Kamikaze (7 page)

Tears streamed down Viv’s cheeks as her heart poured out the emotions she’d repressed since the war.

“The Jap?” said Lyn. “Do you know his name?”

“I heard it once.”

“Where?”

“In Stanley Camp.”

The day began like any other day in Stanley Camp. The breezeless hellhole was hot, muggy, and thick with mosquitoes and flies. Water was in scarce supply, with drought on the horizon. The
Hong Kong News,
the English-language propaganda sheet, informed the prisoners that a tiger had been seen digging in trash near the fence. They got a rare laugh from that bunk, until a shot rang out and a dead tiger was carried off hanging by its paws from a pole. It turned out that the cat had escaped from a circus during the invasion.

“Who knows what to believe?” said the matron who was sewing alongside Viv. The curlers styling her hair were fashioned from odd bits of telephone wire.

The window framing both women looked out on a yard where a pair of scrawny prisoners threw a baseball back and forth. All clothing in the camp was made by hand. Tea towels and rice sacks were turned into shorts and shirts. Buttons were carved from bamboo, and old rubber tires were cut into sandals. When someone died, his rags would be on somebody else the next day.

“Don’t believe
that
,”
Viv scoffed, jabbing her sewing needle into a
News
story beside the tiger report.

“Why?” queried the Englishwoman. “Couldn’t Japanese bombers have wiped out the bridge between Vancouver and Vancouver Island?”

“What bridge?” Viv said dryly.

And that’s when the two Japanese soldiers had come around the corner of the housing block. Neither had been to the camp before, and Viv was suddenly tense. Both were dressed in uniform, and both carried swords. They strode across the yard as if it were their private domain, and Viv knew they were from the Kempeitai.

The Japanese gestapo.

“I throw the ball,” said the
gunso,
the Kempeitai sergeant.

The baseball players glanced at each other, and one began to shake with the DTs. Not for nothing was the rampart the Japanese had overrun in early December dubbed the Gin Drinkers’ Line. Some of the Brits were bottle-a-day men, and the fall of Hong Kong had deprived them of their gin.

“The ball,” repeated the
gunso.
“I know how to play.”

“Oh God!” said the matron beside Viv. “He must be the Kamloops Kid!”

The women of Stanley Camp lived in fear of the guards. The ugly shadow of the conquest atrocities hung over them, and there was drunkenness among the Japanese guards. Prowling around the camp at night, they would peer into windows. During the day, they would sneak up behind women in their rubber-soled boots and startle them. At bedtime, it was Viv’s practice to wedge the door.

But a far worse threat lurked across the harbor in Kowloon, at Shamshuipo Camp, where military prisoners of war were confined. There, the danger took the form of a grinning young man with a clipboard.

“You’re Canadians, eh?” he said, greeting one group of new arrivals. “Is anyone here from Kamloops?”

“I am,” a POW replied.

As hard as he could, the interpreter punched the POW in the face. As the Canadian crumpled to his knees, he was smashed across the cheek with the clipboard in Slap Happy’s hand.

“My name is Sergeant Inouye,” the translator told those lined up at the gate. “I was born and raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, so I hate your goddamn guts. When I was ten years old, I was barred from my friend’s birthday party because his mother didn’t want ‘a Jap face’ in her snapshots. I couldn’t get into the public swimming pool because the sign on the wall said, ‘No Coloreds, Japs, or Chinese.’ In Canada, they called me a ‘little yellow bastard.’ So now I have
you,
and you bastards are going to suffer.”

Slap Happy—the Kamloops Kid—made good on his threat.

According to the rumors that reached Stanley Camp, his signature punishment was to have two soldiers hold down a prisoner while he personally punched and kicked him. He locked men away in solitary confinement and starved them past the point of begging for mercy. To squeeze information out of a hard case, Inouye would drive the man through the jostling streets of Kowloon until they reached a military police station. Along the way, he would read from the Kempeitai’s training manual: “‘Torture can include kicking, beating, and anything else connected with physical suffering.’ We Kempeitai are good torturers, my friend. You’ll find we’ve taken the phrase ‘anything else’ and made it an art form.”

The POW would come back broken.

Or not come back at all.

“They say the Kamloops Kid went to Tokyo in 1938,” the matron whispered to Viv. “He enlisted in the army as a translator and is now the official mouthpiece of Commandant Tokunaga. He’s the most sadistic of the Japs at Shamshuipo. I hate to think what brings the Kamloops Kid to us.”

“The ball,” said the Kamloops Kid for the third time, still grinning like the Cheshire cat.

The second of the two prisoners, a toilet-tissue cigarette dangling from his lip, shrugged and tossed him a pitch.

Back came the ball.

Harder.

“Again,” said the
gunso.

The smoker’s next pitch had muscle.

It came back even harder.

“Again,” ordered the
gunso.

The prisoner smirked, wound up, and really let fly, putting a curve on the ball.

The ball shot right between the splayed hands of the Kamloops Kid and struck him in the face.

His nose began to bleed.

From the moment the two men had rounded the corner of the building, Viv’s eyes had been fixed on the other Japanese soldier. Now she watched in horror as the corporal drew his samurai sword and, with a two-handed sweep worthy of those ancient warriors, sliced the pitcher’s head from his bony shoulders.

The Kamloops Kid swaggered over and picked up the head.

Holding it out before him, he slowly turned so all the spectators could see.

“You’ll be counted off in groups of ten,” said Inouye. “Should one of your ten try to escape over this barbed wire”—he passed the head to the swordsman, the same man who had raped Viv and gutted her lover during the fall of Hong Kong—“Corporal Tokuda will return to Stanley Camp with Kamikaze—that’s his sword—and do
this
to the other nine.”

So here sat Lyn Barrow, keeping vigil beside her mom’s deathbed, holding Viv’s arthritic hand in her own, and watching the sheet rise and fall a little less with each
labored breath. She thought of all the suffering wrought by that one man—to her mother and herself—and she soon felt overwhelmed by the injustice of it all.

“Mom, it’s Lyn. Your daughter.”

Viv’s death rattle marked the beginning of the end.

“This, I promise you. I’m going to hunt Tokuda. Then I’m going to kill him.”

It might have been a spasm, but Lyn thought otherwise.

Viv squeezed her hand.

Then she died.

Nine O’Clock Gun

Vancouver was still laboring under gloomy, low-level clouds, but a gap had opened on the inland horizon, and there a fat, orange harvest moon glared at the Pacific. Like an island in the ocean, Stanley Park formed a barricade between English Bay and the sheltered harbor of Burrard Inlet.

The watch on Kamikaze’s wrist ticked toward nine o’clock as his car left behind the canyons of glittering downtown towers for the shadowed darkness of the urban forest. He drove between the moon-dappled waters of Lost Lagoon and Coal Harbour, then began his counter-clockwise prowl around the park’s shoreline. Ahead, at Hallelujah Point, was the Nine O’Clock Gun, a century-old cannon encased in a wire-and-granite cupola. Originally, the gun was fired so that seamen in port could synchronize their ship chronometers with the tide. It had been fired every night since 1894, except during the Second World War, when its blast would have been alarming to Vancouverites.

And it would be fired this evening.

Kamikaze had checked.

Instead of continuing around the park on the seawall road, the car turned inland, toward the aquarium. Parking just beyond that watery animal jail, which had once known better days, the would-be yakuza, dressed all in ninja black, headed for the path that would lead him to his fate. He stalked along it until he came to a sandstone column crowned by a marble lantern with what had turned out to be a not-so-eternal flame.

The Japanese-Canadian War Memorial.

No need to read the plaque.

He knew it by heart.

For as long as he could remember, going all the way back—perhaps—to his early life in that internment camp, Kamikaze had no clear grasp of who he was. It was as if his internal self-image was pathologically out of focus—as if the light within his soul had been snuffed. So that’s why he felt as if this monument stood for him, too, even though he had no link to its actual history.

Often, he had come here to sit in the dark and brood.

But not tonight.

Tonight, he would find out who he was.

Or he would die.

To be a Japanese
issei
—an immigrant—on the West Coast was to inherit a history of racial hatred. Back in the 1880s, men had sailed from Japan to follow a dream of riches, and here they had fished, farmed, and mined, or worked in lumber camps and on the railroad. But when it came, the backlash was fierce and angry. The
issei
were denied the vote and citizenship. In 1907, white supremacists
rampaged toward “Japtown.” They were met by a hail of rocks, and that led to limits being set on future immigration.

The only way to prove themselves loyal to Canada was to fight in the First World War, so 195
issei
and one
nisei—
a Japanese descendant born here—volunteered. Of them, 54 were killed and 92 wounded, so in 1920, on the third anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, this cenotaph was raised in Stanley Park. To the lasting memory of those who had laid down their lives, the lantern was lit.

Ha! thought Kamikaze.

You proud fools.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had fanned the flames of hate, and less than ten days later, on December 16, 1941, the lantern was extinguished.

Every Japanese person on the West Coast was forced to register as an enemy alien, and all twenty-one thousand, Canadian citizens included, were driven inland to internment camps. Their property was seized and sold off to whites. Suspected spies and protesters were shipped east to prisoner-of-war compounds. No Japanese were allowed within a hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Later, after the war, the mass deportations began. Internees by the thousands were expelled to Japan.

For the next four decades, the lantern atop this cenotaph remained dark. Kamikaze could barely recall the day he was set free from
his
internment camp, but he knew that whatever had happened to him within its barbed-wire fence had left horrific scars on his subconscious. The first time he had glimpsed this snuffed-out lantern, sometime back in his
vague childhood, he had understood intuitively that that’s what he had suffered in the concentration camp.

Extinction of his “I’m me” light.

Then had come the August 1985 day when, as if to finally mark the integration of the
nikkei
—the new term for Japanese Canadians—into this racist amalgam, the lantern of the Stanley Park memorial was relit. The guest of honor, seated beneath the shirotae and yoshino cherry trees (so colorful in the springtime, but barren of leaves and blossoms tonight), had been Sergeant Masumi Mitsui. Then ninety-eight years old, he had led the charge up Vimy Ridge, only to spend the next war in the Greenwood Internment Camp with his family. Watching from the crowd, Kamikaze had seen the sense of self light up that old man’s eyes, and he had hoped—how he had hoped!—that a sense of self would also ignite in him.

But that was not to be his fate, it seemed, for he was neither
nikkei
nor Caucasian.

Instead, he was caged physiologically in a no man’s land between the trenches of the Pacific War.

A misfit, he belonged to neither side.

Hated by one camp during and after the war.

Shunned by the other for being genetically unclean.

And so he had resigned himself to his ignoble fate, wandering aimlessly through purgatory, denied entrance to both heaven and hell.

But then ...

Was it possible?

Could it actually be?

Kamikaze had chanced across his blood link to Genjo Tokuda, the wealthiest and deadliest of Tokyo’s yakuza.

Kamikaze had taken his code name from Genjo Tokuda’s sword.

The old-school yakuza flatly denied that they were descended from the
ronin,
the marauding samurai who had terrorized Japan in the 1600s. Instead, they carried on the traditions of the
machi-yokku,
the “servants of the town,” courageous folk heroes who had stood up to the
ronin.
In doing so, the ancients had protected the poor and the defenseless. That’s why the yakuza have a romantic stature in Japanese films. And that’s why Kamikaze, in a fantasy born from researching Tokuda, likened himself to Robin Hood.

Would that not be a life with meaning?

To
know
who you are?

But even more alluring to him was the structure of the yakuza. It, like the Mafia, was organized into a pyramid, with a hierarchy based not on bloodline but on adoption. At the top was the gang’s godfather—the
kumicho
—Genjo Tokuda. Beneath him were descending levels of underlings, and each underling was bound to his immediate boss by a centuries-old code. The
oyabun
played the “father role,” and like any good father, he provided protection and advice to his initiated children. In return, the father had a right to expect unquestioning loyalty and obedient service from the
kobun,
playing the “child role.” A
kobun
had to be willing
to take a bullet for, and
be
a bullet for, his
oyabun.

He had to be kamikaze.

He had to be ready to die.

For Kamikaze, it would be enough to be accepted for who he was. The yakuza don’t care where you come from—your color, your country, your class—because they initiate the misfits of society. All they require is that you pride yourself on the code of
bushido,
the Way of the Warrior.
Giri
—a strong sense of duty and obligation to other members—is also essential. Nothing in life can be more important than your gang. And yakuza must show sympathy for the weak and for people ground down by the powers that be. Violent death in a struggle against the tyranny of oppressors: that is a most poetic, tragic, honorable fate.

Your boss becomes your father.

Your gang members become your bothers.

That alone would be enough for Kamikaze.

But his fate—it seemed to him—was to be more than that. For his
oyabun
was destined to be the
kumicho
himself. If the link Kamikaze had discovered in some old British colonial records was correct, then Genjo Tokuda would be both father figure and actual father to him.

According to his watch, it was time to go. So the would-be yakuza in his ninja black followed the densely shadowed path north from the cenotaph to a vantage point near the dragon-like figurehead of the
Empress of Japan.
Its fanged
jaws seemed to snarl fearsomely at the humped mass of mountains beyond the moon-streaked harbor.

At five minutes to nine, a black limousine rounded the lighthouse at Brockton Point and stopped at the curb directly in front of the figurehead, as instructed.

Kamikaze crouched in the dark.

No one got out of the idling limousine.

Boom!
The Nine O’Clock Gun, just around the point and out of sight, blasted south toward the towers of the downtown core. Its reverberations echoed back at the park. Before that phantom battery fell silent for another day, the far rear door of the limousine opened. A featureless figure strode quickly to the base of the figurehead, and Kamikaze abandoned his hiding place on the opposite side of the road. Reaching the seawall, he walked east toward the limo and engaged the waiting man.

“I’m Kamikaze.”

“Call me the Claw. Get in,” the bodyguard ordered, indicating the yawning rear door.

So stocky was the Claw that his body seemed fit for a gorilla. He was balding and had a prominent mole on his cheek. Not a word escaped his lips as they drove through the peninsular park. The fact that Kamikaze wasn’t on the floor with a sack pulled over his head meant that this was either the first day of the rest of his yakuza life or the beginning of a one-way ride.

So be it, he thought.

No turning back.

From the dragon figurehead, Stanley Park Drive ran parallel to the seawall, along the south shore of the harbor. On the inland side loomed Lumberman’s Arch, a huge, wonky structure that resembled a lopsided
torii
gate to a Shinto shrine. Ahead, the Lions Gate Bridge, with its necklace of lights dipping from the dual supports, spanned First Narrows and landed at the foot of the mountains.

The limo zigzagged to the crest of Prospect Point and drove onto the causeway bisecting the park. As the car bridged the neck of ocean joining the outer bay to the inner harbor, the harvest moon peered into the tinted windows like a pudgy-faced groupie at a rock concert.

The end of the bridge saw Marine Drive branch left and right. The left fork conveyed them into West Vancouver, the richest municipality in Canada. No sooner had they entered than they turned up Taylor Way, the road that climbed Hollyburn Mountain to the British Properties. Up, up, up they snaked to the crown of the city. The irony was not lost on Kamikaze.

During the Depression, the Guinness family of Ireland, brewers of good beer, had purchased this side of the mountain to create an exclusive community. To populate the British Properties, they built the Lions Gate Bridge in 1938. Then, to make sure the properties
stayed
British, they sold the lots with covenants that restricted ethnic Asians.