In the morning, he wanted to go out to the Pacific. Susie said, “Go ahead. I just don’t feel like it.” She looked at him in a way that would have been sidelong except, in a fashion he couldn’t quite define, it wasn’t. “I don’t much feel like anything else today, either,” she added, just in case he hadn’t got the point.
But he had. He was no dummy, not where people were concerned. “See you later,” he said, and hurried out the door. He trotted down toward Waikiki Beach like a man going toward his beloved. He got his surfboard from the Outrigger Club and was heading across the soft sand of the beach to the sea when somebody behind him let out a yell.
He stopped. There was Charlie Kaapu, also with his surfboard under his arm. “You can’t stand the Japs, either, hey?” Charlie said.
“That’s . . . part of it,” Oscar answered. “Come on—let’s go.”
They entered the water side by side. Setting his skill against the surf, Oscar didn’t have to think about the Japs or anything else. If he had done any thinking, he surely would have taken a tumble. If you were anything but a creature of reflex and reaction on the waves, you were in trouble.
When he and Charlie came up onto the beach after one long, smooth ride, he saw a pair of Japanese officers watching. Well, would I teach a Jap to surf-ride? he wondered. He didn’t want to think about that, either, and plunged into the Pacific again. But the Japanese officers were still there when he got back. So were the rest of his troubles, of course. He knew they wouldn’t disappear no matter how he ran. Knowing didn’t stop him from running.
After a while, he’d had enough. He walked up the beach to the Outrigger Club. He passed within about ten feet of the two Japs. He wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. But they both bowed to him. He’d heard things about how touchy Japs were, so he figured he’d better nod back. That seemed to satisfy them. He’d never been sorry to get a salute for what he did on a surfboard, but he was now.
The apartment was empty when he walked in. A note lay on the bed. He picked it up. Good luck, Susie had written. It isn’t fun any more. Nothing is much fun any more. He stared down at that, then slowly nodded. It wasn’t as if she were wrong.
Then he checked the place. She hadn’t cleaned him out. Maybe that meant that, in her own way, she had style. Maybe it just meant he didn’t own anything she thought worth stealing. He went back and looked at the note again. “Good luck, Susie,” he said.
JIRO TAKAHASHI CLIMBED out of the tent where he and his sons were living. They were lucky to have even a tent. Their apartment building was a burnt-out wreck. No one had found any trace of his wife. Officially, Reiko was listed as missing. Jiro clung to that. He knew what it meant, knew what it almost had to mean. The less he had to think about that, though, the better.
Escaping the tent felt good. If he stayed in there, he’d just quarrel with Hiroshi and Kenzo again. They blamed Japan for the bombs that had left them without a home and their mother missing or worse. He blamed the Americans for not surrendering once things were hopeless. He also scorned them for surrendering at all. He didn’t even notice the inconsistency.
Before the tent city sprang up, this had been a botanical garden. A lot of the trees here had come down for the sake of firewood. At first, the haole in charge of the place had fussed about that, but people had to cook food and heat water. What were they supposed to do, go without fire?
“Ha! Takahashi!” There was old man Okamoto. He’d lost his house in the bombing, too. “You going to watch the parade?”
“I don’t know,” Jiro answered. “It’s hard to care about anything any more, you know what I mean?”
“Life is all confused,” Okamoto said.
“Hai. Honto,” Jiro agreed. Confused he was. When the fighting started, he’d wanted Japan to teach the United States a lesson. Haoles had the arrogance to treat Japanese like inferiors. They deserved a comeuppance.
And they’d got it. Oahu belonged to the Empire of Japan. All the Hawaiian islands did. But Jiro had never imagined victory would come at such a high price to him. He’d never imagined the war would come home to civilians at all. When you thought of war, you thought of soldiers shooting at soldiers, of airplanes shooting down airplanes, of ships sinking ships. You didn’t think of bombs and shells landing on your city, on your home. You didn’t think any of your loved ones would go missing, which was only a politer way of saying get killed.
You didn’t think about that, but you were only a civilian, so what did you know? The officers in the fancy uniforms figured that war involved making your life miserable. They were the ones who gave orders to the soldiers and the airplanes and the ships. What they said went. And if you happened to get in the way . . . well, too bad for you.
“Come on,” old man Okamoto said. “I mean, what else have we got to do?”
Takahashi had no answer for that. He could stay here and brood. Or he could stay here and quarrel with his sons, which was a loud, external kind of brooding over whose officers in fancy uniforms were to blame for the way things were in Honolulu.
“All right,” Jiro said, his mouth making up its mind before his brain did. “Let’s go.”
To get to King Street, down which the parade would run, they had to walk down Nuuanu Avenue through the bombed-out part of town. Scavengers picked through the ruins for whatever they could salvage. Jiro walked on, his face hard and set as a stone. He would not think of Reiko lying there lost in the wreckage. He would not think that her body added to the stench of death still lingering here.
He would not—but he did.
King Street wasn’t too badly damaged. Here and there, buildings had broken windows, or perhaps plywood where windows had been. Takahashi didn’t see any craters in the street itself. Rising Sun flags fluttered from lamp poles. Okamoto pointed to one of them and said, “The Japanese consulate had people putting those up yesterday.”
“Really?” Jiro said. “I know the consul a little. I’ve sold Kita-san tuna fairly often—whenever I had some that was particularly good. And Morimura, the chancellor at the consulate, knows a good piece of fish, too.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Okamoto said. “Morimura drives all over the place. Did you ever notice? I wonder how much spying he did for Japan.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Jiro said. “I was out on the ocean. I only paid attention to him when I had fish I thought he might like.”
“Well, he did. He bought gas from me plenty of times,” Okamoto said. “And Oahu’s not a big island. You can do a lot of driving here without using much gas. So if you’re filling up twice a week, or even three times, you’re doing a lot of driving.”
Before Takahashi could answer, a Japanese boy who couldn’t have been more than six handed him a small Japanese flag on a stick. “Here, mister,” the boy said in English. He gave Okamoto a flag, too, and then went on up the sidewalk passing them out.
Following the kid with his eyes, Jiro took in the other people who’d come to watch the Imperial Japanese Army’s victory parade. Almost all of them, unsurprisingly, were Japanese themselves. Most of them were of his generation, the generation that had been born in Japan. A few men and women in their twenties and thirties accompanied them, but only a few.
“Here they come!” People pointed west. Jiro craned his neck to see better. He’d watched U.S. military parades often enough, so he had some idea what to expect. This one didn’t seem too different, not at first. Standard-bearers carrying Japanese flags led the procession. Half a dozen tanks followed them.
The tanks were both more and less impressive than Jiro had expected. They weren’t very big. But they’d plainly seen combat. They were splashed with mud and other stains. Their yellow-green paint was chipped and scarred by American bullets. Still, the bullets hadn’t penetrated their armor. The tanks were here. They’d won.
Here and there, someone would clap or shout out, “Banzai!” Most of the crowd stayed quiet, though. That made Jiro notice the absence of a marching band. He’d ne
ver paid much attention to the ones in American parades. Now, to his surprise, he found himself missing them.
Japanese officers stood in open cars and waved to the crowd. Unlike the tanks, the cars hadn’t come from Japan. They were convertibles with Hawaii license plates. That didn’t bother Takahashi too much. If you won, you captured what you needed. Japan had won.
Behind the tanks and the officers came regiment after regiment of Japanese soldiers. More “Banzai!”s and applause rang out for them. They marched proudly, eyes straight ahead, faces expressionless, bayoneted rifles on their shoulders.
“They look brave. They look tough,” Jiro said to old man Okamoto. The other Japanese nodded.
And then sudden silence slammed down on the crowd. After the neat ranks of imperial soldiers, and plainly included as a contrast, shambled a swarm of American prisoners. The U.S. Army men went up the street in no particular order. They were skinny. They were dirty. They were unshaven. Their uniforms were torn and filthy. Most of them trudged along with their heads down, as if they didn’t want to meet the eyes of the people staring at them.
For as long as anyone but the oldest residents could remember, Americans had ruled the roost and called the shots in Hawaii. The sight of those prisoners—and the smell of them, for they hadn’t bathed any time lately, which became only too clear as they went by—said one era had passed here and another was beginning. The handful of Japanese guards who herded the Americans along seemed a different and superior species.
Still more Japanese soldiers followed the prisoners. “Not bad,” Okamoto said. “Funny watching all those haoles go by like so many sheep.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Jiro answered. “They didn’t let Japanese join their divisions here. Now they’re paying the price.”
“That’s the truth.” But Okamoto lowered his voice and added, “We’re all paying the price now. It’s going to be a hungry time.”
Takahashi nodded. “I’ve got to get that Doi fellow to put a mast on my sampan. That’s not going to wait any more. If I can catch fish, I won’t starve.” Soup kitchens fed the refugees in the botanical garden. There wasn’t enough to go around, and what there was wasn’t very good.
“Bound to be a good idea for you. Nobody knows where fuel’s going to come from now,” Okamoto said. He nudged Jiro. “Nobody will know what you eat that you don’t bring in, either. You’re lucky.”
“Some luck,” Jiro said. No home, his wife missing and probably dead . . .
No matter what he thought, old man Okamoto nodded this time. “Yes, lucky. Your children are alive, and fishermen don’t starve any more than cooks do.”
“I won’t be a fisherman any more if Doi can’t rig the sampan.” As always, saying that frightened Jiro. He’d been a fisherman as long as he could remember. His father had started taking him out on the Inland Sea when he was a very little boy. If he couldn’t be a fisherman, what could he be? Anything at all?
Okamoto shrugged. “He’ll manage. He’d better manage. If we don’t get boats out there, nobody eats.”
Jiro grunted. That was too likely to be true. As stocks of everything got shorter, prices went on soaring. But if Okamoto or anybody else thought the sampan fleet could feed Oahu by itself . . . Jiro knew what a dream that was. There weren’t enough sampans. There probably weren’t enough fish, either. And the sampans wouldn’t be able to go out nearly so far with sails as they could with their diesels. Or if they did go out as far, they wouldn’t be able to do it so often.
“Japan can’t want us to starve,” Jiro said.
Another shrug from Okamoto. “Why should she care? As long as she’s got soldiers and airplanes here, what difference do we make? We’re just a nuisance.”
Shaking his head, Jiro said, “That can’t be so. You and I, we’re Japanese, too.” Old man Okamoto only shrugged again.
AT OHIO STATE, Jane Armitage had read Candide. The advice the naive hero had got could be boiled down to one phrase: tend your garden. While Jane was in college, she’d never understood what important advice it could be. She did now. Now she had a garden of her own.
Her little plot of turnips and potatoes had sprouted. With luck, they would grow fast. She eyed the turnip greens. The only people she’d ever heard of who ate such things were niggers. She shrugged. If you got hungry enough, you’d eat almost anything.
A mynah bird fluttered down and landed in her plot. It pecked at something: a bug. “Good for you,” Jane said. “Eat lots of bugs. Get fat.” Were mynahs good to eat? She wouldn’t have been surprised if, somewhere on the island, some people were already finding out.
And then there were zebra doves. The blue-faced birds were so tame, you could grab them with your bare hands. They made pigeons seem smart by comparison. They weren’t very big, but they were meat. And they were all over the place. They ate anything that wasn’t nailed down. She’d shooed them out of the plot more times than she could count. If she didn’t shoo them . . . If she grabbed them or netted them . . .
Could I wring their necks? Could I pluck them and gut them? She wasn’t a farm girl. She’d never dealt with chickens or hogs or anything like that. She suspected that gutting a zebra dove might make her lose her lunch. But if she had no lunch to lose, if she was empty in there . . . And after she’d done it a few times, wouldn’t she get used to it?
Something brown and low to the ground skittered toward the mynah bird, which fluttered away. The mongoose reared up in almost palpable frustration. Jane didn’t worry about him. He didn’t care about turnips or potatoes or any of the other crops different people were growing. He might assassinate some zebra doves, but that was as far as he went toward being a pest.
Jane wished he would have gone as far as assassinating rats. That was why people had brought mongooses here in the first place. But the mongooses preferred eating birds that were out and about during the day, as they were. Rats came out at night. Traps didn’t do much to discourage them. Jane had known about rats back in Columbus. Nothing did much to discourage them.
A Japanese soldier tramped by. Jane bent and dug out a weed with her trowel. She didn’t want the Jap paying any special attention to her, either because he thought she was lazy or because he liked her looks. Bad things could happen both ways.
He kept going. She breathed a silent sigh of relief. Some of the local Japanese women had got friendly, or more than friendly, with the new occupiers. And, to Jane’s shame, so had a few of the local white women. If you can’t join ’em, lick ’em, she thought scornfully. The heat that rose to her cheeks after that had nothing to do with the warm sun in the sky. That was the sort of thing Fletch would have said.
As she got rid of another weed, she wondered how Fletch was doing. However much she wanted not to, she couldn’t help herself. They’d been together most of her adult life, and apart for not very long. She was used to worrying about what was going on with him. She didn’t want him dead, just out of her life. She’d got that. For all she knew, he was dead, whether she wanted him that way or not.
A shadow made her look up. There stood Yosh Nakayama, watching her. Major Hirabayashi’s local go-between nodded. “You do well,” he said in his slow, careful English. “Plot looks good.”
“Thanks,” Jane said. She didn’t want to collaborate with the Japs and their quislings, but she didn’t want to get them angry at her, either. Very bad things happened if the Japs got mad at you.
“Hope everything grows fast,” Nakayama said. “Hope food we have lasts till it does.”
“Aren’t the Japanese”—Jane was careful not to say Japs to a Jap—“ bringing in supplies?”
“For their own men, yes. For anybody else . . .” Nakayama shrugged. “They don’t have a lot of ships to spare.” By the way he said it, that was liable to be an understatement.
“What do we do if . . . if things run out?”
The Hawaiian Japanese man shrugged again. “Eat sugarcane. Eat pineapple. Eat whatever birds and fruit we can. Then we start to
starve.” He didn’t wait for any more questions. With a curt nod, he walked away to inspect the work of some other involuntary gardener.
Jane eyed the zebra doves even more thoughtfully than she had before.
She worked till almost sundown. Her hands had blistered at first. Now they were starting to callus. Her nails were short, and had dirt under them. Her face was sunburned, her hair a sweaty mess. She didn’t worry as much about that as she’d thought she would. All her neighbors were in the same boat. And if that boat happened to be the Titanic . . . She shoved the thought aside.
She still had running water in her apartment. She didn’t have hot water, though, and she couldn’t even make any on the stove. Like the water heater, the stove ran on natural gas. There was no more natural gas for them to run on. A cold shower in January would have been an invitation to double pneumonia—to say nothing of frostbite—in Columbus. Here in Wahiawa, it was refreshing, as long as she didn’t linger under the water too long.
No more shampoo, either. Jane did still have a couple of bars of Ivory left after the one she was using. What she would do once the last suds gurgled down the drain, she didn’t know. Her mouth twisted as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror. Figuring out what she’d do then wasn’t very hard. One of her pupils could have done it with no trouble at all. She’d be filthy and she’d stink, that was what.
Other such worries were cropping up, too. She was almost out of Kotex pads. Like everything else, those came, or had come, from the mainland. What would she use without them? Rags, she supposed. What else was there? Her mouth twisted again, harder this time.
She put on a sun dress to go to the communal supper. It was fairly clean: she didn’t do farm work in it. Most people dressed a little nicer than usual for supper. Some didn’t bother.
A couple of Japanese soldiers with rifles on their shoulders strode up the street toward her. She got out of their way and bowed, holding the pose till they’d gone past. They mostly didn’t bother people who followed the rules they’d set. Mostly. But you never could tell. That was part of what made them so scary.
Days of Infamy Page 25
