Tears in the Darkness (17 page)

The jungle canopy blocked the breezes and turned the point into a steam bath by day and a meat locker at night. The men had never known such asphyxiating heat, and they had never imagined that a jungle night could give them such a chill.

Most of all the jungle was a spooky place, a dim battlefield where the half-light created menacing shapes and shadows, a landscape that looked so riotous and malignant—the primeval trees, unruly vines, and woody lianas—it left a man feeling that nature was as dark and sinister as the enemy.

Quinauan Point was a fat finger of land, half a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile long, jutting out into the South China Sea. Years before, a logging company had cut a rough road from the tip of the point inland a few miles to the West Road, the only unfettered access. All else on the promontory, every square yard of ground, was tangled hinterland and jungle.

The terrain was so thick, so dense and ensnaring, it left each side blind to the other, but entrenched in the understory and perched high in the trees, Colonel Tsunehiro's men at first had the advantage. They sat behind the screen of jungle and waited for the enemy to walk into them. And they did.

For three days the Tsunehiro detachment beat back the enemy's assaults and probes. (The Americans had sent untrained troops to push the interlopers into the sea—first airmen and engineers turned provisional infantry, then the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary, gendarmes with rifles—but these rear-echelon troops were no match for Colonel Tsunehiro's men, who, unlike their comrades in the Summer Brigade fighting
on the other side of the peninsula, had been trained well.) The colonel had deployed his men in an arc of trenches, each foxhole three feet deep, two feet wide, six- to eight feet long. Every day he tried to advance this line inland; the men would crawl forward from their holes, perhaps fifty or a hundred yards, then dig in again, advancing the arc. By the third day the line, which stretched some nine hundreds yards from one side of the point to the other, had moved about halfway to the neck. Even on the defensive, the Japanese always advanced.

When the fighting began, Kiyoshi Kinoshita was a runner for the Sixth Company, carrying messages and orders back and forth between his company commander and Colonel Tsunehiro, who had positioned himself just behind the center of the line. To call him a “runner,” however, was a misnomer, for Kiyoshi Kinoshita spent more time on his belly than on his feet. The enemy appeared to have only one tactic—they just blasted away at the jungle in front of them, and they never seemed to run out of bullets. For every round a
hohei
fired, a hundred came back at him. It was astonishing, and it was effective. The defenders started digging deeper, and Kiyoshi Kinoshita went to ground so often he shredded the legs of his trousers and the sleeves of his shirt.

 

UNLIKE HIS TWO YOUNGER BROTHERS
, who had enlisted as officers, he was
issen gorin
, a “penny man” or common conscript.

He had done well enough in school to win a position with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, but the pay was a pittance, so after a year or so in Tokyo, he packed his kit and headed for Maizuru, a seaside town north of Ayabe, his home, to work as a welder in a shipyard. The radio and newspapers seemed to be clamoring for war, and in the noodle shops and public baths, young men of draft age were resigned to wearing a uniform. Sooner or later, they told one another, they would have to do their duty and swallow their discontent. Then, in January 1940, at the age of twenty-two, the penny postcard calling Kiyoshi Kinoshita to service arrived in the mail.

His father, an executive with a silk company, had taught him that a Japanese man had three obligations in life: to go to school, pay his taxes, take his turn in uniform. So with neither enthusiasm nor protest, Kiyoshi Kinoshita reported for training—four months of calisthenics, close-order drill, forced marches (day marches, night marches, heat marches, cold marches), rifle and bayonet practice, instruction in tactics, classes
in military etiquette, and lectures on citizenship and the rewards of sacrifice.

Like the other recruits, he took his lumps, the daily cuff on the ear or crack in the mouth or open hand on the side of the face. “Private sanctions,” the conscripts called this hazing, the bullying behind the barracks doors. None of them complained. No one ever did. Not openly. (Though some offered the public protest of suicide, slipping silently into the latrine at night to hang themselves.) Once in a while, a rare while, a strong-willed recruit, usually someone with an education and always someone with backbone, would offer some resistance. He wouldn't go against the grain, exactly. That would land a man in prison. Instead, he'd just stand up for himself.

One Sunday after their evening meal, the recruits (as was their duty) were cleaning up after the senior privates. Each recruit had a different job. Kiyoshi Kinoshita was collecting the mess kits and returning them to each man's cupboard, and in the rush, he apparently put one soldier's kit in the wrong place.

“My cupboard's on the second row,” the senior private said. “You looked right at the shelf. Didn't you see it?”

Kiyoshi Kinoshita should have answered, “Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir,” because senior privates were always right, which is to say, recruits were always wrong. But Kiyoshi Kinoshita refused to offer the required obsequity.

He had just returned from a few hours' leave—he'd walked to the town, had a good meal, cleared the army out of his head.

“No,” he told the senior private, somewhat dryly, “I didn't see it.”

And just like that the man slapped him, slapped him harder than he had ever been slapped before, so hard his ears started to ring.

The unreasonable had turned into the intolerable, and Kiyoshi Kinoshita rushed his assailant, grabbed him by the legs, turned him upside down, and dangled him out a second-story window. He was going to drop the man on his head when he felt someone grabbing at him, pulling him, and as he turned to see who was interfering, he found himself facing a circle of senior privates.

In an instant he was on the ground. At first the kicks and punches stung, then it was just one dull thud after another. Pretty soon his eyes began to swell and his ears began to bleed.

When the “punishment” was over, the other first-year men picked him up and helped him to his cot. They soaked towels in cold water and
applied them to the cuts, welts, and contusions on his face. The next day his platoon commander excused him from duty.

At first he was humiliated. He'd never felt so helpless, so powerless. Later, after he healed, a quiet rage took hold of him, and one morning toward the end of training when his company commander called him into the office and said, “You went far in school and you should take the test to become an officer,” he answered courteously, “No, thank you, sir,” because he had come to hate the army and everything about it.

To keep his sanity, his
tsuriai
, or sense of balance, he adopted a mindset common to most recruits. Instead of the iniquities of the army, Kiyoshi Kinoshita focused on his duty, his obligation to his country.

“To protect one's own country is something like protecting one's own family,” he told himself. “It's something I have to do, just like obeying my father.”

Several months later he still hated the army, but he was a senior private himself now, and with war approaching he had begun to feel a connection with his fellow
hohei
, that complicated transaction called comradeship.

They all ate their rice from the same pot. They all shouldered the same heavy load. Soon they would be watching one another's backs. After that they would be carrying home one another's ashes.

 

FOR FIVE DAYS
at Quinauan Point, Colonel Tsunehiro's men fought the enemy to a standstill, even advanced a bit, a few more yards of ground. Then on January 28, the enemy apparently brought in fresh troops, regular infantry from the look of them (in fact, the crack Philippine Scouts), and the battle for Quinauan Point turned desperate.

The enemy attacked in the morning behind a whirlwind of gunfire. Colonel Tsunehiro's men hunkered down and dug deeper, dug furiously. The gunfire was so intense it shredded the screen of leaves and vines and kicked up clouds of dust and detritus from the jungle floor.

The colonel's men stayed low in their holes, waiting, then, with the enemy almost on top of them, they too let loose a volley of fire, then another and another. And so it went, back and forth, back and forth, almost till dark.

Late the next afternoon, following another day of frenzied fighting, Colonel Tsunehiro wrote a message to General Kimura at division headquarters.

 

Each company is fighting bravely, but there is no apparent promise of our completing our duty. [We are] surrounded by a superior enemy . . . The dead and wounded continue to mount, and our fighting strength is conspicuously declining. We are in a position of danger . . . We are already lacking in munitions and food. However, we are still fighting hard.
⁵⁵

 

Thereupon he added a poignant postscript.

“I pray for the success of Your Excellency's strenuous fight,” he said, a doomed officer telling his commander he was grateful that the army was doing all it could to reach him. Then he signed off with,
Tenno Heika banzai!
(Long live the emperor!), a valediction that, under the circumstances, could be taken only as a dying declaration.

On the eighth day of battle, the enemy began its attack with a barrage of mortar and artillery rounds. The high-trajectory missiles came crashing down through the canopy and exploded on the
hohei
in their holes, then the barrage lifted, and behind a loud rattle of rifle fire the enemy advanced.

The Sixth Company was on the right side of the arc now, and Kiyoshi Kinoshita spent the day crawling back and forth with messages. He had to keep low, creep carefully under the heavy wooden lianas and across the green thorns and thistles that tore at his uniform and ripped into his skin. Sometimes, to catch his breath, he hunkered down for a moment in a depression in the ground or tucked himself into a nook between two finlike tree roots. The jungle soil was cool, the only relief from the smothering heat, but he had to keep moving.

He was thirsty—they all were. Some of the men had discovered a small spring in a ravine leading down to the beach, but it took a long time for a man to fill his canteen there, especially under fire. And the heat and dust and smoke and fear left their throats tight and their mouths as dry as rice paper and bitter as vinegar. They were hungry too, down to dry biscuits and bits of candy now. There was little forage on Quinauan Point, a few roots perhaps, some leaves and grasses they boiled to a sour tea. And they were so low on ammunition they often waited until an enemy was almost on top of them to fire. One officer, defending himself only with his sword, cut off his enemy's right hand before his enemy shot and killed him with the other.

After a week of such savagery, bodies, limbs, hunks of flesh, and viscera
fouled the jungle floor. When they were able, the colonel's men dragged their dead comrades down a ravine to a natural cave in the face of the cliff, where, after picking the pockets of the dead for food and ammunition, they stacked the corpses in neat clusters, like cords of wood. Mostly, however, a man lay where he fell, or where a comrade could drag him. In such heat, of course, the remains began to rot, and the smell, the reek of decaying flesh, left the survivors retching.

So many men were wounded that the battalion surgeon had long since exhausted his kit. Those with severe wounds—men shot in the chest or stomach, men with burned or flayed flesh or splintered bones—tried to be stoic, to endure the consuming pain that settles in after the shock wears off, pain that left them bleary-eyed and breathless, but they could not keep up the pretense, the reserve that was always expected of a Japanese man. Sometimes, crawling past a hole on his way to a command post, Kiyoshi Kinoshita was arrested by the sound of suffering. “
O itai
” (oh-ee-tie-ee), a wounded comrade would yell to him, “How it hurts! How it hurts me!” Oh-ee-tie-ee.

He never stopped. The yelling of the wounded always drew more fire, and the Samaritans who answered the sorrowful cries and entreaties usually ended up casualties themselves or stacked in the cave at the bottom of the cliff. So he kept going, kept pulling himself through the creepers and ferns and across the moss beds and tangles of thorns.

On the ninth day the enemy began to push the battalion back, and the arc started to collapse on itself. Kiyoshi Kinoshita was with Colonel Tsunehiro in the center.

“Go to the Sixth Company and tell them they have to hold,” the colonel said. “Tell the Sixth they have to fight until help comes.”

The colonel knew by now that no relief would reach him; the division would never be able to break through the enemy's main line and drive down the peninsula in time to rescue what was left of the trapped battalion. And his men doubtless knew that, too. Their mission had failed. They were exhausted, outnumbered, and outgunned. Still, they would fight. The colonel knew they would fight. They were
hohei
.

 

LAPCADIO HEARN
, the thoughtful Victorian who wandered Japan for fourteen years trying to get a sense of the place, thought loyalty a “religion” in Japan, a transcendent form of “affection.” Loyalty, the government
proclaimed in 1937, “is the basis of our national morality . . . In loyalty do we obtain life.”
⁵⁶

To the soldier, “duty” was loyalty in practice, and to those who did their duty in time of war the government promised martyrdom. It built the Yasukuni Shrine on Kudan Hill in Tokyo, where the souls of all those killed in battle were installed as kami, soldier gods on perpetual duty protecting the fatherland. There was no greater glory, the government said, no better way for a man to bring honor to his family (and fulfill his filial piety) than to have his name inscribed on the rolls of the immortals on Kudan Hill.
⁵⁷