July 8, 1944: A Man Dies, Where the Story Starts

He dies because he must – because without his death, there is no story, and, in the end, no history itself. And because history, by its nature, follows linear time, it goes forward, leaving behind bodies of men and women whose worlds and dreams die when they die.

 

But here is a man. He has just turned twenty-eight half a month ago. He has three children and a wife back home in Japan. He is a sergeant with a dozen or so men under his command, and he is in New Guinea. He is a seasoned soldier: first, as the Emperor’s guard, then on a tour of duty in China for two years. His third and final tour on this green island where men die from hunger as quickly as seven-day cicadas, where they die from malaria and simple infection. Until here, he did not know that men die, most of all, from homesickness so keen that the soul disengages from its body even while not asleep to make its way back home. He has received a command, the first in eighteen months: to march toward Driniumor River for the final offensive attack.

 

And in the next scene, he lies by the riverbank, dead. As he dies, he takes with him the memory of his first embrace, his love, his thoughts, his dreams, and all the hopes he never actualised during the life he lived – so short it could have been the mere sigh of a god.

 

 

1936: What the Soldiers Want to Believe

You become a god when you die in war. No one will forget you – after all, people may forget the names but not the gods themselves. Your family will be honoured as Homare no Ie – the Revered Home. They will receive a letter from your commanding officer, praising how gallantly you fought until your last breath or how you threw yourself in front of your brother-soldiers to save them. Don’t worry, you will never die a miserable death in this war, in this army. You are a chosen child of the Emperor-god; you are invincible. Your cause, just and heroic. If you leave a wife behind, the Emperor-god will take care of her. She will be compensated, first with consolation money, then with a pension, all based on your rank (do take care to rise in rank, because your family, too, will be affected). Your body will be retrieved. Be sure about that. No one will leave a body behind to be buried in the heathen land. You will get a proper salutation once your ashes return to the motherland. Twice a year, the Emperor will come visit you and pay respect at your new home at the Yasukuni Shrine; your family, too, will be given a round-trip ticket to come see you. But there’s a trade-off. No one in your family will be able to mourn for you openly; none of them will be able to put you under the family gravestone. You will no longer have your name. You will have to stand off in the corner of the plot, under a pointed gravestone, your enshrined name woven in with the characters that signify that you were once a soldier, and even in death, you remain as such. Your family will only be able to talk about you in the darkest hours of the night when no one is around, whispering the smallest details that make you a singular human being, a unique member of a family, amongst themselves like a secret. What a small price to pay for the honour.

 

 

1938: A Man’s Worth

 

A man is worth six yen a month, or the equivalent of thirty kilograms of rice. No one ate that much rice in a month. Not back in 1938. That would have lasted a year back then. But if you are a man, and if you have been chosen as the child of the Emperor in the Imperial Army, you will start out at that rate. And if you need a good fuck, because you’re tired and sick to death of fighting one battle after another against an invisible army, day after day, slicing off the fingers of your brother-soldiers to carry them around, so that later, when there is no battle, you can cremate them all to send the ashes back home; when the mortars explode all around you and you pray to gods, any gods, because you are scared shitless and there’s nothing you can do but wait to die; when you have lost your way and you don’t know what is real and what is not real anymore, and you need something, someone, you can buy a woman – a comfort woman – for one and a half yen. Thirty minutes. You can buy a cheaper one – a Chink whore – for one yen for thirty minutes. With your salary, four women a month. But no one can live off women only. And if you are the breadwinner of the family, your savings books mean a lot more than women. A cheap fuck. Remember: you still need to buy extra socks, extra shirts, alcohol, and cigarettes. You can write home and ask for these things, if they are well-off, but more than likely, they aren’t. In this war, whether you are an Imperial soldier or women serving as the Imperial girls’ force, your life does not amount to much.

 

 

November 1943: Papua New Guinea

 

We rename the landscape, one place after another, undoing the former coloniser’s names, and we rename our river after another into the familiar language: Driniumor River becomes Bandou River, and here and there, Tazaki, Tsurumaki, are renamed after the rivers back in the innerland, to conjure up the memory of the home we can hardly see any more, not even when we close our eyes at night. To ease the disorientation, the homesickness, we tame the unfamiliar jungle island into a familiar place, a place we can, for a moment, mistake for what we left behind six thousand miles north.

 

 

The Old Japanese Saying

 

Give us three years of failed harvest but do not give us three days of war, an old man mutters. Give us three years of hunger but do not take our men away. When a man is torn from the farm, there are not enough men to toil the land, the gods are angered at being abandoned. So like children, and in their bounty and in their anger they are children, simple in their punishment, loving in their bounty, as long as they are loved. Give us three years of failed harvest and we will sell the girls for the price enough to survive the season; we will sell them so that they can shoulder the debts and so we can live a little longer. But give us three days of war and we are done for.

 

 

Mid-March 1945: The Emperor-God Observing Bombed-Out Tokyo

The god walks amongst us. He walks. He sees. He observes. Then he gets back in his car and the driver starts the engine. The Emperor-god does not look back. When asked how the observation went, he may answer, in His god-language so archaic that only prophets can decipher, that His great city is flattened, that the Americans cleaned the city in the darkness while he and his family huddled in the strongest bunker in the world, in the deepest womb of the imperial palace. His children have been squirreled away like important artifacts, as the prophets have done with priceless statues of Buddha and paintings. Nothing in the world would have hurt him, not the B-29s, not the atomic bombs being developed on the other side of the Pacific, under the deepest cover of the desert. Though he is a god, all knowing, he does not know that before he came, before he even thought of where to go, the prophets chose the place, told the bombed-out people where to hide so as not to pollute his sacred sight, commanded them to clean out the rubble, the charred bodies, and where to take the bodies to. The Emperor-god saw the sanitised version of the war, he might have believed what the prophets told him, we’re winning the war, and when the war is over, he will see the sanitised versions of his own country as he makes pilgrimages throughout Japan, and everywhere he goes, the railroads will be rebuilt, the roads will be repaved or repaired, giving him the sight of the country well on its way to reconstruction. He will never see the true devastation of the war.

 

 

August 9, 1945: The Border Bending, the Nation Erased from History

 

The border bulges inward, the Soviets pushing it in. Breaking it. Tanks roll in from the north, bringing with them boy-soldiers with hair the colour of the Siberian snow and eyes of the clearest lake filled with the water of melted arctic ice, who march with rifles as part of their bodies, as if they were born with them, as if they were born for this war, just for this war. They come from north. They roll into one village after another, laughing and killing, because this is their first war, because it is an easy war, because they didn’t know that war could be this easy: hunting down old men and women and children. No men are there to stop these boy-soldiers. Of course, there was slight resistance when they first crossed the border, but what of these older men who didn’t put up much fight, men who carried their ancient rifles awkwardly, as if they never knew what rifles were? The sky was empty and so was the earth; no planes or tanks met these boy-soldiers. The boy-soldiers just aimed, pulled the triggers, and these men just fell, even without taking a shot. Just like the war movies showed: pop, pop, and the enemy falling. And now, look how these women and old people run like rabbits, leaving behind bags, babies, and old people who can’t run. The boy-soldiers come across village after village full of dead bodies, stabbed to death, strangled, poisoned, villagers who killed themselves in their moment of desperation, and the boy-soldiers shake their heads, can’t understand these Nipponese, and continue on their way southward, following the escaping Manchurians. The country does not exist anymore. Manchuria is a country that existed for a blink in the eye of history, but it is no more.