The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  First, the doctor was not a suicide. He was killed in action in the last major counterattack conducted by the Japanese troops. Also there is no foundation to believe that he had any personal part in the destruction of any Japanese patients. It seems to be customary among Japanese troops for grenades to be issued to helpless patients, making it possible for them to commit suicide if they so wish. If an administrative order were given from higher headquarters to the effect that grenades should be furnished all patients, the Japanese medical officer, regardless of his personal views, would be helpless to do anything but see that it was carried out. However, there is absolutely no foundation for the statement, as carried in the newspapers, that Dr. Tatsuguchi personally contributed to the murder of any patients.

  There were both personal and professional reasons to challenge the press narrative of Tatsuguchi’s diary. For starters, Tatsuguchi had many friends at Loma Linda who knew him and liked him, but had lost touch with him during the war years. In their memory, Tatsy was a faith-centered surgeon who devoted himself to healing the infirm, not lobbing grenades at them. They wanted to clear Tatsy’s name.

  The professional reasons were serious, too. Though some practices set Seventh-day Adventists apart from traditional Christian faiths in the United States—the Saturday Sabbath, the promotion of vegetarianism, the door-to-door evangelizing—Adventists wanted to be viewed in the mainstream of religions. The church had always put strong emphasis on wholeness and health. The version of the Tatsuguchi story in the popular press was completely at odds with the Adventist view of its Loma Linda–trained physicians. Classmates did not want the reputation of the church or the medical school to be sullied, especially if the Attu headlines about Tatsuguchi were not true.

  The year before Taeko Tatsuguchi had moved to Hawaii, she had been visited in Japan by Adventist elder B. P. Hoffman. He had been an instructor of Paul Tatsuguchi at Pacific Union College. The instructor told Taeko that his name and contact information had been in Tatsuguchi’s address book on Attu, and that an FBI agent had conducted an interview on the relationship between the men.

  The church elder told Taeko a different story about her husband’s death. Hoffman said the FBI agent told him the doctor had been killed as he emerged from a field hospital. The church official told Taeko that her husband had been waving a Bible and calling out, “Don’t shoot! I am a Christian!” but that an American soldier could not understand the words through the Aleutian wind. The soldier mistook the Bible for a gun and shot Tatsuguchi, the church official told Taeko.

  Which version of the death of her husband was true? At the time, Taeko hadn’t yet heard Dick Laird’s telling of the Attu story. She would only see her husband’s diary for the first time eight years after his death, when the Japanese government passed along a version it had translated from English—a translation of a translation. Taeko had no reason to doubt the church elder’s version. She told her daughters about it. It’s what they all believed.

  20

  * * *

  Home

  Dick Laird returned home to Ohio a war hero. He had a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Presidential Unit Citation Medal, Asiatic Pacific Theatre Ribbon with Four Bronze Stars and Arrowhead, Philippine Liberation Ribbon with Two Bronze Stars, and Army Achievement Medal, among others. He had so much hardware that he needed four standard picture frames to hold it all for display on the walls of his home.

  He soon learned, however, that there was one tough truth about all his recognition: Medals didn’t pay.

  Yes, he was thrilled to be living in Columbus, Ohio, with Rose and the kids. He couldn’t believe how much how much Peggy and Nancy Lou had grown. He also couldn’t believe how difficult it was to find a good job.

  He arrived home on June 16, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was tested in Alamagordo, New Mexico, and he found the country was still geared up for war. His one job offer was as an ROTC instructor, which he rejected, because he’d had his fill of the Army. He eventually hired on driving a gasoline tanker for Shell Oil, but long days in a truck seat hurt his back and, frankly, the work was boring. It was hard to be interested in driving the same route on city streets, day after day after day, when he had gone to war and risked all.

  Civilian life was not easy for Laird. In the Army, he was used to giving orders and having them followed. Now his voice was just one of four in the family, though his was the loudest and sternest. The daughters were in grade school, and had minds of their own. Life in a foxhole could be more predictable than life at home with a wife and children—in war he knew when to fight and when to duck.

  Laird worried that he was letting down Rose. For all of his time away overseas, he felt that he owed her a better life. Driving a truck wasn’t going to do it. He had earned the opportunity of an education through the GI Bill, but college had no appeal to him. Rose had the brains and the drive for school. Laird insisted that she start taking classes at Ohio State University. The Army buddy who was killed next to Laird in Okinawa, Sergeant Harold Gellein, had convinced him of the power of a college diploma. Laird vowed to make sure his wife would get one. He opened an appliance-repair shop for a day job, worked at a roller-bearing factory at night, and installed home insulation on the weekends. Meanwhile, after attending her daytime classes, Rose worked another three hours a day for professors and typed term papers for graduate students. In 1953, Rose and Dick’s combined work paid off: She earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Ohio State. As a fourteen-year-old dropout from Appalachia, Laird felt proud and a little in awe to see his wife earn a college diploma. He also felt like he had lived up to his end of the deal. Not long after Rose had earned her degree, Laird walked up to his night-shift boss at the Timken Roller Bearing Company and quit his job. When his boss asked why, Laird told him, “I’m a number and in ten or more years I’ll still be a number.”

  Quitting his night job gave him more free time, which did not turn out to be a good thing. Without something to keep him constantly busy, Laird’s mind raced. At night he lay awake and rehashed the events of the day. He also relived the war. When he fell asleep, the nightmares returned.

  Pointing his gun at the mother and baby. Finger on the trigger with the two boys at the sugarcane fields. An Army buddy mangled beside him. The soldier hit in the backside in his foxhole. Pieces of the two fresh young soldiers at the landmine. Drinking from the creek with the dead soldier’s body. And the American-trained surgeon with the wife and the kids and the diary, Nobuo Tatsuguchi.

  Rose knew about her husband’s night terrors because he was thrashing and moaning in bed. Still, Laird wouldn’t say much. He didn’t want to burden her with his problems. He was also embarrassed. Soldiers, he thought, should not show weakness or even feel it. He was supposed to be brave, and he had the medals to prove it. He definitely did not want his daughters to know what made him scream at night.

  Still, the whole family was ready for a change. Ohio was just too familiar. He couldn’t see a big future here. He wanted a fresh start.

  During his time training in the Army, Laird had learned to love the desert. Rose had a cousin who lived in Tucson. So the Lairds loaded up a trailer and moved cross-country from Ohio to Arizona. Laird was accepted to the Asbestos Workers Local No. 73, and began working at power plants, nuclear missile silos, and other industrial construction jobs across the Southwest. Rose hired on as a schoolteacher and began working on her master’s degree in education from the University of Arizona. They had another daughter, Ellie, in 1955. They were well on their way to a comfortable, middle-class life.

  And yet Laird did not take well to domestication. He loved the four females in his house, but he could never quite shed the give-orders-or-take-orders structure of military life. He could be a stern taskmaster. For years around the house, his own daughters did not naturally refer to him as Dad or Father or Pop. They called him Laird.

  Laird missed the camaraderie of Army life. He tried a VFW hall. It wasn’t the same. He didn’t want to be an old guy r
eliving his glory days. He wanted to fix things in the here and now. He and Rose bought four acres near what was then Saguaro National Monument. Laird then designed and spent hundreds of hours building the family’s new three-bedroom brick house. Laird was busy again, and he was happy.

  Rose earned her master’s degree and started teaching at the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind. They bought a few acres in the White Mountains, and Laird fixed up a mobile home to withstand local snows. By the mid-1970s, the girls had grown up and moved into their own homes, which Laird renovated. Laird added a greenhouse to the family home in Tucson and spent hours collecting and growing orchids. Without the kids, the house turned quiet. Rose and Dick sat on the sofa in the living room and adjusted slowly to their empty nest. So many of the family issues that had consumed so much energy for so many years—the kids’ grades, their driving, their curfews—were all gone. Through the 1980s, Rose and Dick were happy grandparents. The days had dragged, but the years had flown by.

  On February 3, 1992, the Lairds were reading in their living room when the phone rang. “Are you Rose?” the caller asked. “Are you from Columbus, Ohio?”

  Yes, Rose answered.

  “Did you have a baby girl in Columbus, Ohio, on December 31, 1934, and give her up for adoption?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am that girl.”

  Her name was Marty. She lived in Bluffton, Ohio. After her adoptive parents died, she began looking for her birth mother. She was middle-aged now, and with children of her own. She and her husband traveled to Tucson to meet Rose and Dick and their daughters. The ice was broken when Dick and Rose’s daughter Peggy met her newfound sister and said, “Well, I’m not the oldest anymore.” The two families joined for boisterous barbecues, a tour of blooming cacti, and long stories about unfamiliar relatives. Rose and Marty spent hours together catching up on their years apart while Dick and Marty’s husband, Bruno, who had a shared love of landscape and wildflower photography, drove across the southern Arizona desert exposing hundreds of frames of 35mm film. For an event so unexpected, the reunion went amazingly well.

  Laird had unsettled history, too. He still had nightmares from the war. They weren’t as frequent as they used to be, but in some ways that made them worse. He could never predict when they would happen. They always were terrifying. It troubled him to realize that three years of combat decades ago still had such sway over his life. The Army medals displayed in a large custom frame on his wall reminded him daily of how the war made him rise up and become a hero. Yet war’s dark chapters were lodged in his conscience.

  He found his box of wartime memorabilia and pulled out his copy of the Tatsuguchi diary. The man had a family. Laird wondered if he could find them.

  In Honolulu, Taeko knew it was time for a change. Joy was reaching college age, and Laura was close behind. Taeko moved the family to California so the girls could attend the same Seventh-day Adventist schools as their parents.

  The transition from Hawaii to the mainland United States was difficult. The family found California to be much less racially tolerant than Hawaii. In Honolulu, the girls’ schools were filled with more Japanese, Chinese, and Korean immigrants than Anglos, but Laura was the only Asian student in her California high school. Her isolation hit home during a history lesson in her senior year, when Laura’s teacher lectured on World War II. After the discussion, a white classmate turned in his desk and pointed a finger at Laura. “You bombed Pearl Harbor!” he shouted at her in front of the class. Neither the teacher nor classmates did anything to contradict the accuser. Laura was horrified. The year before, at age seventeen, she had completed all the studies and tests to become an official United States citizen. She had not bombed Pearl Harbor. She had not even been alive for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She wanted to tell off the accuser, set him straight, but she realized she was all alone on the front lines of racism with no backup. She kept her head down and stewed in silence. The confrontation defused, but Laura boiled inside.

  Laura had no doubt that the United States offered far more opportunities than her native Japan. In California, the girls never went hungry. In fact, the postwar boom was turning the parents of many of her friends rich. The California parks offered regular free concerts. The libraries loaned books. And the beaches, mountains, and Sequoia forests were full of free paths and adventures. The Tatsuguchis could practice their religion without fear of persecution. Their lives brimmed with optimism.

  In their new country, the two sisters earned educations far superior to those available to most girls in Japan, with Joy enrolling at Pacific Union College and Laura attending Loma Linda University. Both studied to become nurses, and both, in the footsteps of their father, worked at White Memorial in Los Angeles. Both girls believed they were living the American dream.

  And yet . . .

  No matter their accomplishments in school or at work, Laura and Joy often faced reminders that they, like their mother and father before them, were outsiders in a new land. In California, Laura had several Japanese American friends who had lost everything—their homes, their businesses, their cars—while being ordered to internment camps during the war. Her friends talked often of the humiliations of daily life in the camps—the searing heat of the desert, the dust that caked everything, the stench of unsanitary toilets, the children who sobbed at night, the hacking coughs that would not go away. Their shame only intensified with the knowledge that their German and Italian former neighbors were still living free of barbed wire. Years after the war, the father of one of Laura’s friends was invited to a business conference in Palm Springs. He refused because, after years in an internment camp, he could not stand the sight of the desert.

  Even the most accomplished members of the Japanese American community battled discrimination. In Los Angeles, Laura worked for a top American-born orthopedic surgeon who wanted to buy a house in the tony Brentwood neighborhood. The surgeon had the same personal wealth, prestigious career, and elite diplomas as many of the surrounding homeowners. What the surgeon did not have was the same skin color. After being rejected by one real estate agent after another, the surgeon finally found a white friend to stage a straw purchase of a Brentwood house for him. Laura could not forget the pain and anger of a boss who performed daily miracles in the surgical bay, but whose race prevented him from buying the home of his choice in the land of the free.

  Still, Laura and her mother were often taken aback by the curiosity and friendliness of American strangers. While living first in Hawaii and then in California, Taeko started to see one consequence of having an unusual last name—she was easy to find in the phone book. Several times a month the family mailbox would fill with letters from former American soldiers that all asked the same questions: Do you know the Tatsuguchi soldier who wrote the diary on Attu? Are you related? Have you ever seen the diary? Can I send you a copy? Years after their service, soldiers from the Aleutians were still haunted by the writings of the man who had changed their beliefs about the enemy.

  Over the years she had received dozens and maybe hundreds of letters from former GIs. Usually she answered with a brief thank-you, but didn’t do much beyond that. She was living in America now, and what happened in the war and Alaska and Attu was long in the past. She let it drop. Eventually the inquiring soldiers let it drop, too.

  One day, however, she received a letter from someone more persistent. Floyd Watkins was an Emory University literature professor from Atlanta who had been an Army cryptographer in the Aleutians during the war. Like hundreds of other soldiers, he ended up with several copies of the Tatsuguchi diary. Watkins, however, was a curious academic who noticed differences between versions. He wanted to discuss them with the Tatsuguchi family.

  Taeko’s first instinct was to say no. Her heart had suffered enough. She was a war widow and saw little need to rip the stitches off that wound.

  But the professor persisted. He assured Taeko that he was not some voyeuristic ex-GI on a nostalgia trip. He was an English professo
r whose life’s work was the analysis of William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and other celebrated Southern writers. Yes, the professor had a personal interest in the topic of the Tatsuguchi diary, but he felt it deserved serious scholarship. He embraced academic rigor. He promised to be respectful and open-minded.

  Taeko softened. She was interested in what the man from Georgia might find. She just didn’t know if she could bear it. She asked for more information.

  In another heartfelt letter, the professor assured Taeko that he was not out for sensationalism. Acknowledging Taeko’s deep Christian beliefs, the professor noted that he was a church elder who studied the scriptures. He told how the Book of Job had helped him to make sense of the pain and suffering in the war.

  Taeko was curious, but Laura was ready. If this man from Georgia knew something about her father, then she wanted to hear it. The Tatsuguchis agreed to meet with Watkins in Los Angeles.

  When the professor walked into their home in Los Angeles, Taeko was overwhelmed with memories. Here was a man who, like her husband, had gone to war in Alaska and seen man at his worst. But this soldier had returned home. He had a wife and children and a rewarding career. He had gray hair. He was standing in her living room now.

  It was hard not to like Floyd Watkins. He was polite and gentle and spoke with a soothing voice. He was like an earnest, favorite uncle. He also knew something about the diary of Nobuo Tatsuguchi.

  The professor had canvassed other soldiers who served in the Aleutians and accumulated ten different copies of the diary. The mistakes between versions were myriad.

  The name of the youngest Tatsuguchi daughter, Mutsuko, was incorrectly spelled as Fokiko, Takiko, Tekiko, Tokiko, and Tokkiko. Taeko’s name was misspelled as Faeke, Tacke, Taeke, Taoko, and Toeko. Only one translation correctly lists Tatsuguchi’s use of the word Christ; others either omit the passage or repeat the word as Ehkist, Enkist, and Edict. Different versions say he ate a half-friend thistle, a dried thistle, a friend thistle, and half-a-fried thistle. Two versions of the diary omit Tatsuguchi’s claim that the Americans had used poison gas on Attu, raising the question of whether the diary was censored by military officials.