Burial in the Clouds (2 page)

Petty Officer Yoshimi is among the surviving crew of the aircraft carrier
So-ryu,
which was sunk at the Battle of Midway Island. He is a veteran of ten years' standing, yet before long we will outrank him. And if we find ourselves together on the same battlefield, we students must assume command, taking into our hands the lives of officers like these. We cannot treat the matter lightly. I can well imagine that it won't be pleasant for these drill instructors to see students like us—men who don't know their left from their right—outrank them, and in such short order, too. But at least our instructor, Petty Officer Yoshimi, has the good humor to say, with a laugh, that he “has now become a college professor.” Besides, he takes his responsibilities seriously and never makes unreasonable demands of us.

As for the examinations: It is a piece of cake for us to tackle Japanese and composition, but we humanities students are totally out of our element in mathematics and physics. I have only the faintest memory of ever hearing such terms as “Ohm's law,” or Helmholtz's “Conservation of Energy,” and
that
was when I was in junior high school. Everybody is having trouble. However, navy custom fosters a decidedly strong rivalry among its various divisions and outfits, and to that rule the Student Reserve Officers Exam is no exception. The drill instructors would do anything to avoid the dishonor of producing a failure from their own outfits. So the proctors themselves cheat. Petty Officer Yoshimi paused once beside my desk and rapped it with a pencil. I turned, but he stepped away as if nothing had happened. Whereupon I scrutinized the paper: I had given the wrong answer to one of the questions in mathematics. I looked around me and saw our proctor rapping, here and there, as he walked among the desks.

In the evening, we had a special course in navy calisthenics.

December 28

Our third time rowing the cutter. About fifty strokes. I can think of nothing more beautiful and orderly to look at, and yet more arduous to do myself But I have to pull my own weight.

Navy mottoes: Iron will. Order. Initiative. And above all,
praxis.

But honestly, I know my heart always harbors the antitheses of all these elements of virtue, side by side with each of them. Weakness. Slovenliness. Passive maintenance of the status quo. And above all, just going through the motions. As for that last one: I'm really not shrewd enough to pull it off, though I sometimes feel that you
have
to pull it off if you want to survive in the military.

“Ingenuity,
Yoshino,” Fujikura said to me bluntly during a cigarette break.
“Ingenuity.
I tell you this because you're rather naively honest. We can do what we're asked to do without letting ourselves be cast into the mold of this insular navy world. If you can't salvage at least that much independence, to what purpose have you lived such a free and easy life at high school and university? Of course, the brass would be furious if we didn't at least
appear
to fit their mold, and that's where the ingenuity comes in. You know, the novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa once said, ‘There is also a truth that can only be told through lies.”'

Fujikura still won't use military talk like
kisama, ore,
and omae,
*
unless a supervisor is within earshot. He seems to enjoy putting up a little resistance. I don't always agree with him, but I can listen to anything with an open mind so long as it comes from Kashima or Fujikura. Among the four of us, it's Fujikura and Kashima who rebel most strongly against the navy atmosphere. Sakai is the most amenable, though he's timid and somewhat whiny. And I'd say I'm just about in between.

The navy adheres to a diet of brown rice, and before each meal a voice bellows instructions from the loudspeakers.
Dinner is ready! Wash your hands! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly.

We always heard that in the military you have to eat quickly, or else they teach you a lesson. To prepare ourselves we even staged an eating contest at a restaurant we used to haunt called Ogawa-tei, if only for fun. But I find that in the navy it's actually the other way round. I don't know whether this has anything to do with it, but the sailors, to a man, empty their bowels with remarkable frequency, quite as if their bodies had somehow altered. I myself take a good hard shit three times a day, every day. The bathroom is always packed during short breaks. If you delay getting in line, you miss your chance. It's quite painful to engage in battle drills while holding at bay so urgent a call of nature. This is especially true when you have to stand at attention. Your lower abdomen feels bloated, and you have to struggle not to let out a fart. Maybe I should get up in the middle of the night and finish off a portion of the business. That might be an example of “ingenuity.”

January 2, Showa 19 (1944)

A new year begins. Our first march to Iwakuni. For the first time since joining the navy, I breathed the air of the outside world. Chickens clucking. Children playing battledore and shuttlecock in their Sunday best. A drunk peddler taking a leak by the road, his bicycle at his side. The sights and sounds of the holiday impressed me vividly. The waters of the Iwakuni River ran clear, with round, white pebbles covering the bottom. The landscape around the Kintaikyo Bridge reminded me of the country near Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, in the western suburbs of Kyoto. We returned to base in the evening.

I want something sweet. For two weeks I have been craving
botamochi.
What preoccupies me most since I entered the navy? Well, I find myself always thinking of food. I don't have any sexual desire at
all,
probably because I haven't had any experience, but I certainly desire
mame-daifuku,
beautifully browned over red-hot charcoal. Just one more time I want to sit down to some breaded pork cutlets at Ogawa-tei.

We are eating white rice for the first three days of the New Year. I am so used to staring at brown rice day after day that freshly cooked white rice, with its moist, pearly finish, is precious in my sight. Lunch was served at 1000 on New Year's Day: salad, steamed fish cake, herring roe, sweet black beans, beef, and soft azuki-bean jelly, immediately followed by two parcels of treats, an apple, and four satsuma oranges. We were told, however, that we had to polish it all off at the table. We were forbidden to set anything aside for later. We wondered why, but as they say, we haven't mastered soldiering yet if we are forever asking why. Nobody openly opposes that idea, and yet isn't it true that skepticism is the father of modern science? And isn't the navy, above all, founded upon the modern science of the West? I mean, the navy is hardly the infantry. Naval officers know perfectly well that soldiership alone can't move its warships and aircraft. Isn't this all something of a paradox?

Anyway, it seems that if you wish for something from the bottom of your heart, you will be heard. Last night, unbeknownst to me, someone laid three dried persimmons in my hammock. And there was another anonymous gift today of five miso-seasoned rice crackers. It requires supreme skill to eat rice crackers without making any noise. They say that, even now, with the world cut in two by the war, there are ways to get steel from Sweden or equipment from the United States, if you only have the will to do it. And in much the same way, we aren't shut off completely from the outer world. For example, the father of S. in my outfit is a man of some influence in the city of Otake, and he manages to send food in through the executive officer at the naval barracks. This accounts for the miso-seasoned rice crackers, a bequest from S.

Kashima belongs to the outfit bunking next to us. As New Year's Eve wound to a close, he was startled by a sharp, goblin-like cackle, coming at him from above: “Hey, Kashima! Kashima!” Before he could recover from the shock, he was hauled up onto a broom closet. There, with Drill Instructor Ishii at his side, Kashima found himself forced to wolf down dried persimmons and twenty-odd boiled eggs. The story goes that Kashima's father came for a visit bearing various morsels for him to eat during the New Year holiday. However, he was not allowed to see his son. “Well, it's a shame to waste this,” he said. “Please share it with the instructors.” And he left all the food for them. Many fathers and mothers reportedly come out to visit their sons only to be turned away. Some try to bribe their way in, and the drill instructors have been known to wink at the practice. I don't like this sort of business, but I could sell my soul when it comes to food. Needless to say, last night's dried persimmons came from Kashima.

During study session New Year's Eve, a fellow got caught drawing elaborate pictures of an
oyako-donburi,
curried rice, and all manner of cakes. This was M., of the 6
th outfit, and he used pencils in twelve different colors to sketch these painstakingly detailed pictures. But no matter, they ended up torn to bits. He received a slap on each cheek from the division officer. Fortunately, I have yet to suffer a blow since joining the navy.

January 7

The cold last night chilled me to the bone, and, sure enough, we had snow this morning. It has been falling steadily ever since, blanketing the mountains of the Chugoku district and the islands of the Seto Inland Sea.

Bending and stretching exercises. Jogging. Then rowing drills in the cutter.

“Make it snappy! Go!” Petty Officer Yoshimi barked out his commands, banging on the broadside. But that was just while we were boarding the boat, and with the division officer overseeing the exercise. Once we were out in the offing, he ordered us to cross oars, and then he gave us a little talk. We snuggled up together to get warm, like a group of chicks, and rubbed our hands as we listened. Itsuku-shima Island, which before had always looked blackish-blue, lay powdered in the snowy inland sea. A thin layer of snow covered the cutter, too. I could make out two German submarines in port.

Petty Officer Yoshimi told us the story of how his warship, the
So-ryu,
went down at Midway Island. That battle was a watershed defeat for Japan, and we have now lost nearly all our big carriers: the
Akagi,
the
Kaga,
the
Ryu-jo,
the
So-ryu,
the
Hi-ryu,
and the
Sho-ho.
The auxiliary aircraft carrier
Chu-yo
was also sunk recently. According to the officer, the
Chu-yo
used to be a Japanese mail-boat called the
Nitta-maru,
but it was converted into a warship. Only two vessels, the
Shokaku
and the
Zuikaku,
remain in service as purpose-built aircraft carriers. From now on, he explained, the war will be an extremely difficult affair for Japan. He doesn't think our prospects are necessarily as bright as the radio reports from Imperial Headquarters suggest. The men who have taken part in actual combat know this better than anybody else. of us, he added, should understand that our lives will likely end sometime next spring; we must prepare. Officer Yoshimi spoke with feeling, and his words absorbed us utterly. We forgot even to rub our hands. Before long, he also said, we will join operational units as officers, and our sense of responsibility might well lead us to impose severe discipline on our subordinates. The more earnest and dedicated we are, he suggested, the more we will be prone to do that, but the fact is that there are many occasions when neither the character nor the degree of the discipline we enforce has any bearing at all on the wider situation. It is perfectly all right to tighten the reins, to push the men, or even to beat them if necessary. However, Officer Yoshimi said that he wants us all to take care to discern
when
to come down hard, and also to slacken up a little bit, occasionally turning a blind eye to the men. How gratifying that is for deprived young soldiers! He urged us never to forget how we felt during our brief period as seaman recruits at the naval barracks.

Later, a man in my outfit criticized Petty Officer Yoshimi. He claimed this little speech was done from calculation, that Officer Yoshimi says we'll all be dead next spring, but all the while is just shrewdly looking out for his own hide in a way perfectly characteristic of petty officers. Well, I can't agree, and it is impertinent of that fellow to say such a thing, pulling a rank he doesn't even have yet. If we indulge ourselves in
needless
conceit and lose our humility, we surely invite
needless
troubles.

It's so cold that my fingers are almost numb, but I'm getting the hang of rowing the cutter. Also we are learning light signals, semaphore, and rope work. Rope work involves the half hitch, two half hitch, bowline knot, bowline on the bight, sheet bend, log hitch, and so on, and is all rather complicated. We learn to clean the toilet and do the laundry, how to wash socks as well. It seems I'm gradually assimilating myself to navy life. They say we'll leave this barracks on the 25th of this month at the latest.

We had hot tofu miso soup and a sardine for dinner. The fish, complete with its head and tail, had plenty of fat, and the saltiness penetrated it. Quite good. I saw a guy slip a second sardine into his bowl of rice, taking advantage of its being his turn to serve the meal. He hid the fish well, but inevitably it poked its head out as he ate. Still he kept at it, cool as a cucumber. Is this what we should expect of someone from the law college at Kyoto University? His conduct is beneath contempt, but all the same I clearly envy him that one sardine—intensely. Why do I get so hungry?