The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Still, the reality was that Paul’s sister was living in a brothel in Manchuria, China. The more he thought about it, the more he grew angry, heartbroken, and disgusted. Five thousand miles away, however, he could do little. The horror gnawed at him in the morning when he said his prayers and in the evening when he prayed again.

  Finally he could take it no longer. He had to rescue his sister. After ten life-changing years in America, Paul and Taeko Tatsuguchi boarded a ship in California and sailed west three weeks across the Pacific. The Tatsuguchis were returning home.

  3

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  Homeland

  With a new wife, a new medical license, and a new appreciation for life outside Japan, Paul Tatsuguchi knew he was returning to Japan as a new man. What he hadn’t realized was how much his home had changed, too.

  When he had left Japan in 1929, the country was in distress. Six years earlier, an earthquake, tsunami, typhoon, and firestorm lashed together on the same day to create the worst natural disaster in the history of Japan, and one of the worst of the modern world. Just before noon on September 1, 1923, as cooks across Tokyo stoked lunchtime stoves, a 7.9 magnitude temblor rocked the Kanto Plain of western Japan for fourteen seconds. Thousands of buildings collapsed. Cooking fires jumped from houses to streets to neighborhoods. Tens of thousands of refugees from the fires fled for the wet safety of the Sumida River, which had flooded in the aftermath of a forty-foot-high tsunami. Alas, at that very moment, ferocious winds from an offshore typhoon whipped dozens of smaller city fires into a pillar of flame. The three-hundred-foot fire tornado, called a dragon twist, consumed all available oxygen and burned alive as many as 44,000 people.

  Between the fire, flood, and building destruction, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 killed at least 140,000. Nearly half the structures in Tokyo, the capital city, were destroyed; two million people were left homeless; and the nation’s most important port city, Yokohama, was reduced to cinder and rubble. “The city of almost half a million souls had become a vast plain of fire, of red, devouring sheets of flame which played and flickered,” wrote Henry Kinney, editor of Trans-Pacific magazine, after a tour of Yokohama. “Here and there a remnant of a building, a few shattered walls, stood up like rocks above the expanse of flame, unrecognizable. . . . It was as if the very earth were now burning. It presented exactly the aspect of a gigantic Christmas pudding over which the spirits were blazing, devouring nothing. For the city was gone.”

  At the time, the Tatsuguchi family was living 400 miles away in Hiroshima, but the earthquake and firestorm had devastated the nation’s economy. With the port shut down, few goods could get in or out of the country, and the modernization and industrialization of Japan ground to a halt. False rumors spread that foreigners were poisoning wells and profiteering from the disaster. Japanese vigilante mobs responded with mass murders of as many as ten thousand Koreans and Chinese. After weeks of pointless hate and distrust, Tokyo and Yokohama finally turned to the formidable task of rebuilding. First shanties and then permanent structures had to be built for the two million homeless. Typhoid fever raged in the unsanitary conditions. One of the world’s largest cities required a total overhaul of its water, sewer, electric, and transportation lines. Reconstruction boomed, aided by Japanese wages that in the 1930s were about one-tenth of those in the United States.

  When Paul and Taeko returned to Yokohama in 1939, the newlyweds hardly recognized it. There were few signs of earthquake misery. Instead, the rebuilt port now bustled with new docks, vast warehouses, and an unending parade of merchant ships that filled the island nation with new goods and, even more importantly, the confidence that came from a frenzied construction drive. Few people had been subject to a natural fury as fearsome as the Great Kanto Earthquake. The Japanese, however, had seen it, survived it, and, in many ways, been strengthened by it. At the same time, in the United States and Europe, the Great Depression had crushed hopes and fortunes. In Japan, the earthquake had exacted a far worse human toll, but the recovery set the country on the path to becoming a modern industrial juggernaut. In some ways the earthquake worsened relations with the West. The United States donated millions to Japan for rebuilding, but American officials complained that Tokyo was ungrateful. At the same time, many Japanese officials believed the Americans were trying to profit from their misery. The seeds of distrust had germinated.

  The Tatsuguchis could feel the difference in the neighborhoods of Tokyo, which brimmed with confidence. New construction and prosperity seemed to have taken root everywhere. What other nation could have withstood such a calamity? Japan had always been a proud nation, but the remarkable Kanto comeback seemed to infuse the country with a wash of hubris.

  The nation had become the region’s preeminent power, both militarily and in business, but it carried a serious chip on its shoulder.

  Patriotism can be a fine balance between pride and belligerence. On the streets of Tokyo, Paul and Taeko could feel the scales tilt in a way that made them uncomfortable. Dissent was quashed, conformity expected. Yet the Tatsuguchis had lived long enough in the United States to value their independence. While Japanese neighbors carried watches from Seiko and Citizen as a point of national pride, Paul stubbornly stuck with his American timepiece, on a flexible wristband, because it was easier to put on and take off for surgeries. He kept his American eyeglasses because they felt more comfortable. In California, the couple had grown accustomed to sleeping on a mattress with sheets and pillows, so they kept the same arrangement in Japan.

  Neighbors and co-workers could sense there was something different, something foreign about the Tatsuguchis. They had become the object of curiosity, and, sometimes, derision. Paul and Taeko didn’t understand it. In their hearts, they still felt Japanese, even if they loved America.

  Yet they didn’t always help themselves blend in. Surrounded by crowds on the street, or in a garden, or at a shop, Paul and Taeko sometimes guaranteed themselves some privacy by conversing in English. In Japan of the 1930s, few things were more jarring than a countryman who spoke an alien language.

  Paul and Taeko were set apart by their religion, too. Even in the United States, the birthplace of Seventh-day Adventism, their faith was considered unusual. Adventists attended church on Saturday. Secular work and sports were discouraged on Saturdays, though nature walks or hikes were permitted. (Just as they loved visiting Yosemite National Park in California, the Tatsuguchis in Japan loved to hike and check for wildflowers around Lake Chuzenji at Nikko National Park.) Most Adventists also followed the Old Testament kosher dietary rules, eschewing pork and shellfish, while many gave up meat altogether and became vegetarian.

  One major tenet of their faith: Seventh-day Adventists were pacifists. Through the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I, Adventists were either conscientious objectors or, if drafted, noncombatants. They could work behind the lines of combat, or in medical service, but they could not bear arms.

  If their religion was considered unusual in the United States, it was even less understood in Japan, where the Adventists represented only a small minority of Christians, who themselves comprised less than one percent of Japan’s population. The dominant faith in Japan was Shinto, which at that time was used by the state to promote nationalism and worship of the emperor. The Tatsuguchis, like all schoolchildren in Japan, had grown up memorizing and reciting the Imperial Rescript on Education, a kind of Japanese Pledge of Allegiance that promised, among other things, to “offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.”

  How exactly could anyone square a belief in a Christian God with a Japanese leadership connected directly to heaven? Paul and Taeko did not preoccupy themselves with philosophical concerns. They had more pragmatic worries.

  The biggest nightmare continued to be Paul’s sister in the brothel in Manchuria. Details of her ordeal were scarce. Paul worked steadily, but quietly, to get her back, worki
ng through intermediaries and sending along money when he had it. His single biggest sum of cash came when he imported a Steinway piano from California and sold it. How and why she eventually won her freedom remains unclear even to family members—neither Paul nor the sister would speak of it. One day, however, she returned to Japan. She was sullen and hurt, and, according to some family members, changed forever. But she was home, and for that both she and Paul were extremely grateful.

  Her return allowed Paul and Taeko to readjust to Japanese life. They had settled in Tokyo, Taeko’s girlhood home, and Paul started work at the Adventist sanitarium for tuberculosis patients that had been funded generously by his philanthropist parents.

  In his new job, Paul missed performing surgeries, but felt that his new service was crucial. As more Japanese moved from open farms to cramped cities and factories, tuberculosis spread quickly. The sickness carried a deep stigma, and few people wanted to risk any contact with the afflicted. Helping the desperate and the unwanted, Paul Tatsuguchi believed, was an essential Christian value. He not only loved helping—he loved showing what Seventh-day Adventism was all about. He considered himself to be more than a doctor. He was a medical missionary. He devoted himself to healing not just the body, but also the soul. Faith gave him purpose, community, and hope.

  It also set Paul and Taeko apart from their neighbors. In 1939, Japan was not focused on charity. After centuries of isolation and subjugation, Japan was transforming itself into something new and powerful.

  4

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  Isolation

  Japan had always chosen a different path than its neighbors. Like almost every other Asian country, Japan had been descended upon in the Sixteenth Century by Europeans bent on plunder and colonization. Yet when Portuguese sailors were blown off-course by a storm in 1543 and landed on the southern Japanese island of Tanegashima, something odd happened.

  The Japanese did not surrender to the Europeans. Instead, they adapted and learned.

  The local territorial warlord, or daimyo, grew fascinated with the strange but powerful exploding rods that were wielded by the Portuguese sailors. The daimyo traded for two, and commissioned his swordsmith to replicate them. When islanders couldn’t figure out how to make the copies work correctly, they negotiated more trades for new lessons in craftsmanship. Two hundred years after guns and cannons had begun to dominate warfare in Europe, firearms had arrived in Japan.

  Initially the warlords thought they were getting a fantastic deal. For the mere price of some local silk, or fish, or hand-carved curios, a daimyo received the weapons to keep his peasants in line and his rivals at bay. Subsequent Portuguese ships were welcomed enthusiastically.

  Over time, however, the Portuguese began introducing more than just guns to Japanese society. They also packed another powerful force—Christianity.

  By the end of the sixteenth century, dozens of Roman Catholic missionaries, mainly from Portugal and Spain, had spread across the nation and introduced native Buddhists to Western religion. Japanese warlords viewed the first Christian evangelizers as a necessary evil. The only way to get European guns was to put up with European proselytizing.

  After a few years, however, the exotic religion had spread even more rapidly than the revolutionary weapons. More than 100,000 Japanese, including at least eighty daimyos, were baptized as Roman Catholics. Though many daimyos embraced Catholicism for reasons of faith, large numbers also converted for more practical reasons. From the Europeans, Christians in Japan gained better access to saltpeter, a crucial ingredient of gunpowder.

  Alarmed that so many natives were becoming loyal to a pale-faced and mitered pope in Rome, Japanese authorities launched a major crackdown on the two Western innovations. In 1587, the Supreme Commander of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, forbade peasants from owning guns. Then he expelled the missionaries and officially banned European religion.

  Guns receded from everyday life, but the pope’s religion was too strong to wither. Japanese peasants, especially, appreciated a faith that offered the promise of heaven after a life of oppressive serfdom. Jesuits remained influential in western Japan, and Franciscan missionaries continued to enter the country through the southern port city of Nagasaki. The Church estimated the number of Catholics in Japan had more than doubled, to 220,000.

  With growth came excesses. Some daimyos forced peasants to convert to Christianity under threat of death. In Kyushu, Catholic converts even helped the Portuguese sell off their poor Japanese neighbors as slaves to Europe, Africa, and India.

  Finally, the supreme commander of Japan had enough. Six months after the arrival of Japan’s first Catholic bishop, Hideyoshi ordered the arrests of twenty-four Catholic converts and ordered their left ears chopped off as a warning. When the one-eared Christians were paraded through the streets of Nagasaki, two Jesuits arose to defend them. The two Jesuits and the maimed men were all chained to crosses, slashed with swords, and left to hang for eighty days. The crucifixions made Christians across Japan cautious about professing their faith.

  After that gore and several other incidents like it, Christianity vanished from Japan. So, too, did almost all contact with the West. For the next 250 years, Japan became Sakoku, a chained country, an island of both geography and policy.

  The first five points of the Sakoku Edict of 1635 stated:

  • Japanese ships are strictly forbidden to leave for foreign countries.

  • No Japanese is permitted to go abroad. If there is anyone who attempts to do so secretly, he must be executed. The ship so involved must be impounded and its owner arrested, and the matter must be reported to the higher authority.

  • If any Japanese returns from overseas after residing there, he must be put to death.

  • If there is any place where the teachings of the [Catholic] priests is practiced, the two of you must order a thorough investigation.

  • Any informer revealing the whereabouts of the followers of the priests must be rewarded accordingly. If anyone reveals the whereabouts of a high-ranking priest, he must be given one hundred pieces of silver.

  Limited trade was allowed with some Chinese merchants and the Dutch East Indies Company through the port of Nagasaki. By and large, though, the outside world was cut off from Japan, and Japan was cut off from it. For more than two centuries, the outside world knew less about everyday life in Japan than it does today about everyday life in North Korea.

  At the same time, few Japanese knew much about anything beyond their islands. And the little they did know only bolstered their decision to seal off themselves. Across Asia, nation after nation had been forced to submit to the humiliation of European colonization. India, Singapore, Burma, and swaths of China fell to Great Britain; Vietnam to France; Indonesia and the Spice Islands to the Netherlands; and the Philippines to Spain.

  In its isolation, however, Japan remained independent and free. Why did Japan stand virtually alone among Asian countries in resisting colonization? One reason was that the country had few natural resources to attract outside invaders. With no gold, silver, coal, oil, spices, or rubber, Japan was not an inviting target for Western plunder.

  Japan was also well-protected. The same samurai who preserved order for the supreme commander presented a formidable warrior defense against would-be colonizers. Any European who doubted the fighting spirit of Japan had only to remember the twenty-six crucified Catholics of Nagasaki. Would-be invaders stayed away.

  For more than two centuries, Japan became convinced of its own greatness, because it was the only greatness it knew. With little exposure to outside ideas, the country under Sakoku believed it had the smartest thinkers, the fiercest warriors, and the greatest leaders. They were a chosen people, a superior people, favored with special grace from the deities.

  Problem was, the rest of the world didn’t stand still. The period of Japan’s greatest isolation, roughly from the 1630s to the 1850s, coincided in the outside world with one of the greatest explosions of knowledge in the history of
mankind.

  Beyond the closed harbors of Japan, the Scientific Revolution transformed intellectual life. Isaac Newton unveiled calculus and the laws of motion; Antonie van Leewenhoek discovered the unseen with the microscope; and astronomers such as William and Caroline Herschel uncovered the vast beyond, including the new planet Uranus and moons of Saturn. John Harrison eased the dangers of transoceanic navigation with his invention of a marine chronometer, and Charles Morse revolutionized communications with his invention of the telegraph. Charles Darwin set off on the HMS Beagle to chart the course of evolution.

  At the same time, the Industrial Revolution churned out the fantastic machines that spun textiles, mixed cement, mined coal, hauled incredible loads, and pushed back the night sky with dependable brilliance from gas lamps.

  Inside Japan, a single man could travel only as fast as a galloping horse; outside Japan, the steam engine transported hundreds of men and women across continents.

  Outside Japan, arts and letters changed the world as never before. With Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes gave birth to the modern novel, which inspired Voltaire, Goethe, Austen, and Dickens to write for thousands of readers. When educated Westerners were not reading at home, they filled great halls to hear the masterworks of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert. A revolution in painting was led by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velázquez.