Payback wi-10, page 15
part #10 of WW III Series
Lieutenant Suzuki stamped on the dead wasp again as if to emphasize his unrelenting nature. “You fish a lot?”
“Fish?” Tayama shrugged — he felt American. “Yeah,” he said easily — not “yes,” but “yeah.” “So,” he added, grinning, “there a law against fishing?”
“No,” said Suzuki, turning his attention to Yoko, who was looking respectfully at this man who felt the need to kill insects twice. “No law against it. It’s just that you’ve been seen fishing a lot near Pearl.” Suzuki was still looking intently at Yoko, the trade wind that was whispering through the profusion of banyan leaves above them gently blowing a strand of hair across her slightly parted lips.
“So?” said Tayama, fighting his anger at how Suzuki was staring at Yoko, the lieutenant’s look lascivious in its intensity. “You want me to fish somewhere else?”
“Might be an idea,” said Suzuki, without taking his eyes off Yoko.
Tayama was about to say, “It’s a free country,” but that would be pushing it. At the same time, he was aware that too easy an acquiescence might confirm any suspicions Suzuki was harboring about him or Yoko. “Okay, but what’s the problem?”
“Security,” said Suzuki, his eyes shifting suddenly to Tayama. “Navy doesn’t like people getting too close to Pearl.”
“Okay,” said Tayama. “All this trouble with Tojo, right?”
“Yeah.”
Tayama nodded thoughtfully. “He’s a troublemaker, that one,” he said, and he meant it. “They ought to do something about him.” Suzuki sensed a hard conviction in the young Nisei’s voice, a tone that made it clear that this Omura really did not like the Japanese war minister.
Tayama was feeling increasingly nervous. If Suzuki mentioned his and Yoko’s nightly walks through Moanalua Gardens, it would tell Tayama that U.S. Naval Intelligence was doing much more than a simple security check on them.
“Don’t take offense,” said Suzuki. “It’s not just you. They don’t want anyone near Pearl.”
“Fine,” said Tayama.
Suzuki said nothing, and there was an awkward silence before he gave a nod and walked away. Another wasp swooped out of the banyan toward him; the investigator frenetically struck out again with the newspaper.
“He looks so funny!” said Yoko, hand to mouth as if to stem an explosion of laughter.
“Don’t!” Tayama said. “That’d really make him—” Taking Yoko’s hand, he turned about quickly to look back at the hula competitions, and they both shook with laughter, their outburst exacerbated by the sudden release of tension, the sound of their laughter fortunately subsumed by the clapping of the hula spectators. Tayama told Yoko he would have to find a better hiding place for the concealed camera in his tackle box. No doubt the Kempei Tai would press him to keep photographing Pearl, whether he kept fishing or not. Tayama and Yoko also reaffirmed their decision never to disclose the name of their shikisha—controller — to each other. That way, if they were ever caught, neither of them could identify the other’s contact. Tayama wondered just how many spies, willing or otherwise, the Kempei Tai had planted throughout these beautiful and, for him and Yoko, dangerous islands.
After they made love the next morning, he showed Yoko where the camera and lenses were, in the event something happened to him before he could move them unobserved from the apartment. It had been during one of the rare times when his snoopy landlady wasn’t at home that he’d taken the Voigtlander and lenses out of the false bottom of his fishing tackle box and placed them beneath a floorboard in his apartment. “If I’m not here,” he told her, “and you have to get the camera quickly, don’t bother fiddling about with the coins I use to lever it up. Go get the claw hammer from the cupboard under the bathroom sink. It’s in with the other plumbing tools.”
She nodded. They lay in silence together in the dreamy afterglow of their passionate release, and understood each other without talking, so that when she finally did speak it was in answer to a question he had not asked, but which she’d felt. “Don’t worry, Tay. I’m strong enough. I could pull up the whole floor with my fingers.”
He squeezed her shoulders, looking into the imperturbability of her eyes. “I hope you never have to.” He started to get up.
“No, stay,” she begged.
He turned his wristwatch toward her — it read 6:20. “Already late, sweetheart. We should have been out of here ten minutes ago. I’ll go ahead, set up the stall.” He kissed her. She dragged him back down. “Let them wait. No one wants to eat till ten. Everyone sleeps in today.”
“You’re a seductress!” he said happily, pulling away, unlocking his arms from her. She was strong.
“Your body,” she said, her eyes fixed on his nakedness, “is showing me you want to stay.”
He threw her a kiss. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been pouring rain outside, his mood after making love with Yoko was always upbeat. He felt, as Grandfather Omura would have said, like a lion. The fact that the early sun was shining in a near-cloudless sky, the blue not yet paled, and there was the myriad birdsong of barred doves, mynah birds, and sparrows, amid the fragrance of plumeria, whose white blossoms stood out amid the verdant hibiscus-splashed green of indigenous plants, only elevated his mood that much more. Instead of the downcast feeling that had always accompanied his morning walk to work before he met Yoko, he now had the feeling that with her he could endure. It was true: love did conquer all.
As if it was being performed just for him, sweet music floated across the harbor from Pearl’s Ford Island, where colors were being struck as the sailors in their Sunday whites began their day. The approaching dots of planes coming in over the Waianae Mountains to the northwest, Tayama thought, must be some kind of fly-past, the pilots’ timing impeccable. As the dots became larger, Tayama saw the bloodred suns painted on the fuselage and suddenly stopped, all his attention riveted on the planes and the black cigarlike appendages slung beneath them. Torpedoes. It was as if a giant’s hand had grasped his throat, his larynx paralyzed, unable to utter a sound though his mouth was wide-open.
It was 7:49 as Air Commander Fuchida, breaking radio silence, signaled, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”—Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! Received by Admiral Nagumo, commander of “Red Castle,” the carrier Akagi, 275 miles northeast of Oahu, the message from Fuchida was confirmation that the Japanese spearhead squadrons of forty-three Mitsubishi Zero fighters, forty-nine Nakajima bombers, fifty-one Aichi dive-bombers, and forty Torpedo bombers had attained complete surprise, catching the Americans off guard not only in Pearl Harbor but at other U.S. airfields and barracks throughout Hawaii, as well. Fuchida joked gleefully with his fellow pilots that they had caught the Americans “with their pants down.” Bombs were raining even before morning colors aboard the American ships had been completed, the Japanese pilots struck by how, save for the absence of several U.S. carriers, the layout in Pearl Harbor had been so precisely duplicated by Japanese Intelligence in the pilots’ practice mockups in Japan.
Tayama, like so many other inhabitants of Honolulu watching the massive raid unfold, could feel the concussion of the massive explosions in the pit of his stomach, the attack so savage and unexpected that for many the curling palls of thick, black smoke in the distance and the roiling eruptions of orange-crimson fire on Ford Island and belching fire from the docked and anchored fleet seemed surreal at first — it couldn’t possibly be happening, not against America’s Pacific bastion. It must be Hollywood people making a film.
Those too far away from Pearl to hear the screams and other agonies of the dying sailors and civilian employees who were trying to save themselves and their vessels nevertheless saw the carnage, marked by the great curdling black columns of oil smoke, so thick at times that it obscured the stricken battleships under attack.
Yoko came running down to join Tayama, who hadn’t moved since the first torpedo struck. The reek of the oil fires and the death and destruction was so strong, it had overwhelmed the usually flower-scented trade winds, indelibly impressing the pungent odor of the tragedy on the senses of those who saw and smelled it.
Out of breath, Yoko grabbed Tayama’s arm, gripping it tightly. “I–I—got rid of the camera. The landlady—” Yoko had to stop for air. “The landlady ran outside with everyone else as soon as the first bombs — Oh, Tayama, what’ll we do?”
It was as if he hadn’t heard her, his head shaking in stubborn disbelief, yet he could taste the fumes of burning oil. “Yesterday,” he told Yoko, “the radio announcer said our people and theirs were having discussions in Washington to avoid any—” Tayama’s voice was lost amid a bone-shaking detonation. A battleship had split apart as its forward magazine exploded from a direct hit, what had been its deck now a gaping hole, vomiting flame skyward as gunpowder packs for the leviathan’s big fourteen-inch guns blew up and ammunition cooked off amid the blazing infernos. Yoko was crying, utterly confused. “What do you mean?” she asked, shaking. “our people and theirs?”
Tayama didn’t answer. Instead, he quietly took her hand.
It was 8:30, just over a half hour after the beginning of the attack, and already seven of the American battleships—West Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, Nevada, Oklahoma, and California—had been either sunk, run aground, or engulfed in flames from explosions the likes of which few Hawaiians, even those who had witnessed Hawaii’s legendary volcanic eruptions, had ever witnessed.
“We have to get into town,” Tayama told Yoko. “One of the fishermen I know does a run to Kauai.”
Yoko had often dreamed of going there, to the lushly beautiful island, but as a visitor, not on the run. “How long will it take us?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, knowing only that Kauai was about 120 miles from Oahu. “Twelve, maybe fifteen hours. If we can leave straightaway, we should be there about midnight.”
Tayama flagged down a Waikiki-bound bus. The bus driver was also Japanese-American, the three of them avoiding eye contact. What would the American authorities do? How would they decide who were loyal Niseis and loyal immigrants and who weren’t?
Tayama saw a neighbor, also Japanese-American. They exchanged glances nervously. The man, holding tightly on to the back of one of the seats as Tayama and Yoko passed him, suddenly blurted out, “We’ll be all right.”
Tayama and Yoko said nothing. At the next bus stop an elderly white couple got on, the man glaring at the driver. “I’m not paying you!” he said.
“Walter!” the man’s wife snapped. “There’s no need for that. Pay the man.”
“See,” said Tayama’s neighbor, “we’ll be fine. Look at the German-Americans. They’re fine.” The man’s voluble, unsought opinion embarrassed everyone on the bus, especially Tayama and Yoko, the man’s public display not at all in the nature of the Japanese-born Americans. And it was delivered in such a tremulous voice that it suggested he was merely trying to reassure himself. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “We’ll be fine.”
As the bus neared the fishermen’s wharf a mile or so west of Waikiki, Yoko could see a huddle of a half-dozen or so people by several of the boats off to the right, involved in some kind of altercation with a Navy shore patrol, the latter’s highly polished white helmets and black-lettered MP armbands standing out in the bright sun against the surf-fringed turquoise ocean.
“Don’t get out,” Tayama told Yoko quietly, holding her hand tightly. “I don’t see his boat. We’ll go on to Waikiki and I’ll call his home. He might have anchored somewhere on the island’s northwest side, which is better anyway. It’s closer to Kauai.”
“Ha!” said their nervous neighbor. “All probably drunk. Saturday-night fling. Ha!”
Yoko smiled weakly. Farther on, at the stop a block from the pink Royal Hawaiian, which was one of only a few hotels near what is now the International Market Place, they alighted so that Tayama could use the pay phone in the plush lobby of the hotel. One of the American guests coming out of the hotel glowered at them, a bellboy trying to get the crowd waiting for the phone to form a line along one side of the lobby, where guests, early risers for a Sunday, were spilling out onto Kalakaua Avenue in confused alarm. Someone was yelling that Schofield Army Barracks were also under attack, someone else claimed that a Japanese submarine had been depth-charged off the entrance to Pearl Harbor. Perhaps, Tayama thought, that had been the first explosion he’d heard on the way to the stall.
Tayama and Yoko, avoiding the stares of guests coming and going through the lobby, kept their eyes fixed on the phone queue ahead of them, the hostility in the air so intense that for the first time in her life Yoko was aware that she could actually feel waves of hatred directed at her.
“Hey, Omura!”
Tayama turned his head back toward the hotel’s entrance.
“Come here!” It was the Naval intelligence officer, Lieutenant Suzuki.
Even before Tayama and Yoko stepped up into the back of the open khaki-green three-ton Army truck, they saw that their neighbor from the bus was among the dozen or so Japanese-Americans who had already been rounded up.
“Think we’ll be all right?” Tayama asked his neighbor as he sat down on the truck’s hard seat.
“Shut your face, Omura!” shouted Suzuki.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the third night of internment, as the moon slipped temporarily behind thick cumulus, Yoko, blindfolded, was taken by two men to a small, pitch-dark shed toward the rear of the camp. One of the men savagely beat her when she tried to protest, her blindfold slipping. He shoved an oily wad of cloth down her throat. After the rape, they told her if she reported it to anyone, her “Jap boyfriend” would be dragged out of the men’s barracks and would “get the shit kicked out of him.”
One of her attackers, though she could see neither clearly, given the darkness, was a black man, and the other sounded like Lieutenant Suzuki.
Bleeding, her face throbbing with pain, Yoko crept back to the women’s barracks and wept quietly in her bunk, determined not to raise a fuss, put Tayama in danger. The thought that Suzuki, a fellow Japanese-American, might have been one of the men seemed unthinkable until she recalled reports she’d heard of how in Korea and China some of the POWs captured by the Japanese Imperial Army had turned collaborationist, and had become more cruel toward their own kind than their Japanese captors.
Four days later she saw Suzuki enter the camp between two tall white guards and noticed, with satisfaction, that the naval intelligence officer’s former swaggering self-confidence had been replaced now with a stare of apprehension.
A few days later the rumor was that while Suzuki was still nominally a lieutenant in U.S. Naval Intelligence, he was being used not as an interrogator but merely as an interpreter and, as a further insult, in the women’s, rather than the men’s, barracks. He too was clearly under suspicion. She also saw Tayama for the first time since they had been herded into the Army truck. Not being married they, like all the other single men and women, had been segregated and couldn’t speak to each other. But Tayama didn’t have to be told what had happened to her. He could see the dark bruising on her face and arms, her swollen lips, and while he said nothing, the veins in his neck suddenly became taut, pulsating with rage at what he knew must have happened.
From that moment on, Tayama Omura’s one-time admiration for America and Americans froze and transformed itself into a hatred that would never leave him, a hatred increasingly rationalized by the way in which the innocent Nisei and Japanese immigrants in Hawaii would be treated for the duration of the war. Never mind the fact that later Nisei volunteers, many of them who, like Suzuki, had been either downgraded or dismissed outright from the National Guard and who were prevented from joining any of the armed services, eventually formed two segregated Nisei regiments and that one of these units, the 442nd, went into action in Europe, becoming the most decorated combat unit in the history of the United States. Or that one of the Nisei veterans, whose life was saved by a field blood transfusion from a member of a segregated black combat unit and who lost an arm during battle, was not only decorated but later became Hawaii’s first senator. For Tayama Omura all that mattered was that his beloved Yoko had been raped by an American.
Six weeks after the assault, Yoko realized her ill fortune had become compounded and drastically exacerbated. She was pregnant, so now she lived with the ever-growing fear — one of the worst to befall a Nisei — that she might be carrying a black man’s child. Not even white Hawaiians, she knew, could live with what was then considered a shame worse than death. In Yoko’s Japan it had always been accepted that black Americans were no better than savages. They were considered highly potent sexually but almost as low on the evolutionary ladder as the Chinese, those Chinese who had fled their turbulent country to Hawaii now taking a special, if quiet, delight in seeing the Nisei rounded up, receiving what the Chinese deemed the Nisei’s comeuppance. It was only fitting, from the Chinese view, that the Japanese pay not only for their attack against America but also for their continuing invasion of the Chinese homeland, memories of Nippon’s aggression in Manchuria and the rape of Nanking still fresh in the minds of many Chinese who had fled their homeland to escape the Japanese.
If there was any chance of Tayama’s hatred of the U.S. fading in the future, it was dashed forever on the evening of Sunday, March 15, 1942, when Yoko, despite the prohibitions of her deep Shinto upbringing, tried to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger in the women’s barracks washroom. Septicemia quickly set in and soon she went into shock. She was rushed to Queen’s Hospital but “expired following abortion of Caucasian/Asian fetus,” as the coroner’s report put it, “at 0315, March 17/42.”
From that day on, Tayama Omura, his hatred further fueled later by the fact that both his sisters were killed, along with tens of thousands of his fellow Japanese, by the A-bomb the Americans dropped on Nagasaki, which ended the war, became an implacable foe of the United States. The subsequent apologies by the U.S. government years later for its wartime treatment of Americans of Japanese descent did nothing to mitigate his hatred, so that during the Korean War of the early 1950s when he was approached by North Korea’s RDEI, Research Department for External Intelligence, he was ripe for recruitment to spy on America’s strategically vital Pacific base in Hawaii. If revenge hadn’t been motivation enough, he was brusquely informed by the Kempei Tai that his two brothers, who had surrendered with the other Japanese divisions in Korea at World War II’s end, might be eventually freed and repatriated by Pyongyang. But it was an unnecessary inducement, for what had previously been a resented task of espionage, through blackmail, against the Americans had now become a zealous and ongoing revenge for the death of his beloved Yoko and his two sisters.
