The Souvenir (14 page)

O
N THE NINTH
of September 1945—a week after the Japanese had signed surrender papers aboard the USS
Missouri
—the commanding officer of the Twenty-fifth Division was officially notified of the division's mission during the occupation of Japan: to disarm the Japanese and see that they stayed disarmed.

As the division yearbook understates, “Lack of information on the exact nature of the occupation made planning difficult.” Inventory and disposal teams were responsible for destroying Japan's war-making capabilities. There were thousands of tons of war matériel to be destroyed and disposed of, thousands of miles of roads to be covered in reconnaissance. Men from the Tropic Lightning Division were to provide guards for the trainloads of Koreans—forced laborers in Japan during the war—en route to embarkation ports on the island of Kyushu.

On October 19, 1945, after five weeks of cramped confinement on the USS
Natrona
, the Twenty-fifth Division finally disembarked in Nagoya. The city, the size of Detroit with a prewar population of 1,350,000, had been almost completely destroyed by American bombs. As he walked the ruined streets, my father wondered how a country “so poor and backwards dared to wage war against the United States.”

The son of a coat merchant, he noticed right away that peoples'
clothes were shabby, that no one wore good leather shoes, just shoddy wooden clogs or sneakers. Women dressed in baggy pants made of coarse cloth. “Only the comfort girls wear kimonos all the time—that's how the fellows can spot the houses of ill repute,” he wrote home.

Like most Americans, my father knew no Japanese personally. He knew little, if anything, about Japanese culture. Japanese films were unknown in America, Japanese literature largely untranslated. Not until 1953 was there a major exhibition of Japanese art in the United States. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japan was as mysterious for most Americans as it had been when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853. What my father knew about the Japanese he'd absorbed from wartime propaganda, or learned from bitter combat. Now he strolled among a stunned populace whose sons and brothers and fathers, until just recently, he had been determined to kill and who had been equally as determined to kill him. (In fact, the home of the Japanese Twenty-sixth Infantry—which had opposed the Twenty-fifth Division on Guadalcanal in the early stages of the war—was located right outside Nagoya.) My father's first reactions were predictably tense:

A few days later, he walked past a boys' elementary school, commenting in despair:

The sullen resentment on the faces of middle-age men, the women's smiles, the cheerful greetings of the children must have elicited a peculiar set of emotions. In his letters, he never admits to feeling he is in any danger, though he mentions an expedition by jeep with his buddies to a distant village, where it occurred to them that the inhabitants “may not even know yet that the war is over.”

After a few weeks, his letters take on a more positive tone. He noted that after the Japanese realized “we're not going to hurt them in any way” they seemed “sincerely happy to have us here.” They were “very polite and outwardly friendly—most cooperative, no trouble at all.” They were industrious workers and meticulously clean. “Sometimes I think even their custom of removing their shoes to enter their homes is a good one,” he conceded.

His biggest thrill came from the spectacle of the Twenty-fifth Division engineers collecting and destroying Japanese military equipment. “Our Cannon Company Boys are towing the Nip planes and then the tractors roll over them—then the flame throwers burn them up—I feel as gleeful seeing this happen as the Nazis did when they burned books.”

On his rambles through Gifu, the former resort town twenty miles north of Nagoya, where the Twenty-fifth Division eventually established a garrison, he kept his eye out for souvenirs to bring home, but none met his standards. “Most of the trading is for kimonos—but although one can get them for about ten packs of cigarettes, I
haven't seen any that I would be proud of. They are all made of sleazy rayon, commonly known as
shmate
—but most of the boys were grabbing anything they could get.”

There was one thing, however, that caught his attention. High on the shelf on the second floor of a bombed-out department store in Gifu was a doll—an emperor on a white horse. He wanted it for his daughter. Before he could reach for it, another soldier grabbed it.

L
LOYD WAS TOO
ill for sight-seeing. We'd moved to a hotel to spare Marjorie and her children from the flu and to ensure maximum quiet for sick bay. I prayed he'd recover by the time we were supposed to leave for Suibara, where Yoshio Shimizu's family lived. I left him sleeping fitfully in a darkened room with Tylenol and cold green tea at his reach and then I set off to explore Tokyo on my own.

I'd heard enough speculation about Asahara's minions and their cargo of sarin gas to convince me to stay off the subways. It was a beautiful spring day in Tokyo anyway, and I was glad to be above-ground. My destination was Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese honor their war dead. My map indicated that I could get there by walking through the Imperial Gardens surrounding the emperor's palace.

It was lunch time as I navigated through the crowds of suited salarymen, garrulous schoolgirls in thigh-high pleated skirts, elegant women wearing pastel spring ensembles in delicate shades of coral, topaz, seafoam green.

Friends who'd been to Tokyo told me not to miss the bustling fish market in early morning, the antique district, the fifties rock 'n' rollers at Harajuku. But I was irresistibly drawn to Yasukuni Shrine. It was a place that always came up in discussions of how Japan dealt with its wartime past.

“Meet me at Yasukuni,” was the traditional parting phrase that Japanese Imperial soldiers gave one another as they went into combat. In wartime Japan, the highest honor a soldier could look forward to was for his spirit to be enshrined at Yasukuni, a place where the emperor himself came to worship and pay respect.

I reached the Outer Gardens of the Imperial Palace, one of the few open spaces in the center of crowded Tokyo. Behind its graceful turrets and ancient stone walls lie the official residences of the emperor and his family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a passenger on a tram passing by the palace was expected to rise from his seat and bow to the emperor. The palace itself was a focus of almost mystical veneration during the war years. When Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender on August 15, some of his more fanatical Imperial Army officers performed ceremonial suicide in front of the palace enclave. (Several hundred of his exhausted and grateful subjects also gathered to cheer the news of war's end.)

The government established the imperial cult of State Shintoism in the late nineteenth century, at the time of the great government reform called the Meiji Restoration. Japan was then emerging from a feudal system into that of a nation-state. The absolute authority of the emperor, up to that time a powerless figurehead, was seen as a way to unify the country.

State Shinto encompassed the beliefs that the emperor was God, the direct descendent from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. The emperor was perceived as a father, and thus the people were annointed with Divine Power. Orders from a superior—in the government, in the army, at school—must be obeyed without question.

Before that, the Japanese freely mixed religious philosophies—Buddhism for funerals, Shintoism for weddings. Shinto was practiced primarily as a folk religion. People worshiped the divine in the
forces of nature. A big rock, a rice paddy, a stream could all contain a spirit. Buddhism wasn't appropriate for a state religion because it was an import from China. Shinto, by contrast, was homegrown.

By the early 1930s, Japan had become a military autocracy. Military drill was part of the regular curriculum in elementary schools. In 1931, the Japanese took over Manchuria in China, and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. In the increasing number of armed conflicts that ensued, as the “Buzz Saw of War” destroyed more families by consuming husbands and sons and fathers, the military became like a surrogate family with the emperor as the nation's great patriarch.

After 1936, any citizen who even dared to look at the God/emperor was subject to arrest by the police. After Pearl Harbor, the emperor was practically immured behind the walls of the Imperial Palace; he rarely ventured outside the grounds. The Japanese military wanted an emperor who was both distant and yet at the same time, awe-inspiring.

It was no coincidence that most photographs of Hirohito show him on horseback. From the lofty haunches of his magnificent white stallion named Shiroyuki (White Snow), the five foot three inch emperor was impressively regal. On the ground, he looked like a frumpy businessman.

In his surrender speech on August 15, 1945, the emperor addressed his subjects for the first time. In what has been termed “one of the great understatements in the history of politics,” the emperor told his subjects, “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.” The emperor asked his people “to bear the unbearable and endure the unendurable.”

By virtually all accounts the radio reception was terrible, and to the millions of his subjects who anxiously gathered to hear his
message, it was difficult to understand what was being said. Nonetheless, what was shockingly clear was that the emperor himself was speaking. He spoke with a human voice. From the battlefields of Luzon to the border between Russia and China on the Eastern Front, when battle-hardened soldiers were informed that the emperor had surrendered, many wept.

Walking through the gracious East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, what I sensed in the design of the landscape and distant palatial rooftops was remoteness. The current emperor was somewhere over there, across the moat that separated the impenetrable palace walls from the public park.

Visitors to the park were involved in their own private activities. Young lovers embraced on benches, an old man dozed in the sun, tourists flashed Fujis and Nikons, taking portraits of one another against the scenery of gingko trees and well-tended cedars. Some older women, wrinkled faces framed by odd white bonnets, dutifully raked leaves.

It was in the emperor's name that young soldiers climbed into torpedoes packed with three thousand pounds of explosives and were launched underwater toward American submarines and certain death. It was in the emperor's name that Japanese soldiers on Luzon placed grenades on their stomachs, pulled the pins, and blew themselves up.

The emperor cult was abolished by order of the Allies after their victory in 1945, a confusing reversal for many Japanese. What had been preached as official dogma was, after August 1945, prohibited as dangerous military propaganda. Ironically, it was the American government, on General MacArthur's advice, that decided to keep Hirohito on the throne, albeit not as a deity, and to shield him from retribution. MacArthur felt he needed the emperor and the military bureaucracy in order to rule “indirectly,” to rally citizen support and prevent civil unrest in a shattered society. A handful
of military officers were tried and executed for war crimes by the Allies, but the emperor himself was exonerated and his war responsibility denied and ignored. Most scholars agree that this decision by the Allies may have forever clouded the subject of Japan's war guilt. If the emperor, in whose name all barbarism had been committed for twenty years, was not guilty, then who was?

“Where is the emperor?” wartime Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo asked from Death Row shortly before he was hanged as a war criminal. Even during his long lingering illness, which led to his death in 1989, Emperor Hirohito never issued any statement admitting direct responsibility for his role in the war.

I walked underneath a massive metal torii gate—as tall as an eight-story building—and stepped onto a grand tree-lined promenade leading to Yasukuni. My shoes made a peculiar sound as I walked on the innumerable smooth pebbles.

A flea market sprawled informally on the outskirts of the park grounds. The vendors sipped tea and traded gossip. Along with pottery, kimonos, and old quilts, there were several samurai swords on lacquer pedestals, and a Nazi armband displayed atop a military trunk. The aroma of octopus pancakes wafted from an open-air lunch counter, nearly derailing me from my intended course. I continued on past the huge wooden portals of the Outer Gate, with its golden sixteen-petal chrysanthemum—the divine seal of the emperor—mounted far above my head. The shrine itself was a modest wooden structure, its interior off-limits to all but the attending Shinto priests and the families of the war dead. People stopped in front of it, tossed a few coins in the slatted wooden repository, clapped their hands in the Shinto custom, and made their wish or prayer.

The inner grounds of Yasukuni Shrine were bathed in the translucent glow of pale pink cherry blossoms so revered by the young kamikaze pilots as symbols of the evanescence of life. Under
the boughs, a number of older men wearing white armbands hosted an outdoor exhibit, mainly crude paintings of kamikaze pilots about to depart on their last, glorious missions. About six thousand Japanese, ages eighteen to thirty, died in suicide attacks in the war, many during its final weeks, some even after the surrender.