Please Enjoy Your Happiness (13 page)

‘I did not hate my father,’ you said hesitantly, as if you had never uttered that phrase before. ‘My mother was devoted to him despite everything. But she became so worried, and she became ill. People said she caught tuberculosis because the beatings made her weak. When my mother was living, I always knew her as a sick woman, as a suffering woman. She neglected her health. Maybe she wanted to die. It was only after I became a teenager and I had heard rumours about the kind of work my father did, that my mother took me aside one night and warned me never to mention Unit 731 to anyone. My mother said, “Your father is doing his duty. I have to accept that. I have no choice. He does what he is doing as a service to the country.”’

You stared at me with what looked like stark fear. I knew then that you had never been able to escape those memories. If they were not part of your daily thoughts, they were part of your conscience. They were also probably part of your worst dreams. You told me once that even then, when I knew you, sometimes you were afraid to sleep. I knew that because you sometimes told me you were so envious that I had funny dreams I could share with you.

I could see how uncertain you were about continuing. You held my hand again, and leaned your weight against me. It was the first time in my life a woman had been that intimately physical with me. ‘Please give me a moment,’ you said, ‘before I continue. Let’s pretend we are happy, happy. Happy! Happy! Oh, yes, until this moment with you, sailor boy, I had lost my happiness. My happiness should have been a butterfly, visiting flower after flower, just looking for a taste of sweetness. But instead my happiness became one of those big crows, cawing at
me with his cruel voice from the trees behind my house. Do you know they have feathers so dark you cannot see even the blackness of their eyes? But now, I have my happiness again. It has come back to me.’

You smiled such a thin smile. Oh, that smile!

‘Let’s listen to the bells,’ you said. ‘Let’s watch the wind carrying my prayers to Heaven.’

9

There Is No Forgiveness

For several minutes, we watched small birds attacking a big hawk soaring as if it was a malevolent kite on a very long string.

‘Look, Paul. Look at those brave birds,’ you said. ‘They are mothers protecting little baby birds in their nests. My mother tried her best to look after her children. On those nights that my father came back drunk from his job, she gathered us in a dark room of the house. She hugged us tightly until we fell asleep because there was nowhere to go and my father had a gun and a sword. She hugged me like this,’ you said brightly. You suddenly shifted your position so you had your arms tight round me. ‘I am going to tell you more, but please do not be frightened. Please think about beautiful poetry when this certain girl is talking. She would appreciate it if you would give
her that poem after she finishes her Manchuria history. If there is no poem, I will be very worried. Maybe you will hate my country. Maybe you will hate my family. You might hate me.

‘I have to put my arms round you when I am telling you this because you were once a child in England and your mother hid you under the stairs when the bombs came. Were you afraid? In 1945 you were already six years old. Yes, I know you had that experience. That is why you listen so patiently to me. Thank you for that.

‘But you did not have a father like me,’ you said, your voice hardening. You released me from that very long embrace and pushed me back. It was another of those instances when everything froze in place and you studied me from head to toe, slowly and carefully. You stared especially closely into my eyes, as if you could somehow use them to gain entrance to my mind. You stared, and then you slowly shook your head. In your eyes I could see tiny crystals of ice and blood. I looked deeper and I was afraid of what I saw there: your history and a life I would never be able to comprehend.

‘You are without guilt,’ you said suddenly, with a strange smile of resignation. ‘You are a very nice boy . . . I share a guilt. As long as I live, it will always be that way. I share that guilt with my father. But for the time being, please remember I only want happiness. So far, you are perfect . . . You are a handsome young man who is respectful. You think like a poet. You look at me and you feel fear because you see the truth – evidence of the truth – and that I cannot hide from you. You are a friend. You are a pleasure and a joy.
Are wa taihen okashii, da wa! Hen, da wa! Hen na gaijin, daiyo!
[That is very strange indeed! Very peculiar! You are indeed a very strange foreigner!]

‘You see,’ you said, with the saddest of smiles, ‘I am ready to
tell you now something I did not know myself until very recently when I came to Yokosuka to work. My father – like you, once a sweet man – worked at a place that was truly the entrance to Hell.’

‘Hell is here?’ I asked. ‘Here on Earth?’

‘Yes,’ you said. Now your mouth was twisted, as if someone had just struck you, or as if someone had pushed needles under your fingernails. ‘A Japanese Hell is not only a bright light that blinds you. It is also darkness. In that secret Hell, you are trapped no matter what you do. All you know is the pain, but you are alive. You are not burning. You are living your life . . . laughing and suffering . . . To me it is all the same, unless . . . unless . . . someone, a nice young man, is brave enough to love me.’

You said you found it so strange that the average human being who puts on a uniform or swears an oath or who marches to the sound of trumpets cannot resist becoming inhuman when the order comes to kill. You said you did not mean the ordinary soldier who fires his weapon in battle in order to attack, defend, and survive. What you meant is the man who does not flinch and who does not resist when he accepts that it is his duty to torture.

‘That is very, very bad,’ you said. ‘There is no forgiveness.’ But the truth is, you said, that those men murder with a strange fascination and satisfaction. ‘I did not know this myself,’ you said, ‘until I met someone who knew what my father did at Unit 731.’

‘Who is that person?’ I asked. ‘The man at the train station?’

‘Oh, no,’ you said. ‘Not that very bad man.’

‘Another very bad man?’

‘No. A man who is not good or bad. A policeman.’

Commander Crockett’s words about a conversation with a detective were ringing in my ears. I nodded. Nodding is what dolts do, I thought to myself, when they see the flood coming and know they are going to drown.

‘But this unit . . .’ I blurted.

‘Yes,’ you said patiently.

‘This unit . . . what did it do, and what did your father do there?’

‘How can I explain this?’ you said. ‘I will try.’

Harbin was a city of culture, you began. It was also a city of infernal intrigue. On the one hand Harbin had a direct link by rail and mail – from Eastern Europe all the way across Russia and through Siberia to Manchuria – with the Japanese vice-consul in far-off Lithuania.

When I was reading your letters, I remembered how you struggled with this explanation. Research on my part recently enabled me to determine that this consul, Sugihara Chiune, decided to issue transit visas good for resettlement in Japanese-controlled territories in the Far East to more than six thousand Jewish men, women, and children, mostly from Poland, fleeing the Nazi campaign of murder in occupied Europe. Sugihara did this not only for humanitarian reasons but because the Japanese government adopted a policy in the early 1930s that favoured encouraging Jews to settle in Manchuria and also in China proper, including the international settlement in Shanghai, which eventually came under Japanese control. The reason Japan decided on this policy was because the Japanese looked upon Jews as people with strong business skills and the spirit of enterprise, who would help facilitate commercial and industrial growth in areas where Tokyo planned to settle millions of Japanese colonists. However, the Japanese Foreign Ministry
never gave direct approval for Sugihara’s actions. For twenty-nine days, he and Yukiko, his wife, handwrote more than three hundred visas per day, until the Soviet government closed the consulate. Sugihara was raised in the strict Japanese code of ethics of a turn-of-the-century samurai family. According to the 1995 book
Visas for Life
by Sugihara Yukiko,

The Imperial Japanese Army was told to keep the Jews in Manchuria under constant surveillance, you said. That was one of your father’s duties as an officer in the fearsome
kempei
. But your father studied music in the thriving Jewish community in Harbin. You had Jewish friends. I wish I had known about Sugihara when I knew you. The diplomat had been stationed by Japan’s Foreign Ministry in Harbin while you lived there. Sugihara converted to Russian Orthodoxy in Harbin. He had a brief marriage to a White Russian woman. You were too young to have known him, but it is possible your father may have met him. Who knows whether they would have been anything more than acquaintances. Sugihara resigned his Harbin post to protest the brutal treatment of Chinese citizens by the
kempei
. His Russian-language tutor was a Jew, and he had friends in Harbin’s large Jewish community. Some Japanese, you said, were convinced that the Jews and the Japanese had much in common in terms of culture and religion and also in terms of
being a ‘special or chosen people’. In fact, you told me, when a new Shinto shrine was dedicated in your neighbourhood in Harbin, Japan sent a Shinto priest to the city, whose job was to invite rabbis and other Jewish community leaders to this sacred event.

‘Some Japanese were convinced,’ you said, ‘that our Shinto religion and the Jewish religion were linked.’

I am not Jewish. Part of my extended family has probable Romany – Gypsy – roots, and I knew about the history of suffering at the hands of the Nazis, who killed more than 220,000 Roma across Europe, in addition to the millions
of Jews, in the Holocaust.
³

‘So you see,’ you said, at a moment when I clearly did not understand what you were telling me, ‘that was one thing my father did.’

‘That is what the policeman told you?’ I said.

‘Yes. Very recently.’

‘But why would he suddenly tell you this?’

‘Because he suddenly met me.’

‘Oh,’ I said. It was first time in my life I felt jealous.

You could see the jealousy, I know. So you suddenly veered
off-subject. The Japanese did not kill Jews. But the Germans did kill Jews. This made no sense to me at all because were the Japanese and the Germans not allies? For me, things had to be either black or white, hot or cold, virtuous or evil, ugly or beautiful, and I was too young to know otherwise. How could the world be that complicated, I remember asking you.

‘Oh,’ you said. ‘Oh . . .’ But beyond that, you did not answer.

Instead, you went inside to make
ocha
, the green tea Japanese people drink for all sorts of reasons, but especially when they are being thoughtful, or they wish to retreat a little from disagreement or controversy or anything else that upsets their need for that all-important harmony, which for Westerners does not really exist.

Large thunderhead clouds were gathering overhead. From the ocean came a rumbling, like distant cannon fire. During all this time when you had been talking, a Tokyo radio station you favoured was having its weekly opera recital. ‘Who is that woman?’ you exclaimed. ‘She has such an extraordinary voice.’ The singer was finishing an aria. The male announcer was explaining something.

‘The singer was someone called Carras,’ you said.

Carras? Who is ‘Carras’, I wondered? My knowledge of opera was fragmentary at best. But then I remembered reading something about Maria Callas and I realized you were having problems pronouncing the letter
l
, a problem common to almost all Japanese.

The children of another tenant down the hallway were laughing and banging on a galvanized steel washtub with sticks. You leaped up in a fury, as if someone had stolen something precious from you.

‘
Urusai!
’ you shouted. ‘
Urusai!
’ That was one of the first
Japanese words I learned. It means ‘Be quiet’, and if spoken loudly and rudely it means ‘Shut up!’

‘I will not have this noise,’ you announced to me, before you made the even louder announcement in Japanese. The children had scattered. They were truly terrified.

Again, I could not understand your rage.

The radio announcer was continuing with his analysis of the opera and its star. ‘How wonderful,’ you said, your voice suddenly gentle again. ‘I have always wanted to sing like that. But . . .’ Your voice faltered. The fury was returning again. I so much wanted to understand you. Language was not the issue. Something else was the issue.

It is only in recent months that I have come to understand that you had been listening to a rebroadcast of a 1955 performance of Puccini’s
Madama Butterfly
, conducted by Herbert von Karajan and recorded at La Scala in Milan. This was the legendary one and only appearance by Callas as Cio-Cio-san (
cho-cho
is Japanese for butterfly). The announcer was continuing with his commentary.