Soldiers in Hiding (17 page)

There is little more to tell. Once we were settled outside the city we heard the sounds of American planes so often that many of us no longer even noticed. Kazuko and her mother and the
sensei
and Milo and I were given a canvas shelter and were able to stay together; that's something. We cooked rice over a small hibachi built at a central location. The entire camp was in good order. It was quiet and no one interrupted the fragile thoughts of his neighbor. Bulletins were posted everywhere, testimonials as to how we were winning the war. It was the government's way of telling us, I think, that we were lost.

No one we knew, none of our neighbors and not even the
sensei
, had ever been so far south as Hiroshima, but it was the consensus that, across the surface of the camp, there was a perceptible movement of liquids at the precise moment that the American bomb was dropped. The
sensei
was doing tea, he said, and even the thick liquid in his cup turned a bit, bubbling once, like lava. Soon after that the planes stopped coming altogether and the bulletin board remained unchanged. Everyone was so sad, so resigned to the arrival of the Americans. They were all looking forward to more pain, to violence, this time perpetrated on a one-to-one basis, eye-to-eye. But I did not think that would happen. Now that the war was over the Americans would walk our streets calmly, I knew, and we would be left alone. It was I, not the others, who understood how it would really be. Incidences of violence would be rare. Insubordination would be unheard-of, and the Americans would be surprised at that. The Japanese would be model prisoners. That had been Major Nakamura's point.

One day, after a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, I left the camp by myself. I took the bus into town and walked the kilometer or so necessary to find that untouchable street, to find Meguro-dori, to see where we had lived. As I walked I got lost, for the landmarks I'd always recognized were gone. In a few places buildings stood as if whole, in others only the tops were missing, but if I walked into what used to be their centers I still found myself outside of things. As I got closer to where we had lived, the rubble and clutter grew, the presence of people diminished. I was wearing, stupidly, my only remaining pair of American pants, and I was busy, most of the time, brushing the soot from them, trying to step high to keep my canvas shoes clean.

Everything I saw reminded me of a forest fire I'd seen once, from the window of a train, as we'd slowly passed through the mountains of northern California. Buildings were stumps, streets were charred earth, schools and marketplaces were roughly burned fields. Perhaps because I wore such odd clothes I felt onstage and acted up a bit at the approximate location of our old
house. As I stepped high and turned in the surprising wind I came to the spot where Kazuko had hidden her beautiful bowls, and I found one of them, untouched by the fire. The leaves of the fig tree above the bowl were rolled tightly and still hung, most of them, like charred cigars, from the branches of the dead tree. I stopped moving then and dug, with my fingers, to see what else I could find under the earth. Our money was there, and a paper bag containing photographs. A few feet away, where our sleeping room had been, I saw the little feet of my calico cat, and that stopped me from searching further. The cat looked like a small version of the monks we had seen and I was nearly sick. Though I had been strong through human death and misery I could not face the roasted body of my cat. I retched once against the side of the fig tree and then stumbled clumsily away from there. I thought, even a charmed life then, even a life which appears to be protected by something outside what we call luck, can find a place in the ashes at any time. There is always room for it among the ruins.

 

THE END OF THE WAR CAME OUT OF A QUIET SKY. PEOPLE in the camps and on the street were increasingly nervous, increasingly willing to chatter. Though the sky had been silent for days there were still no Japanese soldiers home, except for the few who had been there as long as I had, the ones with the missing parts, some of whom already sat at the dirt edges of the camps, tin cups placed where their laps had once been.

Each day seemed exactly like the one before it, exactly like the next, but finally, as we were milling about, walking in aimless circles and nodding to those we passed, the camp commander got on the loudspeaker and told us that the next voice we heard would be that of the Emperor. We all laughed in disbelief and kicked the dirt about us gently with the toes of our shoes. But a voice did come to us, all sad and sounding, suspiciously, like the camp administrator himself. It was a high-pitched voice and, though it was almost impossible to understand, there was
something in it that reminded me of my father the farmer, dead to me for so long.

What? Surely if that was the Emperor speaking, the extraordinary measure was that he was doing so.

Certainly not! It was the Americans who were infringing upon Japan, with bombs! Territorial aggrandizement with bombs and with fire!

This was not the Emperor speaking, but some politician in his place. The people around me all listened with their heads bowed. Could it be that they were taken in?

Who was this man who spoke to us? He had not been inside these camps, that was clear. There were no outbursts here, would never be.

The loudspeaker crackled as it always did when the camp commander wanted us to know that an announcement was over.

“ Who was that really?” the tea teacher asked, and I found myself saying, “That was him. No question about it.”

It was the last blow needed to bring us to our knees. Large tracts of burn had scarred the city, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
gone, but it was the Emperor's speech that made us want to weep. Jimmy and Ike were dead. My son was woefully attracted to the scars that the fires had left, loved the look of destruction across the earth, was already showing signs of the oddness of his other father. Kazuko and her mother and her tea teacher stood beside me there in the relocation camp and what they felt, what I could see across their faces, was shame. It was over. The war was over. The bodies of the Buddhist monks could not withstand the lick of the flames any better than mine would have, but I had survived while most of the people I had known were dead, most of the remainder lost to me. Our losses were incalculable but it was interesting, I think, that though whole cities had been taken from us we were crying then for our most important loss. The virginity of the Emperor's voice.

 

THOSE DAYS AND THE DAYS FOLLOWING WERE VERY BAD for the Japanese. All around the war zone officers sat naked to their waists, the sharp points of ritual swords pressed tightly against their bellies. Their intestines came upon the world with an ironic kind of robust energy, all healthy-looking next to them on the failed ground. In Tokyo there was little impulse to die but there was chaos. There were only tents, and cardboard covers that people held around themselves when it rained.

After the war I put off, for a while, my search for the American officials who could give me safe passage back to the longed-for life of Los Angeles. After the war I could do nothing but lie about listening to General MacArthur telling us to forsake, forever, our wayward ways, to look toward peaceful means, toward trade and textiles. He said that he believed in Japan and that America would someday learn to forgive and forget. “ Let it be in the marketplace that you once more work your way to the top,” he said.

I can remember very well MacArthur's English speeches and the obscure, meaningless, translations given them by his aides. And the more I heard from MacArthur, the more he spoke, the surer I was that I would not be forgiven, that I would be among
those for whom the great general would not be able to find room in his vast and wonderful heart. His megalomania would be my downfall, I feared, and in my small room, with cardboard all around me I realized the irony of my fate. Toward the middle of that year the radio began to introduce MacArthur's speeches with music, you see, and the tune that they found to play was my rendition of “ Mood Indigo,” from a recording never released, Ike's best work on behalf of Jimmy's poor old band.

“
You ain't been blue
,” I sang, just before MacArthur came on with his somber tones, his gift of guilt. “
You ain't been blue. No… No… No …You ain't been blue …' Til you've had that mood indigo.…
” He wanted us unhappy in shades of the rainbow the Japanese could not even recognize. Yet the people loved him and it was not long until that tune, my tune, was heard everywhere in the rebuilding city. And when finally I came forward, as I knew I must, I was swept to fame by it. I had the first hit song of postwar Japan and when it was released to the general public it bore the name Teddy Maki, with no sign of the AyJays, no sign of Jimmy Yamamoto at all.

By the time the Korean war started I was the best-known entertainer in all of Japan. I began to mix my American tunes with those of the new composers, and I took Milo before the cameras so the people watching could see him grow, so that he could become their darling. I lost my American citizenship and Milo grew away from me and Kazuko became the wife that I have so often cheated in the sharing of my evening time. I have had Sachiko and I have had my little tricks, the ones I like to play on Americans, if I can find them, at train and subway stations. For a man whose early life took such odd turns my present one is very staid. If, internally, my chaos has continued, on the outside all seems serene and sequential, I am sure.

The Korean war brought MacArthur back to the front for a while. The Japanese people, in their fervor to be forgiven, to make up for all that they had done, tried to take the general's good advice to heart. There was a presidential election coming up and
MacArthur, with the settlement of Japan under his belt, let his broad-billed cap cast its shadow, for a while, over the semblance of a candidacy. It was clear that all of Japan supported him. I was well into my coasting period, well into the time when I did not think of my past at all, when the government of Tokyo posted a sign high across a stretch of street in Ginza, the busiest section of town.
We Play for MacArthur's Erection
! the sign said, and as I look back on it I realize that it spawned in me the embryo of my present life.
We Play for MacArthur's Erection
! Soon those transposed consonants were corrected but the truth of it was not lost on me. On the “Amateur Hour” my own small campaign was ignited by them. As the show's popularity grew I made sure that its taste and quality diminished. Surely, I thought, I will find a level of entertainment so low that it will defeat even Japan's appetite for the awful, the insipid, the mundane. But though I have tried, that level is still not found. “Mood Indigo” greets the nation each week so ironically, and the whole idea has made me rich. I am living in a country of farters and contortionists, a world as full of them as Arabia is of oil. Plasticity can control Japan as it has America, I have faith, though Japan is the last real holdout of the modern world.

I MUST HAVE DOZED IN THE BACK SEAT OF THE CAB FOR when I awoke the taxi driver was grumbling, anxious to get home himself, to drop me in the low street though I knew immediately that Sachiko had not returned. I let myself into her room with my latchkey. This room is Sachiko's personal domain, one that I should not have been in alone, but the coldness of the night precluded my waiting outside. Before entering the room I walked all around the building but the air was even cooler than in Roppongi and the alley behind the building was too narrow to traverse with ease. When I looked up I could not make out her room. I could see the moon, though, which showed me some debris along the path.