Something Like an Autobiography (13 page)

BEGINNING WITH
my second year of middle school, following the Great Kanto Earthquake, I became an incorrigible prankster. Since the Keika Middle School building had burned down, we moved into the borrowed facilities of a technology school near Ushigome-Kagurazaka. It was at that time a night school, so the buildings were not normally in use during the day. Nevertheless, all four classes of second-year students were crammed into the auditorium instead of individual classrooms. For those assigned seats in the back of the auditorium, the teacher at the rostrum not only looked like a dwarf, but his voice was barely audible. Since my seat was among those in the rear, I was far more diligent in mischief than in studies.

A year later, even after the school was rebuilt on a site near Shirayama and my mischievous tendencies should have been subsiding, I got worse. While we were at the technology school, the pranks I pulled were fairly rudimentary and harmless. But at the new school I did some things that were downright alarming. Once I even put together all the ingredients in the formula for dynamite we had learned in chemistry class. In the laboratory I carefully filled a beer bottle with this mixture and put it on the teacher’s lectern. When he heard what it was, he turned white as a sheet, very gingerly removed the bottle from the lectern, took it outside and sank it in the pond in the school garden. For all I know, that bottle still lies sleeping peacefully on the bottom of the Keika Middle School pond.

Another time I concluded that a boy in my class who was the son of a math teacher but who himself did very poorly at math would probably get the final-exam questions ahead of time. I enlisted some of my friends and we led the boy out behind the school building. At first he insisted he knew nothing, but in the end we got every last exam question out of him. We gave them to everyone else in the class, and on the examination the whole class miraculously scored one hundred percent. However, these marks naturally aroused the teacher’s suspicions, so now it was his turn to interrogate his son. It seems he, too, got a confession, because the whole class was subjected to another exam.
The result on the second exam was that the teacher’s son failed the course, and so did I.

Once a prank I knew nothing about was attributed to me. In righteous indignation, I ran over the tops of all the desks in the lecture hall wearing my spiked baseball shoes. But this was such extreme behavior that I didn’t confess to it, and I was subsequently surprised to see that my marks in conduct improved.

Toward the end of my third year in middle school, military training became part of the regular curriculum. A real Army captain was posted to our school, and things did not go well between him and me.

One day a mischief-loving friend of mine showed me a tin can he was carrying. It was packed full of gunpowder from the bullets we used in marksmanship practice, he said. He was sure it would make a wonderful noise if someone would smash it, but he couldn’t find anyone with enough courage to try it. When I suggested he go ahead and do it himself, he countered that he, too, lacked the courage and proposed, “What about you, Kuro-chan?”

Thus challenged, I could hardly refuse. “All right,” I said, and set the can at the foot of the stairwell in the school building. I then selected a big rock, carried it up to the second floor and dropped it. The sound was positively deafening, much louder than we had expected it to be.

Even before the echoes had died off the concrete walls, the Army captain, livid with rage, was upon me. I wasn’t a soldier, so he couldn’t hit me, but he dragged me off to the principal’s office. There he lambasted me with a fiery stream of reproaches. The next day my father was also summoned. I suspect that his distinguished military career had some influence at this point. I was fully prepared to be expelled from school, but I wasn’t, and no further disciplinary measures ensued.

I don’t recall that my father even scolded me very much. And although the principal was present while the Army captain reprimanded me in his office, I don’t remember the principal himself being angry with me. As I reflect on it now, it seems to me that both my father and the principal may have been opposed to compulsory military education.

Among teachers and military men there are of course exceptions to the rule, but there is a vast difference in viewpoint between the Meiji era—dominated by its elite military and business class—and the Taishō and Showa periods that followed, which were so marked by fanaticism. My father was a military man of Meiji who hated socialism. But he also reacted with horror to the murder of the internationally famous anarchist Ōsugi Sakae and others by an Army extremist in
1923, and when the assassin received no more than a ten-year sentence, my father burst out, “Madmen! What can they be thinking?”

My relations with the Army captain at Keika were very similar to my relations with the teacher who succeeded Mr. Tachikawa at Kuroda Primary School. He seemed to take great pleasure in calling on me to demonstrate everything he was trying to teach. I was never fit to be a model, and he enjoyed it when I botched something and made a fool of myself.

I thought over this situation very carefully and wrote a letter in old-fashioned Chinese-style prose in the book kept for correspondence between teachers and parents. It said something to the effect that “this child has a chest ailment, so please excuse him from carrying heavy implements like rifles.” I affixed my father’s seal to it and handed it to the Army captain. He made a dour face, but accepted its terms. From that time on, he could no longer abuse me with commands like “Target straight ahead, shoot from your knees!” or “Enemy target to your near right, lie down and shoot!”

But if a rifle was too heavy for me, a saber ought to be just right. The captain dragged me forward to be trained as a platoon leader. At my command, my whole class was supposed to spring into action. But my orders would contradict each other, or suddenly fail to emerge from my mouth, and the results were very strange. My classmates found this quite amusing, so they would march off in the wrong direction even when my commands were right, and when I did give wrong commands, they took great delight in carrying them out spectacularly. For example, when I said, “Forward, march!” they should have shouldered their rifles and moved ahead, but instead they would start walking with their rifles dragging along the ground behind them.

They were especially delighted when the whole column was marching straight for a wall. If I panicked and didn’t come out with a command to change direction immediately, they would happily plow into the wall, noisily scuffing at it with their boots. I would get out of the way and give up. No matter what the Army captain said, I would feign ignorance and say nothing. Seeing this, my classmates would all the more faithfully attempt to carry out my order and some would even try scaling the wall. The Army captain would stand there aghast until I came out with another command.

My classmates claimed that their intention was not to embarrass me, but to tease the Army captain for being such a mean-tempered fellow. They showed their consistency most clearly when the military-education inspector came and we were to carry out a practice attack for him. While we were waiting for our turn to perform, I spoke to my
classmates: “All right, let’s show this captain what’s what. There’s a big mud puddle right in front of where the inspector is standing. When we get there, I’m going to give the command to lie down, so everybody do it right.” They all nodded. At my command “Charge!” they all burst into a breakneck run, and when I yelled “Down!” just before the mud puddle, all gustily threw themselves into the mire. A great spray flew into the air, and we were all turned into mud dolls.

The inspector bellowed, “That will do!” I quickly glanced at the face of the captain, standing at attention next to the inspector. He looked as if he had bitten into something that he had thought was a steamed rice cake but turned out to be horse manure. The strained relations between us continued until I graduated from middle school.

It seems to me now that this relationship constituted my second rebellious phase. I feel I concentrated all my youthful resistance on this one man. I say this because during this period I showed no antagonism toward my family or anyone else—only this Army captain received the full brunt of my hostility.

When I graduated from Keika Middle School, I was the only one in my class who failed military education. I did not receive a certificate of commissioned officer’s competence. Moreover, fearing what the captain might say to me at the graduation ceremony, I stayed home. But later when I went to pick up my diploma and passed through the school gate on my way back home, there he was lying in wait. He came after me, planting himself in my path and glaring menacingly. “Traitor!” he roared. Passers-by stopped in amazement and stared at us. But I had been prepared for a scolding from him, and I didn’t waste a moment with my response: “I have graduated from Keika Middle School. You as the military officer attached to the school no longer have the right or the responsibility to say anything to me. Finished!” His face changed several colors with the facility of a chameleon. I waved my rolled-up diploma at that face and turned my back on him. After I had gone a short distance, I turned around and looked back to see him still standing there.

MY FATHER’S PEOPLE
are from Akita in the northern part of Honshu. For this reason, apparently, my name is listed with the Tokyo Association of Akita Prefecture Natives. But my mother was born in Osaka, and I myself was born in the Ōmori district of Tokyo, so I really don’t have the feeling that I am a native of Akita Prefecture or that it is in any way my home.

As if Japan weren’t small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language, I don’t feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?

My father’s home in the back country of Akita has been altered cruelly. In the brook that flows through the center of the village where my father was born, where once lovely grasses and flowers bloomed, there is now refuse: teacups, beer bottles, tin cans, laborers’ rubber shoes and even knee boots. Nature takes good care of her appearance. What makes nature ugly is the behavior of human beings.

When I visited the Akita countryside in my middle-school days, the people were truly simple. And it is not as if the scenery there were the most picturesque imaginable. It was ordinary enough. But at the same time it was replete with a simple beauty. To be accurate about it, the village in which my father was born was called Toyokawa Village and lies in the Senboku-gun district of Akita Prefecture. You used to be able to get within about eight kilometers of it by train and then walk the rest of the way. I remember that there were two oddly named stations along the line, one called Gosannen (“Three Years Later”) and one called Zenkunen (“Nine Years Earlier”). The latter station no longer exists. Apparently these two localities were named for famous battles of the Hachiman Taro clan, relatives of the
medieval Genji warriors. Looking out of the lefthand side of the train, you could see a range of mountains where, according to legend, Hachiman Taro Yoshiie himself had his battle encampment. I later learned that these remote events actually had a connection to me.

In my entire lifetime I have been to my father’s native village only six times. Two of those excursions took place during my middle-school years. Once was when I was a third-year student, and I can’t for the life of me remember when the other time was. Nor can I remember what happened on the second trip—it has all become inextricably tangled in my mind with the first one.

As I ponder it, it occurs to me that the reason for this is that the village had not changed at all in the interval between my two trips. The houses, streets, brooks and trees, even the stones, grasses and flowers were so much the same from one trip to the next that I have no means of distinguishing between what should be two separate memories. It was as if time stood still even for the people in that village, for they, too, remained completely unchanged, left behind by the world. Many people there had never eaten “foreign” foods like breaded pork cutlets or rice curry. No caramels or cookies were sold in Toyokawa either, because there were no houses that doubled as shops. Even the primary-school teacher had never seen Tokyo. He asked me what people there say as a greeting when they go visiting—as if Tokyoites surely spoke some odd, incomprehensible dialect.

Carrying a letter from my father, I went to visit one of the homes in the village. The old man who came to the entry to ask what my business was listened to me a moment and then rushed back into the interior of the house. In his place an old woman came out and with the utmost courtesy conducted me to the formal room with a tatami-mat floor, where she seated me in the honored guest’s position with my back to the art alcove. Then she disappeared.