Kamikaze (15 page)

The sign read: “The buck stops here.”

Yasukuni Shrine

Vancouver

October 31, Now

Genjo Tokuda unsheathed Kamikaze and carried the sword out to the deck of the house at the top of the British Properties. There, he assumed the stance of a samurai warrior, just as his father had taught him to do so many decades ago in that Zen garden fronting his family’s Shinto shrine.

“Banzai!” the old man cursed at the dark, slicing the
katana
down as if to cleave the distant chaos on the hump of the Lions Gate Bridge. Then he slashed down again to bisect the still-smoking pier that had been torpedoed by the kamikaze plane.

That felt good.

The
kumicho
shivered.

Through all those years, from 1945 to now, Tokuda had yearned to exact tonight’s revenge.

First, the bridge.

Then, the pier.

And next, the Sushi Chef ...

Back in 1945, Genjo Tokuda had seen out the war as a prisoner in a U.S. POW camp. Hospitalized for the burns and deep wounds he had suffered on Okinawa, he—unlike his commanders in that cataclysmic battle—had been denied the honorable death of a heroic samurai: hara-kiri.

Instead, he was demeaned.

Through a veil of morphine that quelled the agony racking his body, he glimpsed—through the half of his face that wasn’t a reddish scar—someone watching him from the foot of his hospital bed. The soldier—a muscular man with a shaved head and hateful eyes—was dressed in khaki from cap to boots.

“Okinawans are hurling themselves off suicide cliffs,” snarled the Yank. “Know why?”

His enemy’s body language conveyed what he meant, but Tokuda didn’t reply.

“Because they think we rape and torture those we capture. Know why?”

Again, no reply.

“Because they were told by Nips like you that to join the Marines, a leatherneck like me has to kill his own mother.”

Silence.

“Know what?”

The drugged samurai waited.

“You fuckers are fucking right!” the jarhead said, and he spat on Tokuda’s bed.

“Good morning, Monkey Man.”

Tokuda forced open his eyes.

“I don’t know your name,” the jarhead said, “’cause they found no papers on you. So I’ll call you Monkey Man, since that’s what you are to me. You like cartoons?”

Today, the Marine was dressed in sage green. His bloodshot eyes tattled that he had spent last night in the bar, and he had nicked his face twice while shaving.

Tokuda wondered if henceforth his own facial hair would be only half a beard.

“Here’s Bugs Bunny.”

His tormentor held up a frame from the film “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips.” It showed the rabbit battling it out on a Pacific island with a short, bucktoothed, slant-eyed “Jap” in big, round glasses. The Marine dropped the cartoon onto the bed.

“No? What about Popeye?”

In the next cartoon, a squinty-eyed sailor clenched a corncob pipe in his teeth and had rolled up his sleeves to bare an anchor tattoo on his huge forearm. “Let’s blast ’em Japanazis!” read the caption, and beneath was an ad for the U.S. Treasury: “A 25¢ war stamp buys 12 bullets.”

“Get it?” said the Marine.

Tokuda got more than the jarhead thought, for he had seen similar cartoons about the war in Europe, except those were directed at Hitler’s Nazis, not the German people. In the Pacific, however, U.S. hatred got spewed at all Japanese, who
were viewed as a subhuman race of animalistic demons.

“You’re a sap, Mr. Jap,” jeered the next cartoon in bamboo script. His wrists going limp to illustrate his taunt, the Marine mimicked Popeye, calling Tokuda a “yellow-skinned Japansy.”

One by one, the cartoons fluttered down onto the bed like autumn leaves. In “Jap Trap,” a mousetrap had crushed the neck of a rat-like Japanese soldier. In those titled the “Tokyo Kid,” a snaggle-tooth monster with drooling lips clutched a bloody dagger in its clawed fist and sneered in pidgin English at American factory workers.

The jarhead aped, “Tokyo Kid say ...”

In the next one, the same degenerate monster cowered in fright.

“Tokyo Kid say ...”

Then it was over.

August 15, 1945.

The first time Japanese nationals ever heard their emperor’s voice, it came by radio from a phonograph record that had been smuggled out of the palace in a laundry basket of women’s underwear. That thwarted an attempted raid on the Chrysanthemum Throne by a thousand outraged officers who were intent on heading off dishonorable surrender by assassinating Emperor Hirohito.

“The enemy now possesses,” intoned the Son of Heaven, “a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives ... It is according to the dictates of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

In short, this time the Divine Wind had
not
saved Japan.

By then out of hospital and caged behind barbed wire, Tokuda had vowed to follow the Way of the Warrior, as had his heroic commanders at the Battle of Okinawa. In the code of
bushido,
surrender shames one’s family. Hara-kiri by sword is the warrior’s honorable death, and according to what Tokuda had heard ...

General Ushijima was headquartered in a cave that snaked through a prominent coral formation at the southern shore of Okinawa. The flat summit was defended by Japanese snipers, mortar men, and machine-gunners. Below the jagged pinnacle, the cave had two outlets: one facing land, and the other above the sea.

Backed by flame-throwing tanks spewing five thousand
gallons of napalm, the Yanks captured the crest of the hill on June 20. A surrender demand was rejected by Ushijima, and his men then launched counterattacks to push the enemy back. Explosives sealed the mouth of the cave on the inland slope.

At 10:00 p.m. the next day, Ushijima and General Cho—the patriot who gave the “no prisoners” order in the Rape of Nanking—sat down to an elaborate meal of miso soup, fish cakes, canned meats, rice, cabbage, potatoes, pineapple, and tea, washed down with sake and a bottle of fine Scotch. As they dined, headquarters staff sang “Umi Yukaba,” a solemn poem from ancient times of sacrificing life for the emperor.

At 3:00 a.m. on June 22, the moon was in the sky and dappling on the sea. Inside the cave, General Ushijima was dressed in full uniform, and General Cho wore a white kimono. In preparation for death, the soldiers exchanged last poems.

General Ushijima’s:

We spend arrows and bullets to stain heaven and earth,
Defending our homeland forever.

General Cho’s:

The devil foe tightly grips our southwest land,

His aircraft fill the sky, his ships control the sea;

Bravely we fought for ninety days inside a dream;

We have used up our withered lives,

But our souls race to heaven.

 

“Well, Commanding General Ushijima, as the way may be dark, I, Cho, will lead the way.”

“Please do so,” replied Ushijima, his voice serene. “I’ll take along my fan, as it is getting warm.”

By candlelight, the morbid procession walked toward the cave’s seaward exit, passing the staff, who’d drawn up in a line to pay their last respects. On the back of his kimono, General Cho had brush-stroked, in large characters, the words “With bravery I served my nation, / With loyalty I dedicate my life.” Behind him, Ushijima cooled himself with flutters of an Okinawan
kuba
fan.

The moon, by now, had sunk into the western sea. Mist scaled the cliff from the brine below. Dawn had yet to break on the horizon. Ten paces out from the cave, at the lip of its ledge, a white sheet spread over a quilt created a ritual seat. There, both men knelt and exposed their abdomens. Sensing movement below, the Yanks up top threw down a few grenades. Neither general flinched.

Both bowed in reverence toward the eastern sky. An aide handed each man a hara-kiri dagger with half the blade wrapped in white cloth. Behind Ushijima stood the adjutant, grasping his
katana
sword with both hands and poised to strike. The general also held his dagger in both fists, then ...

“It’s too dark to see your neck,” the swordsman said. “Please wait a few moments.”

With the first flush of dawn, Ushijima plunged the blade deep into his belly. Barely had the samurai shout escaped from his throat when the razor-sharp sword beheaded him. As the corpse lurched forward onto the sheet, Cho performed
the same ritual, and was himself done in by another flash of steel. With that last honorable duty to their emperor done, both spirits would be immortalized at Yasukuni Shrine.

Mine too, thought Tokuda. As soon as they set me free from this accursed camp.

He wished he had his
daisho.

His samurai swords.

Both had been with him when corkscrew and blowtorch had burned him alive.

And when he’d come to, both were gone.

“Lookee, lookee. Come see me.”

The jarhead strutted back and forth on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, a pair of samurai swords stuck through his belt.

The Marine taunted, “Tokyo Kid say ...”