* * *
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I BELIEVE few of us forget what we keep hidden in our memory’s hollows. True, many of us are capable of remaining professionally closed-faced, tossing out facts of our wartime accomplishments the way we toss our car keys, casually and full of the confidence of important men who have worked hard and earned their keep, rightfully. But forgetting?
My two colleagues and I have been debating this point over our yearly meals taken here in the rural outskirts of this wintry city in northern Japan where we converged eight years ago. They claim that if not for these meals, they might have forgotten these memories stowed for so long, buried by a present that discourages remembrances so that trace feelings, occasionally jostled, may surface, but nothing more. For why dig up graves from a banished past, selfishly subjecting all those connected to us to what can only amount to a masochistic pursuit? Isn’t it better to surrender to a world populated by the young, who, taught nothing, remain uncurious, the war as distant as ancient history, its dim heat kindling the pages of textbooks and cinemas, occasionally sparking old men with old grudges, but nothing to do with them?
I would like to disagree. But life did move on, the war’s end swallowing us up and spitting us out different men, who, like everyone else, slipped back into a peacetime world once again girdled by clear boundaries and laws meant to preserve lives, not destroy them. And yet, for me, S has continued to tunnel through time, staying in my present, reminding me of our shared past, which we, with all our excuses, have been guarding as tightly as the walls that surrounded us in Pingfang.
You must understand something: we had always meant to preserve lives. A few thousand enemies to save hundreds of thousands of our own? I hardly think our logic was so remarkable.
What was remarkable was Pingfang. Its imposing structure looming in calculated isolation, its vast grounds secured by high-voltage walls, its four corners staked with watchtowers overlooking its four gates armed with guards whose shouts were regularly drowned out by the clatter of surveillance planes circling the facility. Approaching them for the first time in jostling trucks, we watched the walls of the compound unroll endlessly before us, each additional meter contracting our nerves so that our faces, initially loose with excitement, began to tighten, eliciting a lustrous laugh from our young guide, who turned to remark, Of course, we don’t bear the Emperor’s emblem here.
Sure enough, when we stopped for authorization at the gate, we saw that the walls were indeed ungraced. In a world where even our souls were expected to bear the mark of the Emperor, the absence was terrifying, and perhaps this was when I saw Pingfang, its forbidding grandeur, cloaked by its unmarked walls, presaging what it was capable of. By then it was clear that the warning emanating from it made no exceptions, even as it opened its gates and saluted us in.
In increments we would become privy to the extent of Pingfang’s ambitions. But first we were dazzled. Our days snatched away by seminars and orientation tours, we scarcely had time to unpack, our bodies as well as our minds collapsing into white sleep that seemed to flood always too soon with sunlight, so that even the hardiest of us grew weary, dragging from conference rooms to auditorium, the occasional outdoor tour whisking us off in rattling trucks that clattered our teeth and fibrillated our brains until we developed an aversion to Pingfang’s astigmatized landscape. After a fortnight, we reached our threshold. We broke down, all of us mere husks of ourselves, our individual drives wrung out of us. Until then we had been accustomed to mild routines with little expectation; to be inducted into a life ruled by the exigencies of war proved transformative. We readjusted, our senses and sensibilities recalibrated to accommodate the new demand. After all, humans are remarkable in their ability to adapt. Time and again we would find ourselves reminded of this fact, which, I believe, was at the root of what came to pass at Pingfang.
* * *
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HAD I understood what I glimpsed that night from the train window, would I have turned back, returned to the circumscribed safety of my home and career? I would like to imagine so; in my right mind I am certain of it. But here lies the problem: the issue of “transgression.” In peacetime all lines are clearer; one need only assemble one’s motives and evidence for the courts to make the determination. And even if proceedings are flawed and verdicts inconclusive, in one’s heart, one likely knows if one has transgressed. But in war? Does transgression still require intent? Or is it enough for circumstances to conspire, setting up conditions that pressure one to carry out acts that are in line with, but not always a direct result of, orders? I do not know. Yet I find myself looping through memory’s thickets for that exact bridge that let us cross our ambivalences to the other side.
My two colleagues believe Harbin was the bridge. They claim that, as tourists, we were set up to accept the exotic and so dismiss what would have been, in another context, obviously amiss. I do not dispute this view. Yet I wonder whether we hadn’t been set up—inoculated—long before we set sail for Wonsan. By then the mood of war, long since gathered in the air, had precipitated into crackdowns, the once distant patter of the jingoists’ tattoo literally pounding down doors to keep us spouting the official views. Even our mandatory participation in civil defense drills, as well as our patriotic duty to look the other way, had already become two more chores as seemingly unavoidable as the war itself. Resisting would have been foolhardy, the hardline climate a meteorological fact, its terrorizing power mystical in effect. Yet I am a man of science; I have never been swayed by weather’s mystical claims. Nor have I been captive to its blustery dramatics. So, when I was a young man, still proud of my own mind, I was arrested. My son, Yasushi, was six then, a bright child already righteous, susceptible to grand ideals. He never mentioned my arrest, but I believe it shamed him. He became rebellious, his puerile disobedience erupting into full-scale mutiny by the time he was fourteen. My wife urged me to confront him; I did nothing of the sort. How could I? I, who had ultimately recanted my beliefs. True, I was thinking of them, my wife and son, their torturous road if I refused to cooperate. But finally it was that I could not bear it, the dark shapeless hours sundered by clubs, water, electricity: I gave in.
Four decades later I do not have reason to believe Yasushi is still alive, but every so often there is news of yet another Imperial Army straggler emerging from the jungles in Southeast Asia, and I am unable to let go.
The latest straggler, one Captain Nakahira Fumio, widely speculated to be the last repatriate, is currently on the run. His hut, discovered on Mindoro Island two weeks ago, had evaded detection for thirty-five years. The authorities finally released his picture.
What could I do? I charged into the newsstand. The image, a grainy reproduction of a school portrait, showed a hollow-chested boy with an affable face, generic enough to be any youth. Could Yasushi have taken his identity? Because, you see, back then, when Yasushi was raring to enlist, he’d been too young. Needing my consent, he’d approached me with the forms. I, of course, refused, citing the importance of his studies, and worried that he’d try to forge my signature. But Yasushi, single-minded, was a step ahead of me. Realizing that forms are traceable and therefore retractable, he opted to trade in his identity. What name he assumed we never found out. Even then the military was eager for soldiers, and I, despite my connections, had a record: an official charge of treason.