The Turning Tide (20 page)

‘Oh, I’ve some news about that,’ says Suyin, pleased. ‘Ian was offered a good job with a maritime company at Port Welshpool. We’re going to move to Foster to live.’

‘That’ll be wonderful, especially for Lena. I hope the change goes well.’

‘Perhaps, one day, when Ian sees how silly he’s being, we’ll see you in Foster?’

‘I doubt it, Suyin,’ I say.

It was cold and lonely that winter and spring of 1946, but I finally finished my engineering degree. I had no job prospects and couldn’t bring myself to search for any. One day, wandering aimlessly in Collins Street, I saw a sleek, prosperous-looking figure in uniform coming towards me.

‘Kanga!’ I said, surprised.

‘That’s Captain Kanga now, mate,’ he said, laughing. ‘Broome, how are you? Come and have a drink and a chinwag.’

After we sat down with our beers in the pub, I said, ‘So you stayed in the army? I’m surprised, Kanga. I thought you’d be prime minister by now.’

He chuckled. ‘I looked at what was happening to the boys going home, no work, no jobs, and decided to stay put for a while. At least it was a pay packet. Then I saw a call for volunteers to join the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and thought, That’s for me.’

‘Occupation, where?’

‘Japan, where else? A joint op – Aussies, Poms, Kiwis, Indians. Demilitarisation, repatriation, munitions disposal, that sort of stuff.’

‘I thought the Yanks did all that,’ I said, taking a slug of beer.

‘They run the military government but we do the lion’s share of cleaning up. Our brass wanted to show the flag, make sure we didn’t get overlooked after the war. We’re in charge of the west of Japan while the Yanks hang round Tokyo having fun.’

‘And why have you got that great grin on your face, Kanga?’

‘It just so happens, my lad, I’m back here looking for men to help us in our noble task of beating swords into ploughshares and bringing democracy to the Sons of Heaven.’

‘What sort of men?’

‘Specifically, we need translators, Broome. Odd bods who for some reason have mastered the godless intricacies of the Japanese tongue. Chappies like your good self.’

‘Me?’

‘You’ve got something better to do?’

‘As a matter of fact, no. But I wouldn’t precisely say I’ve mastered Japanese.’

‘Even if all you can talk about is those bloody loggers, you’d still be more useful than most.’

‘Luggers, Kanga.’

He laughed. ‘Ah, Broome, you always bite.’

‘But join up again?’ I said slowly. ‘I’m not sure about that.’

‘It’s interesting work. You’d get a commission too – you’d be Lieutenant Whalen.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘And Japan’s like nowhere else on earth. Almost conquered half the world but it’s like a bunch of medieval villages. An enigma. You’d love it.’

‘Where’s the force based?’

‘Around Kure. About fifteen miles from Hiroshima.’

‘Hiroshima! What about the radiation?’ Oh, Betty, I thought.

‘The boffins say it’s mostly gone.’ He wasn’t smiling anymore. ‘Yeah, Hiroshima’s horrible. A giant garbage dump for miles and miles. But trams are running, streets are usable, houses are being built. Still, it’s grim … you see so many burn victims. Orphaned kids, scavenging. And the hospitals barely cope. People still falling sick.’ He laughed
abruptly. ‘Jesus, Broome. Not doing a very good job of selling you on the place, am I?’

‘Nah, you’ve always had the gift of the gab, Kanga, you know that. Look. I’m at a loose end and it sounds more interesting than anything going here. When do I need to decide about it?’

‘Now. Come on. Finish your beer, go home and pack your bags.’

Rugged up against flurries of winter sleet, Kanga and I leant on the bulwark as our ship steamed into broken-down Kure Harbour. It was January 1947.

‘You think this is bad?’ he said. ‘Should have seen it when we arrived last year. The largest naval dockyard in the country and the Yanks bombed the shit out of it. Flattened warehouses, burnt-out factories, sunken ships – there was even a wrecked aircraft carrier over there.’

‘So this is the place on a good day? Jesus.’

‘It’s better than it looks,’ said Kanga seriously. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff we’ve already cleaned up – mines, torpedoes, drums of poison gas.’

‘Poison gas?’

‘We reckon there’s thousands of tons of it in secret tunnels all round Hiroshima, maybe ten thousand tons of explosives. The local mayors are very helpful, give you the keys to the tunnels and stand well back. We’ve lost half-a-dozen bomb-disposal men in the last six months.’

‘I hope that’s not my job. I was always lousy at demolitions.’

He grinned. ‘You’ll be teaching basic Japanese to the
men, translating newspapers, going in as interpreter for police operations, helping the bigwigs when they’re in town.’

‘Do I get much time off? Fact is, some friends of mine are somewhere here – if they survived – old friends from Broome. I want to look around for them.’

‘Yeah, plenty of time off. Japanese friends? Okay, but be careful. You know there are stupid no-fraternisation rules, for us at least,’ he said. ‘The Yanks can do what they like.’

‘How are we supposed to bring democracy to the place if we can’t fraternise?’

‘Search me. But it doesn’t really stop anyone. Just don’t get caught.’

‘All right.’ I looked along the damaged wharves of the shore. ‘Are the headquarters here?’

‘No. Over there on Edajima Island, but there are camps all around. Edajima’s got the good facilities – offices, mess, dormitories. The outlying posts are a bit less comfortable.’

‘And where are all those enigmatic medieval villages you promised me?’

‘In the countryside. You’ll get to see them. If you’re looking for your friends, all you can do is tramp through the towns and ask people. In Hiroshima there are no full records of who died, and no neighbourhoods left in the city to ask around.’

I nodded soberly. I’d set myself quite a task. I hadn’t had time to go home before leaving Melbourne but had written to my family. Mum and Dad were glad I had interesting work to do and said they hoped I’d find Betty, but my sister was furious with me for helping the Japanese in any way. Anna’s hatred of Japan had only grown as the horrors of the prison camps were revealed after the war. And her
views, it must be said, were no more extreme than those of most other Australians.

After we’d disembarked I was driven to Hiroshima. From a road in the hills above the city I could see a delta, with rivers carving the landscape into islands. I squinted through the haze but couldn’t make out any details. I suddenly realised that was because I wasn’t seeing a city at all, just a vast shattered wasteland. Kanga hadn’t exaggerated.

As we drew closer I could see twisted steel skeletons and rows of shacks and a few brick buildings, with acres of ash-greyness all around instead of little paper and timber houses. Rubble lined the edges of a dusty grid of cleared roads. I could see small memorials – boards with calligraphy, tiny cairns of stones and flowers – in the foundations of what must once have been welcoming homes.

I’d been assigned to the camp at Ujina, the port of Hiroshima (Kanga, of course, was at headquarters, comfortably making hay). Ujina was a sad place. I never grew used to the sight of the small gangs of thin orphaned children, some horribly scarred, who would gather, silent and large-eyed, outside the back door of the mess at night. I was glad our cook was generous with the leftovers. The children would eat the scraps, and bow, and disappear again into the dark.

Ujina’s Hall of Victorious Return had been the last sight of home for thousands of soldiers. On their less than victorious return it was where we plied them with disinfectants, searches, inoculations and forms. By now, eighteen months after the war’s end, the flood of the defeated passing through Ujina was a trickle and I had time to gaze at my old enemies: I hadn’t expected them to be such tough, dignified
men. I wondered what they thought of us, the victors, and of their tragic city turned to dust.

When I first went into the countryside around Hiroshima, Kanga insisted I have a driver. She was a sensible corporal called Enid, engaged to a sergeant stationed at Kure. She spent ten minutes telling me about the problems of getting married in Japan, but fortunately soon realised I didn’t want to talk. After that she concentrated on driving, which was good: the roads were busy with Allied traffic and street signs were non-existent. We had to find our way to the far side of the city, to the town of Hatsukaichi, where Betty had written her long-ago letter to me.

We were soon on twisting, narrow roads among leafless winter trees. After an hour or so we reached Hatsukaichi, on the coast south-west of Hiroshima. It was a largish town with a few modern buildings, but I could see traces of the old villages Kanga had promised, narrow streets of handsome wooden houses. It seemed to have suffered little damage. Perhaps distance from Hiroshima had protected it.

I had an introduction to the headmaster of the local high school. When I spoke to him in Japanese he was as surprised as Enid was (‘How do you
do
that?’ she said under her breath). The headmaster told me he’d only been home for one year, but perhaps his secretary might know something of the Egawa family. He was young and I thought, You came back a year ago? I wonder what island you were on, fella.

We walked down the corridor to his secretary’s office. She was a smartly dressed middle-aged woman who thought the Egawa name was familiar but couldn’t place it. She suggested we ask Shizuko the cleaner, who knew
everyone. We found Shizuko in a room full of mops. She was tiny and thin and smoking a pipe.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I remember the Egawas. Always talking about their rich relatives in Australia. Those relatives didn’t look so rich when they turned up last year. They’d been in an Australian prison camp, they said.’

The headmaster shook his head. ‘Barbaric to treat people that way.’

I snapped, ‘At least they weren’t starved or tortured or shot.’

He looked at me, his eyes unguarded. I thought, Poor bugger, you probably have the same nightmares I do. He bowed and said, ‘I hope you find your friends,’ and left us. I felt bad for a moment but then turned back to Shizuko.

‘Where do they live?’

‘Oh, the Egawas went away, let me see, I think it was four years ago. That’s what I told those sorry relatives too.’

‘Where did they go?’

‘To Koi. They bought a new farm.’

‘Where’s Koi?’

‘West of Hiroshima. Up in the hills.’

I asked, ‘Can you tell us the address, any other details?’

She shook her head and suddenly her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re looking for that girl from Australia, aren’t you?’

‘Was she with the Egawas when they left here?’

‘Don’t know. No friends of mine.’ She turned away with finality.

Enid and I drove back to Hiroshima through the Koi region and its scattered settlements. We stopped at small villages asking people about the Egawas, showing them the photograph I had, but no one knew them. It was evening
by the time we’d returned to Ujina. I thanked Enid and said I could find my own way to Koi next time.

I returned to the region as often as I could. I asked at small towns and farms far enough from Hiroshima for life to have continued much as it always had. After one fruitless search I decided to stop overnight at a tiny inn. The proprietor was astonished to have a Japanese-speaking barbarian seeking accommodation, but he led me to a small tatami-mat room warmed by a brazier. His wife brought me a bowl of noodles, and when I showed her the photo said perhaps the older woman was from a farm a few miles away.

Next morning I followed her directions. The area was closer to Hiroshima than the places I’d been searching so far, on a hill looking over the ruined city. But I saw no one who looked like the Egawas and no one I asked could help me.

I went searching for Betty’s family almost every weekend. At the same time I settled in at Ujina camp. Despite the grimness of the shattered city there was fascination in the old dock buildings and the lapping water, and when spring came the Hiroshima greyness gave way to greenery, as vines and vegetables and flowers grew from the earth and softened the rubble.

It wasn’t far to cycle, like the locals, to the giant black market outside the train station. It had all kinds of rubbish for sale, plus beautiful things – scrolls, silks, statuettes – being sold at absurdly low prices by desperate Japanese. It also offered vast quantities of tobacco, biscuits and chocolate, clearly lifted from Allied stores.

Part of my job was to accompany military police in raids on Japanese black marketeers, which was ironic as
the busiest black marketeers were our own troops. Food was currency for a long time in ravaged Hiroshima: the whole of Japan had been starving by the end of the war and supplies took a long time to recover.

As usual, women bore the brunt. Thousands had lost the modest wealth of their family homes; thousands more were widows or supporting children or aged parents, and thousands were simply destitute. They were available for the taking; for a bar of chocolate, a few yen, a packet of biscuits, even just a promise.

The soldiers had never had it so good: sex, comfort, food and drink. But drunkenness grew rife. Most appalling, given the availability of Japanese women and the politeness of Japanese men, were the rapes and beatings inflicted by their conquerors. Gangs of loutish diggers behaved as if they’d recently arrived with Genghis Khan. While some were prosecuted, I was horrified to find out that few were seriously punished.

By mid-1947 I was losing hope. I’d been in the country for five months and seemed to have stopped at every farm and driven every dirt road in the Koi region, up mountains and along valleys, without success. One afternoon I stopped, tired, at a junction on a hill overlooking Hiroshima and realised I was back near the place the innkeeper’s wife had sent me months ago.

Looking around I saw a small track off the road I hadn’t noticed before. Without much hope I turned the jeep into it and bumped along under a canopy of green. After driving for several miles, I was about to give up and go back when
ahead I saw a small timber farmhouse with a market garden beside it. I could see a woman digging the soil. She was in Japanese dress but, I realised with mounting excitement, she seemed familiar.