave. In other islands in the Pacific, he’d heard, it was customary for those who came of age to leave their homeland at least once in their lives, but the Navidadians stayed put where they were born, raised, bore children, grew old, and died. Even at the very tail end of the war, when the Empire of Greater Japan urged all her subjects to rally to the cause, next to no one left of his own free will. It wasn’t that they lacked courage or felt disloyalty to that distant imperial reign, they simply couldn’t get their head around the idea of leaving the islands. The Japanese could round up any number of voluntary laborers to construct an airfield there, but recruitment campaigns for active service overseas foundered miserably.

  Three years after the imperial forces were routed, however, Matías got the bug. Being an orphan at the bottom of the pecking order among his late mother’s relations back on Melchor Island and with no other means of support, the prospects were slim. Even his above-average intelligence and popularity with other kids his age counted for little in traditional clan society. No, he’d have to make his way to Japan and build himself a life there. So remembering Lieutenant Ryuzoji’s parting promise, he drafted a letter saying he was determined to come. For all its faults and childish wording, it was a moving letter. Ryuzoji’s reply arrived seven months later, when Matías had all but forgotten about it. Ryuzoji wrote that his new postwar career was on a stable footing with enough financial leeway for him to guarantee Matías an education. He’d take care of the necessary procedures for him to make the trip. An elated Matías accepted the invitation and didn’t look back. He was twenty years old at the time.

  In those days, of course, there were no flights between the South Pacific and Japan. There were hardly even any regular ships either, just the occasional lone freighter carrying consumer goods to and from Osaka. Ryuzoji instructed him to sign on as a merchant sailor, enclosing a letter to present to the captain when the next ship anchored at Baltasár City. What’s more, tucked inside that thick envelope was all manner of documentation for when they docked in Osaka: detailed directions, a map of the city, even an application form—complete with address and message—for the telegram he was to send from Osaka Station. The funds for the telegram, his train ticket, and meals en route were double-sealed in yet another envelope. Matías could scarcely believe the money reached him unscathed, but he had to admit, Ryuzoji saw to everything. When he thinks back on it many years and numerous benefactors later, Ryuzoji emerges as the first and brightest beacon of goodwill at a major turning point in his life.

  Eventually the ship arrived in port, and a timid Matías sought out the captain with letter of introduction in hand. Half unsure just how far he could trust Ryuzoji’s word, he found the outcome more than satisfactory. He was quickly shown on board to see the captain, a stalwart soul who’d sailed to Navidad repeatedly during the war, and right then and there he was taken on as a single-passage crew member and given a seaman’s passbook already inscribed with his own name, which had been waiting in readiness in the ship’s safe. The young man was literally floored. How meticulous could these preparations be? Matías ran to tell the good news to the owner of the flophouse where he was staying, gathered up his things, and hurried back to the docks.

  All he remembers of his time on board was that the other crew members generally made a fuss over this short, dark-skinned, hardworking island lad. His job consisted entirely of cleaning. He quickly learned what it meant to run a “tight ship.” For a small vessel, there was plenty to do: swab the decks, tidy the officers’ cabins, mop the mess, brush down the hull, and as if that weren’t enough, don goggles and chip off the clots of rust that encroached on any exposed metal surface. Not bad work, he thought, sitting out on the deck in the hot sun from morning to night, banging away with a hammer. He can still hear the happy rhythms he’d pound out but can’t recall a single face among his fellow crewmen on that twenty-day voyage, nor even that of the kindly captain—proof positive that his memory is selective.

  The ship sailed within sight of the mountains of Kyushu and Shikoku, then negotiated the Kii-Awaji Strait, finally docking at the Port of Osaka. He was unaware at the time just how much clout Ryuzoji must have had to muster in order to arrange this highly irregular means of getting him to Japan as a one-way seaman. He merely breezed on board, then breezed off, thinking that’s just how things went. He even received a little pay to boot. The port where he disembarked didn’t tell him much about the size of the country; ports everywhere large and small look pretty much alike. But when he caught a train together with a seaman on home leave named Shimizu, he had a hard time suppressing his backwater astonishment that such a big machine could move at such speeds. His first-ever train ride—a rush of nervous excitement and exhaustion that ultimately deposited him at Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, where he was met by Ryuzoji. His elation at that moment has long since crowded out any recollection of the days that followed. (Selective memory again?)

  Ryuzoji was hitting a peak just then. Amid the returning demobilized troops who hustled left and right, he’d been quick to read the pulse of the times. He had the knack for building connections through moving material goods; he was sharp enough to see postwar Japan before the war ended. It would take years for young Matías to even begin to understand the cogs that turned the man’s world around them. But of course, that was just one small part of piecing together the big picture of Japan, an engrossing intellectual adventure.

  Ryuzoji, as it turned out, was now in the brokering business; scooping up things with the right hand, passing them on with the left, and mostly odd unrelated flotsam at that. Many of the items were black market. Defeat not only broke the forges of production, it disrupted intangible avenues of trade. Many items just never got to where they were supposed to go, and any middle man who found takers for all the merchandise afloat could name his price. In Ryuzoji’s case, while he himself gained some pull in the currents of resurgent nationalism, a loyal network of contacts among former soldiers and imperial ideologues provided information on goods. From Matías’s perspective, Ryuzoji’s sphere of enterprise was an extremely advantageous perch from which to observe what moved the vast mechanisms of Japan. Here he learned the principle that it was not the capitalist out in front, nor the manufacturer nor the consumer, but the man in the middle who decided everything; goods or ideas, the important thing was to position yourself midstream in the flow of things.

  Fresh-off-the-boat Matías was given work as a warehouse guard for Ryuzoji’s company Shinheiwa Kogyo—the auspiciously named “New Peace Industries.” It was a live-in job, thereby solving both his employment and housing problems in one go. Ryuzoji roped in a country cousin’s third son, and together during the day shift he and Matías managed incoming stock and handed over ticketed goods to customers who came with large carts or three-wheeled cycles or trucks. In the meantime, they just had to hold the fort and patrol two times a night. To Ryuzoji’s credit, he sent this underemployed pair to school, though not both at the same time, of course, as that would have left the warehouse unguarded. The other lad, Ken’ichi, attended regular daytime high school classes, while Matías boned up for night school. With a trumped-up rural middle school diploma that was dubious at best and his entrance exa
m scores that were as bad as could be expected after only two months’ cramming, he still made the grade, thanks again no doubt to Ryuzoji’s political clout. In the end, however, he proved himself to be an earnest student capable of very good marks. Warehouse guard duty afforded time for his studies, and Ken’ichi rose to the head of his class, making him the best possible tutor. Ryuzoji, presumably, was pleased at having paired them up.

  After four years, Matías graduated with decent marks for a foreigner. During those years Shinheiwa grew by leaps and bounds. The postwar enterprise of shuffling about secret caches of local goods leveled off, and business moved on to aid supplies from America, especially with the start of the Korean conflict. During his last year of school, so many goods poured in they sometimes couldn’t finish storing them all during daylight hours and had to continue working late into the night, forcing him to forego classes. Anyway, the future looked bright for the company when the newly graduated Matías became a full employee. He still lived in the dorm room above the warehouse, but meanwhile the warehouse underwent renovations and the wood-frame structure was expanded into a sturdy block-and-mortar building.

  One evening in mid-March, Ryuzoji summoned Matías to his home, a large house he’d bought just fifteen minutes’ walk away. Before the war, this showpiece of “modern living” had been the residence of a pharmaceutical executive and had luckily somehow survived the firebombing of Tokyo. Here Ryuzoji lived with his wife, whom he’d married three years before; already they had two children. Matías was invited into the parlor, where his host stood sipping imported whiskey, a samurai sword mounted on the wall behind him, looking rather incongruous with the faux-Western decor. What Ryuzoji had to say was this: Matías should study a little longer in Japan, then return to Navidad.

  “I believe you know this from all you’ve seen, but for the time being Japan has to look after itself. Any talk of forming a Great Alliance like before is still a long way off. In other words, until then, this country can’t afford to take in people like you as foreign-born Japanese subjects and must treat you as foreigners. Do what you might, there’s little prospect of your rising to the top here in Japan. From the very beginning, not even I thought I could make a Japanese of you. That’s not why I brought you here. No, it’s always been my intention to send you back home once you finished your studies so you could be of service to your own country. Navidad will see changes, but there’s no future in letting your know-nothing clan elders decide things on a whim, or allowing a bunch of young upstarts to run the show just like Uncle Sam tells them to. Son, I want you to become a politician. One of these days I’m going to stand for elections myself. It’s not my turn yet; they still call my brand of thinking ‘backwards,’ a ‘throwback.’ But mark my words, there will come a day when people will realize that they must be true to their Japanese spirit. My ear-to-the-ground says it won’t be so very long. So you go back to your country and become a person everyone respects, someone who can run the islands. The place has gone American. It’s supposed to be a democracy, right? So there ought to be more room for a young person like you to get into some decision-making position. Scratch the surface of American democracy and you’ll find plenty of iffy notions—lies—but up front it offers opportunities for even youngsters to succeed. Equal opportunity is not a bad thing. What’s more, you’ll be fresh back from Japan. Of course, I know there are those who’ll say that since you fought on our side, you lost with our side too, but there should still be some mature people around who understand the Japanese spirit. After all, we turned back the white powers as far as we did; we said what we had to say with blood and steel. That kind of spirit is something your islanders can understand. So pack on home with Japanese spirit in your heart and Japanese connections in hand, and your island folk are sure to respond in kind.”

  Ryuzoji was happily intoxicated. Matías listened in silent doubt. Did he really have the political animal in him? Someone so awkward, so outcast, so short, so fed up with Navidad society, could he really stand up and speak in front of a crowd? Inspire confidence and decide important matters? Negotiate with foreign countries? Build up a political machine? Matías knew very well where Ryuzoji was heading, though the more he understood, the less it seemed to have anything to do with him. On the other hand, he also appreciated Ryuzoji’s generosity in bringing him here to study. And if becoming a politician was what it would take to repay him, well then he’d give it his best shot. Or so he vowed, until he tried to picture the island elders even pretending to listen to him. Matías the politician may have been Ryuzoji’s dream, but to Matías himself it was more like a hallucination.

  It was another four years before he actually returned to Navidad. He left the room above the warehouse, rented a room elsewhere (board included), and began to commute to work. Shinheiwa Kogyo engaged in a little export business by this stage, and Matías was out in that department. He also went to night school to improve his English, and learned to write standard form letters. Meanwhile, Ryuzoji took him places: to business negotiations, to quasi-political gatherings, to a whole range of functions. Everyone recognized Ryuzoji right away by his young briefcase-toting assistant, the short one with the dark skin, though few would ever have thought this was his protégé. To be honest, Matías understood very little of what went on. Who were these people? What was being discussed here? Ryuzoji generally just dragged him along with no explanation before or after. Whether exchanging tip-offs on where surplus goods were to be had, or brainstorming about raising funds for Representative So-and-so, or exploring ways and means to end a dispute, the sessions remained a mystery to him. What Matías ostensibly gained from sitting in on them was the realization that person-to-person connections made the world go round. Men like Ryuzoji had absolutely nothing to do with creating anything. From the word go, things existed as goods to be bought and sold—sugar, bananas, ships, yams, gasoline—goods in all shapes and sizes moving in one direction, money moving in the opposite direction. Anyone in the middle stood to make a profit, which of course he’d then have to share out properly or it would cause squabbles later on. It also struck young Matías that politics must work the same way: the broker who could arbitrate a peaceable accord between those in the middle of the road and those off to the side could shore up his own power base in the process. Something to remember.

  One more thing, during this time Matías learned about women. Up until then, he’d lived quite uninvolved and unconcerned. He never played with girls when he was a boy in Navidad, never had time once he came to Japan and started working. Japanese schools had yet to go coeducational, and even after becoming a Shinheiwa employee he never went out drinking, knew nothing of gambling; he was a mama’s boy without a mama. It took his new landlady to make a man out of him.

  This frumpy, plain-at-best Tsuneko was a war widow. She looked close to forty, though her real age was just a little over thirty, and while she could expect no suitors, she seemed to enjoy her solitary freedom, supporting herself by partitioning her eight-tatami-mat living room to take in three young lodgers, for whom she provided breakfast only. Matías rented the makeshift two-and-a-half-mat “room” in the middle with flimsy plywood “walls.” Hurriedly married just before the end of the war, Tsuneko’s husband was sent off to the front in the South Pacific soon afterwards and never returned. That was the end of the story, but she never complained. She hardly talked much anyway, not even to her three boarders. It just so happened that one of Tsuneko’s distant relations worked for Shinheiwa, and he sent Matías along to her, guaranteeing him to be “of good character—for a foreigner.”

  For all of a year, Matías was only a lodger, and Tsuneko would just serve him breakfast without comment. But then, her two Japanese lodgers moved out one after the other, and no new faces came to fill the vacancies. There was a virus going around at the time, and Matías stayed home sick with a fever. Tsuneko nursed him back to health, coming to his bedside with ice packs, even wiping his sweaty body. Matías had hea
rd the other two lodgers call him “jungle boy” behind his back, so while he did sense a certain reserve on her part, he was pleasantly surprised at her kindness. And one evening when he’d almost fully recovered, Tsuneko came to him in bed. At first, Matías didn’t know what was going on; the storm of sensations caught him totally by surprise. So this is what everyone’s always talking about, he wondered vaguely through the haze of exhaustion.

  “A cute guy like you must be popular with the girls,” she told him in the middle of the night, as they both lay there looking up at the ceiling. He was astonished. It had never even occurred to him that he might be considered “cute,” although come to think of it, people generally did treat him rather nicely for a “jungle boy.” Not that he had a whiff of sex appeal by conventional standards. Yet there was something about this short, foreign-born youth that made everyone only too glad to look after him. The intimacy with Tsuneko became a steady thing. He was both a toy-boy lover to her and a young innocent who needed mothering, a partner with whom to share daily conversations about the weather, snippets of good news, odd topics around town. She decided not to take in any other lodgers, and entitled him to evening meals as well. The sex was fun, but it wasn’t everything. This homely woman took such pleasure in watching him eat that soon she was happily scrubbing his back at home instead of sending him out to the public bathhouse. Matías had to admit it was a good life. One reason he became forever fond of Japanese baths was surely that bathing at Tsuneko’s house was such a treat.

  On the job, Matías gained a working knowledge of trade; from Ryuzoji he learned more abstract lessons in political maneuvering; and Tsuneko’s gift to him, the ease of knowing what it was to be loved. None of these things could have conceivably prefigured his later thirst for power, yet Ryuzoji’s neo-nationalist thinking may have to some extent colored the future president’s views, if not given him an edge on the all-important métier of managing personalities. This same Ryuzoji later went back to his hometown in Kyushu and was elected four times to the local prefectural assembly before serving three terms as a rank-and-file legislator in the Japanese National Diet.