Please Enjoy Your Happiness (20 page)

Yukiko: you signed your name in kanji – Chinese characters – for the first time. The characters were firm, assured, artistic, as if a poet had written them, I thought. Kanji: that was something new.

I folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. I was dealing with such a surge of emotions. I felt as if I had been talking face to face with you, our bodies close, in a hot room. It was like the first time I met you. My whole body was flushed. My shirt was damp with perspiration. That kind of reaction usually happens to me only when I am talking to a beautiful woman, and I am trying hard to sound coherent while at the
same time my eyes are studying her face and her eyes for evidence of life lived. You might remember, Yuki-chan, how closely I studied you, as if you were white marble at the Louvre.

If there had been a safe in the office, I would have locked the letter and all your other letters inside. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if they were not locked away someone would be reading them. It was just a thought.

About that same moment, a senior Marine Corps sergeant, assigned to the USMC detachment aboard ship that guarded the nuclear warheads, dropped by to say he was retiring and to ask if we would like to write about his experiences on Iwo Jima. Red took notes. I listened. I knew a lot about Iwo Jima and the titanic struggle there in February and March of 1945 between the Marine invaders and the Japanese defenders, who were well dug in and ready to sacrifice their lives to help protect their homeland six hundred miles to the north. A total of 6,821 Marines were killed, and more than twenty thousand were wounded. More than twenty thousand Japanese troops died; only 1,083 were taken prisoner. It was hand-to-hand combat of the heroic kind, the cream of manhood from two aggressive nations.

I listened to the sergeant talk about the fact that two hours after the landing, only twelve of the 220 men in his Marine Corps company were still fighting. I did not say anything. A few weeks earlier I had sat in a Yokosuka movie theatre with you, Yuki, and watched a double feature. I know it was part of my education, but it was an ordeal unlike any other. First on the screen was the American film
Sands of Iwo Jima
from 1949, starring John Wayne as the flawed and fearless Sergeant John Stryker. The Marines used flamethrowers, bayonets, rifle fire, machine guns, artillery, mortars, tanks, and bare muscle to
slowly kill the Japanese one by one. Every seat was occupied in the theatre, and many people were standing in the aisles. In an odd way, it was as if they had all come to church. As far as I know, I was the only foreigner in the crowd. Except for the noise of war on the soundtrack, there was absolute silence from the audience. These were ordinary Japanese people watching American Marines and crack Japanese troops in a fight to the death, which is the way the war in the Pacific had to be fought as the Japanese Empire began crumbling.

There was a short break. You would not look at me. I was the enemy and you were my Japanese friend.

Paired with
Sands of Iwo Jima
was the 1953 film by director Imai Tadashi
Himeyuri no t
ō
[
Tower of Lilies
], which was never shown in the United States in those days because it was perceived by the Japanese studio to be anti-American. It was, however, a spectacular hit in Japan. Of course, there were no subtitles. I imagined the dialogue. You did some interpreting. The audience reaction was completely different this time. The theatre was mostly full of women. They had come for the Imai film, not for the
Sands of Iwo Jima
. The women were crying, gasping, sobbing, almost from the start. You were rocking back and forth in your seat, clutching my arm sometimes, putting your hands in front of your eyes at other times to hide from the bloodshed on the screen. I cried too.

Later, Yuki, I found this description of the film that I would have loved to have shared with you. It is from the American author Donald Richie’s pioneering book from 1959,
The Japanese Film: Art and Industry.
I could attempt to describe the film myself, but every time I try to visualize it my hands start shaking and I start choking up. Those emotional reactions did not happen to me during the
Sands of Iwo Jima
: it was about
sacrifice, but it was also about flag-waving and thus not quite real.
Tower of Lilies
was also about sacrifice – but the Japanese killed during the invasion of the island of Okinawa were schoolgirls. It is a true story. There is a monument – the Tower of Lilies – on Okinawa to the memory of the more than two hundred teenage girls and their eighteen teachers who were shot or were killed by flamethrowers or committed suicide rather than surrender during the ninety-day battle. These girls and young women had been hastily conscripted by the Japanese military as nurses. They had been given a few hours of training. They had believed there would be a quick battle, the Americans would be destroyed, and then they could return to school to resume their studies and play basketball and softball, which they were good at. It was their duty to tend to the Japanese wounded, not in a hospital, but in caves, in the trenches, on the front lines. They were not warriors, they were children, and this film, for me, was far more real than the one made by Hollywood, Yuki.

Tower of Lilies
, Richie said, acquired the reputation overseas as

More than two hundred thousand human beings died in the battle – soldiers from both sides, civilians, and the members of the Lily Corps, in their medic uniforms of white headbands, school satchels, straw sandals, black shirts, and black skirts and pants. They were teenage innocents, you said, more innocent even than me. The US Marines won a titanic victory. There have been countless stories through the years about their valour. To their credit, the Marines often tried to convince Japanese soldiers to surrender. But they would not. There was no valour in surrendering. It was not honourable, the Japanese military code declared. Often the Marines watched in horror as Okinawan civilians – they were also Japanese civilians – sometimes killed themselves rather than submit to capture. The desperate struggle put up by the Japanese was one reason the United States opted to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki later. The thinking was that the destruction caused by the bombs would be such a shock to the Japanese that they would choose to avoid an invasion of the home islands and months or even years of hand-to-hand combat.

The Marine Corps sergeant had just told Red that he was at the Battle of Okinawa too. I asked whether he had heard of the Japanese film or had ever visited the Tower of Lilies. He shook his head. ‘Never heard of the Tower of Lilies,’ he said. He asked me what it was about. I told him. I was a youngster, like so many youngsters, who wanted to make a point and sometimes lacked finesse, Yukiko. About two-thirds of the way through my highly detailed account the sergeant walked out of the office without a gesture, without a word, and never came back. I saw him again a few weeks later at his retirement ceremony. He shook my hand. I was so glad he did that. It had occurred to me that I had no idea about what he had experienced in the battle.

The Battle of Iwo Jima was another one of those things that came back from the past to haunt me in my sixties. It reminded me, after many years of forgetting, of my connection with Japan that started in the White Rose bar when you walked up to me and said, with a tired smile, ‘Hello.’ That moment in the bar was really when my adult life started. I think you would be happy to know, Yukiko, that I followed your advice, almost to the letter. My university years began immediately after my four years in the navy. I majored in ancient Japanese history and language. My professional years, some of which I spent in Tokyo with
Newsweek
; my interests in the arts; even my personality, which includes a lack of patience for incompetents, can all be traced back through the tangled threads of life connecting them to that moment in the bar.

In early 1995, Yukiko, I got word that more than eight hundred surviving Marines (a Marine is always a Marine) who fought on Iwo Jima in 1945 were going back to the island for a memorial ceremony. A handful of former Japanese soldiers who opposed them would attend the ceremony too, which included the raising of both the American flag and the Japanese flag on top of the extinct volcano Suribachi. It was on this six-hundred-foot-high cinder dome at the south end of the island in February 1945 that photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped the photograph that will probably never be forgotten: five Marines raising the Stars and Stripes after fighting their way to the top of Suribachi.

You might like to know that the newspaper in Phoenix I was writing for at the time went along with my suggestion that I sign up to travel with the Marine veterans. After all, one of the five flag raisers was Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Hayes was long dead. He had a drinking problem and had passed out in the desert and died on a very cold day in 1955,
depressed, according to his family, because he had survived and he could not handle fame. I interviewed his family members, such shy, modest people. They brought out a small box of letters from Ira. ‘Aye,’ they were saying, as if it were the first word of a lament. ‘Aye! Poor Ira.’ When they showed me the letters as if they were sacraments I suddenly thought of your letters, Yukichan.

On Iwo Jima I walked down to the beach with a half-dozen silver-haired Marines who had landed there in 1945. They stopped at the point where the ocean met the land and they turned to look up at Suribachi for the first time in many years. I could only guess what was going through their minds. The single question I asked myself as I stumbled through the deep black sand was, ‘Could I have done that?’ Could I, at age nineteen, have dashed through the surf and crawled up the steep incline from the beach to the barren flat terrain above while bullets and shells were killing and maiming everyone around me?

Would I be as cheerful as these old men on this reunion day? They had come through the experience of combat, but what dreams did they have? What nightmares? They were such proud men.

I can never forget the scene at the airport in Honolulu, where our charter flight landed to refuel after leaving the West Coast. The Marine Corps had lined the corridors of the terminal with hundreds of young Marines in full dress uniform. They stood and saluted smartly. Some of them were crying, even as they held on for dear life to those stiff salutes. The old Marines, leaning on each other for support, were saluting and weeping too.

‘
Semper Fi!
’ – always faithful – someone shouted fiercely, not as if it were a motto but as if it were a battle cry.

15

What Is My Joy?

The
Shangri-La
sped south by south-west, past the main Japanese island of Honshu, past the smaller island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki was located, down the long string of tiny island jewels leading to Okinawa, and then to the Taiwan Strait, where the great mass of China loomed on one side and the island of Taiwan hid in the fog on the other. It was a journey of 1,400 miles. The People’s Republic of China was fiercely, theatrically anti-American. Just a few months earlier in 1958, ‘Red China’, as we called it, had unleashed deadly artillery barrages against Quemoy, Matsu, and other small islands within sight of its coast. The islands had been fortified by the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan, which the Americans supported. It was the task of the
Shangri-La
to turn back any invasion by the mainland: that is why the ship had an arsenal of nuclear warheads. I did not have much sophistication when it came to understanding politics or making war, but you said, Yukiko, that I did know the difference between right and wrong.

Both the mainland and Taiwan claimed loudly to be China’s legitimate government. Both governments were dictatorships. The mainland government called the Nationalist government
‘the running dogs of the US imperialists’. The Nationalists called their foes ‘murderers’ and ‘lackeys of the criminal Soviets’. I struck a neutral pose and tried to keep an open mind – an attitude that infuriated most of my superiors. They said I was disloyal. I was naive. I was sleeping with the enemy. I was red, a Communist, for sure. But you said when we talked about China – because, after all, you were born there – ‘Do not believe in propaganda. Believe only in yourself. You can be a very young and nice boy. You don’t have to be old and ugly to know what is true or false. And make sure you believe in me,’ you added, laughing.

Then you recited what sounded like a short poem, in Mandarin Chinese. And then you sang a little children’s song in what sounded like Russian and while you did that you stared at your face in the mirror, tied your hair in pigtails, and said in English: ‘This is how I looked when my brothers were killed and my father was murdered. Yes. This was me. I was an innocent, like you. You will not always be innocent. Enjoy your youth, your glory, while you can.’

The fighter pilots who flew F-8 Crusaders from the
Shangri-La
sometimes told me how, when their mission took them near the Chinese coast, small groups of MiG-17 interceptors with red stars painted on their tails would challenge them from a distance. Then, without firing a shot, the Chinese jets would wiggle their wings, spin round, and zip back to the mainland. One flier said a Chinese pilot once gave him a wave and that he was so shocked by the gesture he did not know whether he should return it, but fearing that he would be reprimanded if he waved back, he did nothing, and that still bothered him.