No Surrender (3 page)

I arrived in Hankow about the middle of April and went the same day to see my brother at the officers' quarters. I had not warned him I was coming, and he was dumbfounded. When he recovered, he asked “What's going on? What are you doing here?”

I explained myself. Immediately he gave me to understand that I was not to count on him to look after me.

“Don't you realize you might get killed in China?” he asked.

I pulled myself up and answered, quite loudly, “If a man is not prepared to take a few risks, he will get nowhere!” My brother stared at me, no doubt in disbelief.

He had occasion to stare at me again shortly thereafter. I had left Japan with one suitcase, and it seemed to me that the first thing I should do was to get some good clothes to wear. I decided to ask my brother to buy me a suit; to my surprise he consented. I promptly chose a very good English woolen material and asked the tailor to make me a suit in the London fashion. When my brother received the bill, his eyes nearly popped. It had not occurred to him that a boy of seventeen would even think of spending that much money.

The Hankow branch of Tajima Yōkō was located on a busy downtown street. The showroom was on the first floor, the offices were on the second, and the third floor was a dormitory, where all four members of the staff slept, including the head of the branch. My first job was to keep the branch accounts.

After about a year of working in the office, I was made a buyer and sent around each day to the nearby towns to call on suppliers. The head of the branch was afraid I was too young to be taken seriously, so to bolster my dignity, he
bought me a 1936 Studebaker. When I set forth in this splendid vehicle, I thought I was about the greatest businessman in the world.

After the first year, I discovered the dance hall in the French Concession, where, from then on, I danced through the night almost every night. I loved it. Sometimes when I was dancing it seemed hard to believe that only a year ago I had been getting my kicks swinging a bamboo sword in the
kendō
gym.

It was a decidedly fancy dance hall, and it cost a good deal of money for me to go as often as I did. I resolved to ask my brother to pay half of my monthly expenses; for some reason he agreed to do so. As I look back on it, I see that although I needed the money, what I wanted more than that was to be spoiled by my brother. My upbringing had been very strict, and I was starving for affection and indulgence.

One evening when I was dancing, my brother suddenly appeared, in uniform, at the dance hall. Though somewhat flustered, I managed to grab the initiative by telling him to find a partner and join in the fun. He glowered like a demon, but all he said was, “How can I dance dressed like this?” Luckily he made no move to cut off my allowance.

Although I drank little, I smoked about twenty cigarettes a day, and when I played mahjong all night long, as I sometimes did, I smoked fifty or more. I did not have much to do with the other Japanese in Hankow, and for that reason I was soon able to speak Chinese pretty well. My countrymen all said that I was studying up on Chinese to make time with the Chinese girls. This was not entirely untrue, but I was always bashful around girls. My Chinese rarely helped much when I was talking to them.

In January, 1941, when my brother was transferred to the Army Accounting School in Tokyo, I was left to fend for myself. To shore up my self-confidence, I worked harder—and played harder at the dance hall. I knew there were only two more
years before I would be drafted. In Hankow I had grown two or three inches taller, and since I had no ailments, I was sure I would be put in Class A when the time came. I wanted to make the most of my two years, for I was conscious that they were all the youth I had left. I was determined to do the best I could at my job and at the same time to have as much fun as possible at that splendid dance hall. If I was lucky, I thought, maybe the war would end; then I would be able to make a lot of money in business. I dreamed of having my own company in China, and to some extent I regarded the evenings at the dance hall as an investment in the future, albeit one that had been financed to a considerable extent by my brother.

On the eighth of December in that year, the war between Japan and the United States began. After that the dance hall and just about everything else had to close shop on the eighth day of each month as a “contribution to the Asian war effort.” The Japanese newspapers in Hankow began to call those of us who frequented the French Concession the “vermin of Asia,” and anyone who was in the concession until very late at night ran the risk of being picked up by the Japanese military police.

Deprived to a large extent of my greatest pleasure, I decided to learn how to sing, and I started taking voice lessons. Some of the boys in the band at the dance hall had previously offered to give me music lessons in the daytime, but I did not think my fingers would ever be agile enough to play the trumpet or the clarinet. Singing seemed the right answer. I practiced mostly the blues and tangos, sometimes sitting up all night listening to records on the electric Victrola I had installed in my closet.

One day in May, 1942, I was called up for my army physical, which I passed immediately. That evening I cabled my family in Wakayama: “Class A Banzai!” Shortly afterward I was
notified that on December 10 I would be inducted into the Sixty-first Infantry Regiment in Wakayama.

Thinking that I ought to get myself into the best possible physical shape, I quit my job with Tajima Yōkō in August and returned to Wakayama. Once at home, I spent my days swimming in the nearby ocean and my evenings practicing
kendō
in the gym at the local police headquarters. I had not practiced for a long time, but I was already second rank when I left middle school, and Mr. Sasaki, my teacher, urged me to try for a higher rank, which he felt would come in handy in the army. Not having worked at the sport for so long, I was a little nervous about the test for third rank, but I passed it. Even after that I continued to work out at the gym every other day until I was inducted.

When I went into the army, I promised my mother I would come back a private first class. Although I had some military courses in middle school and was eligible to take entrance examinations for officers' training school, I did not think I I was cut out to be an officer, nor did I want to wear a uniform different from the others and stand up in front of people barking out orders. The two stars of a private first class were enough for me. At least I thought so at that time.

Ten days after I was inducted, I was assigned to the Two Hundred Eighteenth Infantry Regiment, along with other new inductees from my area. There was a celebration to mark our departure, and then we left. We had no idea where we were being sent, but the noncom in charge of our group passed the word to me that it was Nan-ch'ang. I could hardly believe this, because Nan-ch'ang was where Tadao was now stationed. Any misgivings that I might have had left me when I found that I would be seeing my affluent brother again.

Shortly after the beginning of the year we arrived in Nan-ch'ang, where it was so cold that the rice in my mess kit froze. The minute we got off the train I started shivering all over.
The officers from the base had come to the station to meet us, and we marched by them in four ranks. Out of the corner of my eye I looked for Tadao; presently I spotted him standing a little away from the other officers and wearing a cloak over his overcoat. When we passed him, I stole a quick glance in his direction. He saw me; it was clear from the expression on his face that he was even more surprised than he had been at Hankow. He later told me that his second thought was, “This is going to cost money.”

Our squad leader could administer a mean slap when he was angry, but most of the time he was laughing and in good spirits. He called me to him one day and told me that he had chosen me for his squad because he thought I would make a good soldier. He added that I had better make a good soldier.

Our regiment had a reputation for having good legs, and we were constantly being ordered to march three and a half miles in an hour. Sometimes it was five miles, and when that happened, most of the recruits were resentful. Fortunately, my training in
kendō
had prepared me for this, and never once did I break ranks.

I had kept on growing; now I stood five foot four. When I had my physical after basic training, my weight had increased to 132 pounds. which was twice the weight of the full pack we had to carry. I was considered to be just the right size, because anyone who did not weigh twice as much as the pack could not stand up under it in the long haul, and anyone who weighed much more was carrying around excess poundage.

I first came under real fire just after I finished basic training. It was in a place called An-i, which is between Nan-ch'ang and Chiu-chiang, and we were assigned to clean out a troop of enemy guerrillas who had been causing trouble in the area. Our battalion worked out a plan whereby the guerrilla leader was captured alive. But during the operation I injured my right foot and was laid up for a few days, which was particularly
unfortunate because it prevented me from taking an examination for officers' training school.

Having said earlier that I wanted nothing grander than the rank of private first class, I must confess that after I went into the army, I changed my mind rather quickly. One reason was that I wanted to do something that would make the squad leader happy. The other was the idea that if I was going to go to war, I might just as well go in one of those flashy officer's uniforms. The attire of a private first class is not inspiring.

I was dejected at having missed the examination, and I suppose I looked glum when I went on my next day off to see my brother. When I told him the trouble, he directed me to stay put and immediately took off on his horse to see the commander of my unit. When the latter found out I was Tadao's brother, he agreed to give me a special examination. I passed it, and on August 1, I was transferred to a preliminary officers' training unit.

Here the men who passed the course were divided into two groups: some went on to more advanced officers' training, while the others remained noncoms. Fortunately, I came out in the first group. Since the regimental commander was in favor of more and better training for officers, he directed that the twelve successful candidates, myself included, be given extra training by Lieutenant Tsunenori Ōno, the regiment's standard-bearer.

Instead of going back to my company, I stayed with the training unit and was given two weeks of training each in machine guns and horsemanship. After that, I had another week of drill in firing the regimental artillery, and I ended up returning to my company for only one night. In the meantime, my brother was transferred from Nan-ch'ang to a new division being formed in Korea.

As a rule, officer candidates who were in China were sent to the Reserve Officers' Training School in Nanking, but in this year they were being sent back to Japan. My group was assigned to a school in Kurume, a port in Kyushu, where we arrived on January 13, 1944.

“The Devil's Kurume,” as it was known among the students, was a very tough training camp, and the officer in charge of my class, Captain Shigeo Shigetomi, was considered to be one of the toughest officers there. His motto was “Better to sweat on the training ground than to bleed on the battleground,” and he drilled his fifty soldiers constantly in suicide-attack maneuvers. Shigetomi's favorite expressions were, “You're stupid” and “You've got everything backward.” These were usually bleated out to the accompaniment of a sharp slap on the mis-doer's face.

I learned from Captain Shigetomi what military training was and what it meant to be a soldier. He also taught me spiritual discipline. Soldiers, I was told, are always goofing off or making excuses, but such conduct is not permissible for officers. In our school, the worst disgrace was to be caught unprepared or uninformed. Nothing should be handled in slipshod fashion, no matter how trivial it might seem. Captain Shigetomi made me into an officer, and it was my pride as an officer that sustained me during my thirty years on Lubang.