Hooper’s War

by Peter Van Buren

  However, once the war started, the best rice went to the soldiers. So most of what we got was sent out brown and to we Japanese, misuborashi, shabby. It was a sacrifice we were required to make to ensure victory.

  I began dreaming in rice. I went to mother saying I was hungry, and she had to turn away. The fish man would open his doors only when fish was available, the bread store when they could get enough flour. Fish in particular was very hard to find, father explained to us, because the boats could no longer be safe from the Americans. Whenever people saw a line forming outside a shop, they joined, even if they had no idea what they were waiting for.

  Buying anything on the black market meant risking a beating from the economic duty police. Still, late at night, men would come in from the farms with an egg or two here, a rib with a little meat on it there, only such tiny amounts that they could still make their quotas when the military procurement teams would descend. My father would often tell us he was going out for a walk, taking with him something of value. That is how mama lost grandma’s kimonos she said she did not want anymore and father said we could not eat anyway. The farmers did not want actual money that could lose its value, my father said. The deals were terrible, gold for near-rancid pork, but trading much for little was seen as part of our obligation to the war effort. It also allowed us to eat.

  The Bi-nijuku, the American B-29s, attacked day and night. None of us could believe there were so many airplanes in the world. So, like many children in Japan, I was sent away by my parents to doinaka, the distant countryside. Father joked I had to move away to make room for the war. It was actually to save us from the Americans, but also for at least a little longer from the Army recruiters, who were banging on doors for younger and younger boys. I lived out in the countryside with people I called Auntie and Uncle, but to be honest, I do not think they were relatives. We all had been educated to bear any burden for Japan. So when children arrived at night from the cities—during the day it was too easy for the Americans to attack our trains—we were taken in. That was the first night I ever slept away from home.

  We ate at a long table, the adults and ten children, strangers and me mixed together. We boys fought over second helpings, and punched and kicked each other under the table before running off. Our meals with Auntie and Uncle were simple, that brown rice mixed with barley and daikon radish, and maybe some of the small frogs we caught in the rice paddies for meat. See, every hog was counted by the government and in birthing season, every piglet. The frogs they could not count, and so we ate a lot of those.

  One morning I woke up to a breeze coming through the window to tickle my bare feet. I wanted it to be Mama, telling me my part of the war was already over and she would take me home.

  WE ALL WORE UNIFORMS to school. Japanese boys had been wearing them, dark blue with brass buttons, and stiff collars we hated to fasten, since our Emperor was restored to the throne in 1868. Everyone in Japan knew that date from history class as we knew our own birthdays. The uniforms, we were taught, were copied from the Prussian style of that time, a reminder of how Japan beat its enemies by using western weapons in a Japanese way. Everyone had his head shaved to the skin, and we were inspected by teacher each day. If your hair was too long, he would trim it to the proper length. There was blood.

  At my school outside of Kyoto, our teacher left to volunteer for the war, so we had a lot of time to play at first. Then this gimpy man showed up as a replacement and we had to go back. He was old, too, so his face looked like a peach pit. When he walked out of the room, we mocked him, dragging our legs and tipping over chairs. We thought he was weak and we were not.

  One day we assembled on the sports playing field and a squadron of real Japanese fighter planes flew low over us—we could even see the pilots waving from their open canopies. Every one of us could identify the different types of aircraft we saw, competing over who could shout out the model number. The ones that day were Mitsubishi A5M’s, Type 96, and I said it first. We also knew the names of the warships pictured in the newspaper articles we collected. The Yamato was my favorite.

  Every day after that, teacher lined us up in the hall, two rows facing each other, and screamed at us to slap the boy across in the face. Then the other row hit back at us. If you did not strike the other boy hard enough, teacher delivered the blow to you. Learn to hit harder than you have been hit, he said. He was surprisingly strong for a gimp. One of the boys once raised his hand back to teacher, and was dealt with severely. Still, I think I saw the gimp smile at what we had learned.

  Our victory at Pearl Harbor was seen almost as the end of the war. How could the Americans ever recover from such a thrashing? The newspapers featured story after story of our successes, from the Philippines to Malaya to Hong Kong, and we boys studied them all. Who could care about arithmetic or old books?

  We had a large map in the classroom, and teacher selected boys with the highest test scores and best martial spirit to paste small Japanese flags on countries as they fell, each victory announced on the radio to the sound of the “Battleship March.” We were told by our teacher that Japan was leading its younger brothers in Asia away from whatever the colonial domination of the West was.

  At some point there were fewer new flags to paste on the map, and some of the more senior boys were pulled away for the Army before graduation. Sirens warning of American bombers replaced the exciting flyovers of our own Japanese planes. We pledged ourselves to the flag each morning. We memorized slogans such as “Deny One’s Self to Serve the Nation.”

  This was all part of our patriotic education. They said we were empty bags that they were filling with Yamato Damashi, the spirit of the original Japan. Ships and airplanes, we were taught, were only symbols. We were the true tools of war. It was an exciting time.

  Real soldiers came to our school and told us how they learned to shoot and showed us their pistols. They explained that our weapons and training were superior, and that we would never be hurt, but if we were, sacrificing ourselves for the nation in this cause was a perfect way to die. They said one day we would have to stop playing. They told us the Americans would come.

  Chapter 28: Old Man Tanaka’s House

  Eichi Nakagawa: Rural Area in Japan, Before the American Invasion

  THE WAR CAME in the form of American planes. They did not bomb us, but the nearest town instead. We did not know what in that town had to be destroyed by planes that came all the way from America. Someone in that town would call the single telephone in our village, owned by the man who was also in charge of our tonarigumi, the civil defense group, to warn us the planes were nearby. He would spend most of his days sitting near the phone, drinking cup after cup of tea. The man would leap up when the phone rang, grab a hand bell, and ring it three times. Women and small children were to put on quilted bonnets with a short cape attached. Those were supposed to help protect against flying embers catching their hair on fire. Men and boys would fill buckets of water to use against a fire. Then we would all run to our shelters.

  The only days everyone rested were the rainy ones, when the Americans did not fly. Uncle tried to cheer us up by saying the American pilots were like picnickers, waiting on nice weather. It was not funny, but I was not worried, even though my friend Kenta became scared of blue skies and would cry in the morning when he woke up without hearing rain. In fact, I thought hiding was stupid. The planes never bothered with us. Why should they, we were barely a speck below them, far away in the countryside.

  Our shelter, under Auntie and Uncle’s house, smelled like wet sweaters. There were all sorts of wooden tea chests down there, stuffed with handfuls of photos: Auntie in a kimono, Uncle fit and sharp in a military uniform with buttons and medals down the front from when he liberated Taiwan. Uncle would tell us to leave those damn photos alone, but Auntie always said, “Oh, let them look, it distracts them.” One time my friend Kenta got a paper cut off one of the pictures, and on a dare we boys all tasted the blood. “To defend the nation,” we sang, �
��Use the blood of Japanese men,” the words from a popular song.

  One late summer evening, after we tired of playing soldier, we set out to catch frogs. The flooded rice paddies in front of Old Man Tanaka’s house were full of frogs. Tanaka would watch us from his window. He smelled funny, like old people do, but he was nice. One time he taught us to make whistles out of small pieces of bamboo.

  It was easy to smack the frogs in the paddy with a stick when they came up to croak and snap at fireflies. Then Ring! Ring! Ring! The bell. The American airplanes were coming. But that night we were having too much fun to run for the shelter. They would always fly over us to bomb somewhere else anyway.

  The frogs went silent.

  My friend Kenta looked up and saw a metal cylinder falling under a small streamer. The cylinder did not appear so big, but when it crashed through Old Man Tanaka’s roof, it shattered the ceramic tiles.

  “Look,” Kenta said. “More.”

  We counted three, four, then seven cylinders coming down. Some landed in the woods and, with a crack, started fires. Another fell behind us. Our shadows danced across the water as we ran. The embers from the house rose upward, chasing away the fireflies that had been over the paddy.

  The planes continued high and away, like they always had. They did not know about Old Man Tanaka.

  His home burned quickly. Men from the village ran toward us with their wooden buckets and hitataki, bamboo poles tipped with cotton cloth, and put water from the paddy on the house. The low clouds that had lit up orange became black again.

  There was a sticky smell. The old man had not gotten out of the house fast enough.

  “Kenta, what do you want? What can help?” I said. He would not stop crying as we watched the flames die out.

  “I do not want to smell this. I want my mother to take me to the toy store when she goes to the market for rice and fish and buy me a toy. I want to see a coin in her hand and hear her say, ‘You choose something and give the man this coin, Kenta.’”

  For a week after Old Man Tanaka died, the cats did not come out from under the storage shed.

  ON MY LAST AFTERNOON with Auntie and Uncle, I went out to try and play again with my friend Kenta, and we saw a frog hop out of the paddy. I brought my stick down as hard as I could on it, just like I had done before. But then I picked the already dead frog up, threw it on the ground, and hit it again and again until it burst open and its pink insides spilled. I pounded, over and over, until my arms were tired and the frog was a part of the dirt.

  I didn’t understand what was happening to me because of the war. How could I feel powerful and powerless at the same time? I was just a child, and wars were fought by adults, after all.

  Chapter 29: The First Day

  Former Lieutenant Nathaniel Hooper: Retirement Home, Kailua, Hawaii, 2017

  I WAS BORN AND had always lived in a small town called Reeve, Ohio, spending my childhood outside and wrapped in dirt. I’d worn glasses since I was 10, and ended up losing a pair a year if I didn’t break them first. Like nearly everyone in America, when I first heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor, I had to look at a map to double-check where it was. Hawaii wasn’t even a state then. The war at first looked to affect us in Reeve like one of our Ohio summer storms, something coming from far away, grumbly and dark, but it might blow over.

  I was 14-years-old in December 1941, sitting in an overheated classroom hearing about Sherman’s Burning of Atlanta and Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, asking my equally bored teacher numbing questions about why we had to learn this stuff. Every minute dragged like a week’s worth of Mondays.

  Soon enough, though, some of the older kids started getting called up, then the juniors at the high school thinned out, then some teachers left for the service and most of the seniors graduated straight into uniform. Soon we couldn’t get enough boys together to field a baseball team, and Reeve became a town of old men and kids trying to grow up fast. Then a few soldiers started to come home, not all alive and not all whole. Watch out for the Jared boy, Mom would say, especially after he’d been drinking.

  As it looked like the time was coming for me to sign up, I had my own prewar goal to resolve, to go into the service a non-virgin. I refused to surrender to the belief that sex was merely enemy propaganda set loose to frustrate already frustrated boys like me, but I lost every skirmish in that war. The closest I came was one girl who was soft as a sweater. I liked how it felt foraging inside her mouth, tasting Spearmint gum, but for all the advances, there was no victory. I sent her a postcard from training at Fort Polk. Never heard back.

  THE WORLD WE LIVED in then, we accepted it all. You could call it patriotism, or faith, or you could call it naiveté, but in the end you could call it whatever you wanted and it didn’t matter. We’d been attacked at Pearl Harbor by an enemy that was beheading prisoners and was ruthless in serving their dictator emperor. They were out to wreck our way of life.

  Nobody asked any questions about whether the war was right, because we were told it was. Though there was a draft, more than a third of the servicemen, like me, were volunteers. America was in trouble and we needed to help. We had been taught from a young age to stand our ground, and the time had come. It never occurred to us there’d be other wars, and dark men and women who’d waste our lives there.

  We accepted that once our war started we would not just defeat the enemy. Nope, the war was to destroy them, to kill them all. We would crush their whole religion of Emperor worship and militarism. We were, in a literal sense, at war with the idea of them. We were a country that could accomplish anything, and that was what we were going to do with that power and our self-proclaimed authority to use it as we saw fit.

  Reeve was all small-town life, neither misspent nor well-spent. Most days were as exciting as the grocery checkout line. We got along not because we liked each other so much, but because like people on a crowded bus we made adjustments to all fit in. It was easier in Reeve to learn the score of a baseball game than to buy a book. I found that out after I knew I was headed to the Army for sure and had to wait to buy one until I changed buses in Columbus on the way to basic. I ran into the big Lazarus department store outside the terminal and bought the thickest book on war with the smallest print they had. But it turned out there was nothing in it about Japan, and it ended up filling more of my suitcase than my head.

  In Reeve you left the house in the morning always knowing you’d be back in time to wash up for supper. Everybody had a dumb dog; they’d been all together long enough that the brains had been bred out of them. I thought late August corn tasted that sweet everywhere. The last time I’d fought anyone was in 7th grade, a bully named Dougie Dietz, when I got a bloody nose, my ass kicked, and another pair of broken glasses.

  It was a quiet day that I left home for the Army. A song I liked was playing on the radio. The morning felt as cool and sweet as a sip of lemonade. Rain was falling softly. If there was thunder, it was still far away.

  Sometimes there are happy endings. Funny what you remember.

  Afterwords

  Fiction and Non-Fiction

  NO ONE KNEW IF the atomic bomb would work.

  The first full-on test was in July 1945, detonated on a static tower. Scientists were pretty sure the Bomb would work again, when air dropped, but weren’t sure at what height the explosion would cause real damage to an entire city, as was desired. The effects of radiation, particularly how long it would take before people began to die from it under real-world conditions, were little understood. So even if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally destroyed, there was no assurance that the Japanese would surrender. Hence, planning for a land invasion of Japan continued up until the very surrender itself. Voluminous documentation exists for both sides on how that invasion and defense would have been carried out. You can read the original American plans, and some of the Japanese, at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

  The scenes Lieutenant Hooper witnesses inside Kyoto
after the fictional firebombing of the city are based largely on eyewitness accounts of the attacks on Coventry, Dresden and Tokyo, as well as from the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hooper’s observation that survivors in Kyoto earned a few coins posing for photos with G.I.s actually took place, albeit in the ruins of Hiroshima. MacArthur outlawed the practice, in part because the effects of the atomic bomb were considered classified. Most photos and films of the atomic survivors were kept from the American public for “morale” reasons. It was not until many years later that Americans learned what had been done in their names.

  Lieutenant Hooper in this book commands what was known then as a bastard unit. A typical World War II U.S. Army platoon consisted of up to 44 men, led by a lieutenant with a senior non-commissioned officer like Sergeant Laabs as second in command. That platoon would have been made up of two to four squads of about ten soldiers each. However, given wartime exigencies, incomplete units were thrown together, and that is what Lieutenant Hooper found himself taking into battle.

  The soldiers in this story are young. When the American side of the war broke out in December 1941, the draft age was 21. It was quickly lowered to 18. Legally, one could enter the service voluntarily at 17-years-old, but in many cases the rule of thumb was someone who wanted to volunteer was as old as they claimed to be. In Japan, boys as young as 15 were conscripted.

  The occasional mixing of war slang and terminology in this book (“hearts and minds” is a Vietnam-era term, for example) is to connect Lieutenant Hooper’s experiences to the ones American soldiers encountered in later wars.

  The use of firebombing against Japan had been set down in “War Plan Orange,” written long before Pearl Harbor. As far back as the 1920s, U.S. General Billy Mitchell had said Japan’s paper and wood cities would be “the greatest aerial targets the world had ever seen.” Following the outline in War Plan Orange, the efforts during WWII in Japan were lead by the 20th Army Air Force, and its commander, Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay. LeMay expressed his goal as “Japan will eventually be a nation without cities, a nomadic people.”