No Surrender (14 page)

“Nonsense! Why do you want to do that?”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“That's about enough back talk out of you!”

“Who do you think you are, ordering me around?”

Once this started, it went on until somebody gave in. Shimada and Kozuka sometimes came to blows, and there was an occasional split lip or sore arm. When they went at it, I usually mediated, but sometimes I just sat still and let them fight it out by themselves. When that happened, there was nothing they could do but fight tooth and nail until one or the other surrendered unconditionally. This struck me as a good thing, because it gave them a chance to test their physical strength and find out how far their bodies would go along with their convictions. In the long run, the occasional fights brought us closer together.

One time I came to blows with Shimada. We were talking about Akatsu's defection, and Shimada took a sympathetic view toward Akatsu. I, for my part, had no sympathy at all for a soldier who had deserted before my very eyes. Before very long a fistfight started, and we rolled down the hill pounding each other.

Often when we were walking at the foot of the mountains near a village, we found waste paper and worn-out clothing. The latter was most welcome, because we were always running out of rags to polish our rifles with. These days, too, the islanders who came into the mountains to cut trees often left
uneaten rice in their pots. These traces of waste meant to us that living conditions on the island had improved somewhat. At the time when Akatsu left, you could have walked over the whole island without finding a scrap of waste paper.

One night Shimada, who had gone out on patrol, came back and said, somewhat excitedly, “Lieutenant, don't make any noise, but come with me.”

We were near the Tilik area. I followed him silently up a small hill that had been left bald by the recent harvesting of rice. When we reached the top, I suppressed a gasp. Electric lights were shining in Tilik! It was the first time since I had been on Lubang that I had seen electric lights.

The three of us sat down on the hill and stared at the town.

“When do you suppose they got generators?”

“Let's try going a little closer.”

“No! They've never had electricity before. Let them enjoy it for a while.”

It had been six years since I had seen electric lights, but the sight of them did not make me the slightest bit homesick. That surprised even me. I had become so accustomed to having no lights at night that Tilik just looked like a different world from the one I was living in.

The ships coming into Tilik changed too. At first there had been small vessels that looked for all the world like
pokkuri
, the high-base wooden clogs once worn by Japanese geisha. We called them
pokkuri
boats. Now these had given way to large white ocean liners, some of which played music over their loudspeakers when they were anchored in Tilik. They usually played popular Filipino songs, but sometimes we heard a Japanese melody. The sound floated all the way up to the little bald hill where we first saw the lights of Tilik.

We could also see the lighthouse at Cabra, a neighboring island. The sight of something outside Lubang affected me not at all, and I wondered whether I had lost my ability to feel.

In the rainy season neither the search parties nor the islanders came to the mountains. We could relax and stay in one place. We built a little shelter with a roof made of palm leaves. Sometimes we would sit here all day. If you are in one place for a long time, you grow accustomed to the sounds around you. When we were on the move, the slightest sound set us on edge, but when we were in the same place for a long time, we began to recognize this sound as the crackling of twigs in the wind and that sound as rising water in the nearby valley, and so on. We learned to distinguish the birds that lived only in particular localities.

When we were like this, the usual tension left us, and we talked about old times back in Japan. We probably knew more about each other's family background and childhood than most of our relatives knew.

Once in a while Shimada would say softly, “I wonder whether it was a boy or a girl.”

When he had left home, he and his wife were expecting their second child. The first, a girl, had not yet started primary school. One time when Shimada was talking about her, he sighed and said, “I guess she must be about the age to like boys now.” Then he just stared at his feet as the rain fell on outside.

Shimada particularly liked to talk about the
bon
-festival dances in his hometown. Whenever he started on this subject, his face would light up, and his voice become animated. Every once in a while he would break out into the song they sang in his town for the festival

The only ones who aren't dancing tonight

Are the old stone Buddha and me.

He told us about the wooden stage they used to build for the dances and how the young men would strut about on it in their summer kimonos. As the song went on and on to the steady beating of drums, the men and women would dance around
in a circle. The traditional words of the song would gradually be replaced by bawdy variations, until, as dawn approached, the young men would begin to sidle up to the girls.

“You must have danced at the
bon
festival, Lieutenant,” Shimada once said.

But I shook my head. I did not know the song Shimada sang, and I had never been to a
bon
festival. Neither had Kozuka. All we could do was listen.

“The
bon
festival is the happiest time of the year,” Shimada would say, often repeating himself. I like to remember him this way, because it was at times like these that I was most strongly impressed with his essential goodness.

Sometimes we cut each other's hair with some little scissors I had improvised. I cut Shimada's, Shimada cut Kozuka's, and Kozuka cut mine. If two of us cut each other's, eventually one of the two would have to cut the third one's hair, and that would not have been fair. It took about forty minutes per haircut, and if one person cut two others', he would be working nearly an hour and a half, whereas one of the others would not have worked at all.

In February, 1952, a light aircraft from the Philippine Air Force circled over the island. We heard the sound of a loudspeaker, but I could not make out what it was saying because of the noise of the engine. Kozuka, who had good ears, said, “They seem to be calling our names.” After he said that, that is what it sounded like to me too. The airplane dropped some leaflets and left.

We picked up the leaflets later, and among them was a letter from my oldest brother, Toshio. The letter started, “I am entrusting this letter to Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo, who is going to the Philippine Islands on the invitation of Madame Roxas.” It went on to say that the war had ended, that my parents were
both well and that my brothers were all out of the army.

There were also letters from Kozuka's and Shimada's families, together with family photographs.

My reaction was that the Yankees had outdone themselves this time. I wondered how on earth they had obtained the photographs. That there was something fishy about the whole thing was beyond doubt, but I could not figure out exactly how the trick had been carried out. The photograph Shimada received showed his wife and two children. If the photograph was genuine, the second child was a girl, but we had some doubts about this.

“It's supposed to be a photograph of my immediate family,” remarked Shimada, “but that man on the left is not in my immediate family. He's only a relative. I think this is just another enemy hoax.”

I heard after I returned to Japan that when Lieutenant Colonel Nobuhiko Jimbo was in the Philippines during the war, he saved the life of Manuel Roxas, who became president after the war. Roxas died in 1948, and later his widow invited Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo to the Philippines for a visit. He had indeed brought the letters, but we could not believe it at the time.

About a month later, we heard another loudspeaker. A man's voice said, “I was staying at the Manila Hotel, when I heard that you were still on this island. I came to talk with you. I am Yutaka Tsuji of the
Asahi Newspaper
.” After that the man kept repeating that he was Japanese, and then he sang something that sounded like a Japanese war song.

“They're at it again,” I commented.

Shimada replied, “It's a nuisance. Let's move somewhere else.”

Thinking that the man with the loudspeaker might have left something behind, we looked around and found a Japanese newspaper—the first one we had seen for seven years.

In the current topics section, there was a story in bold type saying, “Lieutenant Colonel Jimbo has gone to the Philippines to persuade the Philippine government to cancel its punitive missions against the Japanese soldiers on Lubang.” This article had been circled in red.

We read the rest of the newspaper page by page and came to the conclusion that the enemy had devised some means to insert this article into an otherwise genuine Japanese newspaper. The talk about “punitive missions” proved, after all, that the war was still going on.

I told the other two that the newspaper was “poisoned candy.” It looked good, but it was deadly.

The daily schedule of radio broadcasts in the paper disturbed me a little. It seemed to me that there were far too many light entertainment programs. I knew, however, that in America there were commercial radio stations, and I decided that there must now be commercial stations in Japan. When I left the country, there was only the government-operated network, but there might be commercial stations now. If there were, it stood to reason that they would have to present a good deal of light entertainment in order to attract advertisers.

Kozuka said, “I don't think there
is
any reporter named Yutaka Tsuji. I think they're just trying to be slick, using the name of the
Asahi Newspaper
and all that stuff.”

In June, 1953, Shimada was wounded badly in the leg. This happened on the south shore between Gontin and Binacas.

We considered this a part of our territory. Since islanders rarely came near it, we were surprised one day to find that a group of fifteen or sixteen fishermen had made camp there. The rainy season was approaching, and we could not risk having people this near our hiding place. I said, “Let's clear them out right now. The sooner, the better!”

Before dawn, the fishermen built a fire and gathered around it to warm themselves. From a nearby grove, Shimada and Kozuka fired some shots in their direction. They scattered, but one of them seized a gun and hid behind a boulder. We started out on a roundabout path that would bring us out behind him. We did not know that in the meanwhile another of the fishermen, armed with a carbine, had returned to the beach. Our sudden appearance startled him, and he fired two blind shots at us before fleeing.