Island (Part 1)
Project background/introduction | PDF of the original in Chinese
1. Exile
The Second World War had been over for 30 years, but for First Lieutenant Takeo Arishima, the sole remaining Japanese Imperial Army soldier defending Luban Island in the Philippines, the war did not end until his commanding officer during the war, sixty five year old Major Yue Nishiyama, went to the trouble of closing up his tiny bookshop in Hiroshima, getting on a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and, already travel-worn by the time he arrived in Manila, taking a motorboat from Manila to the barely 12 square kilometer Luban Island, to read Emperor Hirohito’s Armistice Edict from 30 years ago. Only then did Lieutenant Arishima officially accept that World War Two was over.
As the white-haired bookseller squinted through his black-framed glasses and read, with a slack tongue and trembling lips in a faltering mumble, “From this moment forward, Our imperial armed forces will immediately disarm and cease all hostilities against the Allied powers,” Lieutenant Arishima listened intently to the old man’s words, standing in his tattered uniform and decaying field cap, grasping an ancient Type 38 infantry rifle, his shoulder cocked to one side and belly jutting out in an inadvertent parody of a soldier standing at attention. As soon as the old bookseller finished reading the edict, Lieutenant Arishima took off his cap, made a deep 90-degree bow to demonstrate acceptance of the order from his commanding officer, and then began to report to his superior the glorious achievements of the Japanese Imperial Army on Luban Island over the last 30 years.
To the reporters assembled on Luban Island for the occasion, stories of lone holdouts like Lieutenant Arishima were not really groundbreaking news by that point. Just a few years before, a Japanese Imperial Army sergeant who had been hiding in the mountains on Guam for over twenty years was finally discovered and sent back to Japan. But one aspect of Lieutenant Arishima’s story made it newsworthy: The sergeant on Guam had stayed hidden in the jungles out of cowardice, and didn’t even know that the war had ended. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Arishima, who was steeped in the traditional samurai code of honor, wasn’t hiding out of cowardice and actually had a very clear understanding of the state of world affairs, since, during his long time in hiding, he regularly tuned in to the BBC Japanese language broadcast on a stolen crystal set radio. In order to get him to surrender, the Japanese government had actually spent forty thousand American dollars to send a team to Luban Island to find Lieutenant Arishima. and also to drop leaflets and play messages over loudspeakers telling him that the war was indeed over and that he should surrender and come home.
Lieutenant Arishima steadfastly ignored all these attempts to contact him, however, and stubbornly continued to do what he could to carry on the war. Partly this was due to the strict indoctrination he had undergone as a youth, but more importantly was that the last order he received from his commander before coming to Luban island was, “No matter what happens, continue fighting. Down to the last soldier, even if you’re out of ammunition with no hope of resupply or reinforcements, never surrender.”
Over the next thirty years, Lieutenant Arishima followed that order to the utmost. When American and Philippine troops took control of Luban Island, Lieutenant Arishima and the three soldiers under his command retreated into the jungle. One soldier eventually surrendered, and the other two were killed over the years in encounters with the Philippine police, leaving Lieutenant Arishima on his own hiding out in the wilderness. During this time, he came down from the mountains occasionally to steal food from the villages. He sometimes couldn’t avoid encountering “enemy” villagers, who he would shoot with his rifle when they confronted him. He had thus been responsible for the deaths of about thirty villagers, and for wounding another hundred or so.
Lieutenant Arishima’s “last stand” was a headache for the Philippine government, who, at their wits end, asked the Japanese government for help. They enlisted a young Japanese explorer named Suzuki, who volunteered to go to Luban Island and track down Lieutenant Arishima. When the two of them finally met face to face in a small clearing deep in the jungle, Lieutenant Arishima presented Mr. Suzuki with the conditions for surrender that would preserve his honor as a warrior: “I will only surrender if my commanding officer rescinds the order he gave me before I came to this island.”
So Mr. Suzuki had no choice but to return to Japan to find Lieutenant Arishima’s former commander. A long search led him to a tiny book store in Hiroshima, where he finally tracked down Major Nishiyama. Mr. Suzuki then escorted Nishiyama back to Luban Island, where he read Emperor Hirohito’s thirty year old Armistice Edict to Lieutenant Arishima, and then rescinded his thirty year old order to, “no matter what, never surrender,” enabling Lieutenant Arishima to accept that World War Two truly was over.
Later, at the official ceremony of surrender at Malacanang Palace in Manila, Lieutenant Arishima presented the Philippine president with the rusted samurai sword he had carried for thirty years, as a token of his surrender. As a gesture of respect toward Lieutenant Arishima and goodwill toward the Japanese people, however, the Philippine president not only gave the sword back to Lieutenant Arishima, but also pardoned his crimes against the villagers on Luban Island, clapping him on the back and praising him, “you are a great warrior!”
2. Return
In Akita Prefecture in the northern part of Honshu, Japan’s main island, a train pulled into the tiny station at Shimotsuke. The train gradually slowed to a stop and allowed Takeo Arishima to disembark, then blew its whistle sharply and slowly resumed its journey. Arishima watched the train disappear where the tracks vanished on the horizon, and then turned around toward the station house. The station was completely still and silent — even the ticket office looked deserted — as though the entire station had lain down for an afternoon nap. Arishima wandered the station for a long time, and only when he came to a fence outside the station and started looking for an exit that a young station attendant hurried out of the ticket office to open the gate for Arishima and help him with his luggage. The station attendant didn’t have his hat on and had the startled look of someone who’d woken up abruptly.
“Good afternoon, sir. Did you come a long way?” the station attendant inquired politely.
“Tokyo”, Arishima replied, though it occurred to him that it would be more correct to say he had come from Luban Island in the Philippines, but he didn’t say this out loud.
Outside the train station stood an old banyan tree, beneath which lay a yellow akita with its tail wrapped around its snout, napping in the shade. With his sole suitcase in one hand and the ever-present samurai sword in the other, Arishima walked toward the tree. As he sat down in the shade, the samurai sword made a scraping sound in the dirt, startling the dog awake. The dog gazed at Arishima, with a look that indicated neither hostility nor friendliness, then stood up to stretch, and walked listlessly into the station. The corners of Arishima’s mouth lifted into a faint smile, which just as quickly disappeared.
Arishima lifted his head to look at the banyan tree’s tangled stems, and reached out his hand to feel the polished roots. The passage of thirty years had seemingly left no mark on the old banyan tree. He thought back to the last time he was here, thirty years ago, about to get on the train to begin his deployment. He had stood under this same tree with his mother and sister. At that time, it wasn’t just them — families from all around the village and nearby mountains had come to the station to send off their sons who’d been conscripted, and everyone was gathered around this big banyan tree saying their reluctant goodbyes. It was quite the scene.
After he’d boarded the train with the other conscripts, Arishima leaned his torso out of the window to wave goodbye. Some villagers waved flags and others waved handkerchiefs, while Arishima’s fifty-year old mother simply stood at his window wiping away tears. Arishima noticed a neighbor, Mr. Kawasaki, walking toward them. Kawasaki had desperately wanted to enlist, but was rejected due to some physical infirmity. He clasped Arishima’s hand and said, “Takeo Arishima, fight bravely and defeat the enemy at all costs! Do not be afraid to sacrifice your life for your country and return home with honor!”
Upon hearing Kawasaki’s words, Arishima’s mother turned to him in fury and slapped him across the face, exclaiming, “Everyone has sons to spare, is that it? Everyone else’s families have men to spare?”
Kawasaki looked like he wanted to hit back, but was too weak to even lift his arm. He wheezed as though suffering from consumption. All he could do was mutter insults and feebly kick at Arishima’s mother. For her part, Arishima’s mother wasn’t finished with Kawasaki, and started hitting and shoving him, arms and hair flying in her rage, resisting attempts by Arishima’s sister and other villagers to pull them apart. It was during this moment of chaos that the train’s whistle blew and the train started to move. Without a chance to even say “goodbye” to his mother, Takeo Arishima left his home and saw his mother for the last time.
Whenever he thought about the incident over the years, Arishima always believed his mother could have responded more graciously to Mr. Kawasaki, since it is only right and proper for a man to die for his country. Yet he also understood the sorrow his mother carried in that moment. After all, by that time his family had already sacrificed two of its three men to the war — Arishima’s father had been killed in Guam, and Arishima’s older brother Takero had been killed not long before in Shanghai — leaving Arishima as the sole man in the house. In the end, he couldn’t really blame her for being so upset.
He had learned at the press conference in Tokyo that his mother was dead. If she were still alive, he thought to himself, she’d be eighty years old now. And his sister, Hideko? How old would she be? Why, she’d be forty-five. “I wonder what she’s like now?” Arishima said to himself.
An old truck drove around the big banyan tree and stopped in front of the train station. A young man of about twenty leapt out of the truck. He was shorter than average, but was quite solidly built. He wore oil-stained coveralls. He walked into the station, and then came back out a moment later, looking left and right. Arishima was debating whether to wave when the young man spotted him and walked quickly over.
“Are you my uncle, Takeo Arishima?” The young man asked. Seeing Arishima nod, the young man continued, “Mother suffers from rheumatism, so it’s difficult for her to come down from the mountains. She sent me to pick you up. My name is Taro.”
Taro reached forward and picked up Arishima’s suitcase, and was about to pick up the samurai sword as well, when Arishima quickly stopped him. “Thank you, but I’ll get that myself!”
The truck sped along the sole gravel road leading from the station. A creek ran along the left side of the road, and the hills rose steeply on both sides. With the samurai sword resting across his thighs, Arishima looked out the window at the gurgling water, the acacia-covered hills, and the occasional black drongo that landed on a branch. Everything felt so pleasant, so homelike, exactly as it did when he left thirty years ago.
Taro held the steering wheel with one hand while he took out a cigarette with the other hand and put it to his lips. He lit the cigarette, took several hearty puffs, then passed the box to Arishima, asking if he wanted one. Arishima shook his head, saying, “Thank you, but I don’t smoke.”
”The wife doesn’t let me smoke at home, so I have to do it while I’m out,” Taro said. Arishima said nothing, so Taro continued, “I was originally going to come earlier, but this train is often a half-hour late, so I decided to come a half-hour late, too. I didn’t think it would actually be on time today. I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting so long, Uncle.”
”It’s no problem,” Arishima responded, thinking to himself, he’d already waited thirty years, what’s another thirty minutes?
They drove for over an hour, through sparsely populated, dense, mountainous forest. The only break in the scenery was an occasional oil well. The oil wells must be new, thought Arishima — they had not been there when he left. The truck continued along the road, and soon he saw more houses, followed by a butcher, a general store, and a woodware store. Finally, the truck pulled into a gas station with a car repair shop attached.
”This is where I work fixing cars.” Taro told Arishima as he turned off the engine. “I borrowed the truck from my boss. We will walk from here.” He then went to the back of the truck and took out Arishima’s suitcase.
Three young men with grease-stained faces emerged from the garage. They all looked to be about the same age as Taro, who introduced them and then said to them, “This is my uncle, Takeo Arishima.”
”Ah, so this is the ‘Hero of Luban!’”, the tall skinny one named Fukaya said coldly. “We’ve read all about your heroic exploits in the papers.”
The bald one named Tomita then cut in, ”According to the morning paper, the government gave you the entire thirty years of back pay, is that right? That must make you a millionaire!”
“When you were on that island, you had no car, no TV, no liquor, and no women. How did you get through it?” Asked the third one, Ono. He had a short upper lip that exposed all of his teeth when he spoke.
They continued peppering him with questions and observations, sometimes talking over each other. Arishima just looked at them disdainfully and didn’t say anything. Perhaps even Taro sensed his colleagues were going a little overboard, and said to them, “Hey, I think that’s just about enough, guys! My uncle only just returned from the Pacific, and he’s tired. He doesn’t have the energy to answer you guys right now. How about we save the questions for later?”
After they’d walked some distance from the repair shop, Taro turned around and said to Arishima, who was trailing behind, “These guys are used to joking around and ribbing each other. Sometimes they get a little out of control, and even I lose my patience with them.”
“It’s okay,” Arishima responded blandly.
Taro then told Arishima that Fukaya, the tall, skinny one, had attended university. But with one semester left before graduation, he decided he didn’t want to continue, so he quit. He came back to the village, married a deaf-mute girl, and got this job fixing cars. He knew a lot about how things work, and Taro had learned a lot from him.
Arishima took all this in, but said nothing.
Takeo Arishima’s old family home was further up the mountain from the village. After climbing a set of quartz-stone steps set in the hillside, the village’s sole elementary school came into view. Arishima paused there to catch his breath, and called for Taro to take a break as well. However, Taro said he wasn’t the least bit tired, so he would go ahead to the house and let his mother know that he had brought Arishima back. Once Arishima felt rested, he could continue on to the house on his own. So Taro walked on, carrying Arishima’s suitcase.
The little school only had five or six classrooms, all in a row on a narrow ledge carved out of the side of the mountain. Perhaps because the village was so remote, most kids who grew up there moved to the city as soon as they were old enough, so the population of the village had never really grown. Ever since Arishima’s time there, the school had never been renovated or expanded, though workers would brush a fresh coat of lime on the exterior walls every three years, so the school looked exactly the same as it did decades ago. Arishima turned his eyes toward the red dirt school yard. One end of the schoolyard was empty and desolate, without so much as a fence. The other end, however, had a row of cherry trees. The cherry trees didn’t seem to have grown any taller, but the trunks had gotten substantially thicker. Every spring, when the snow melted, the trees would fill with cherry blossoms, spreading a rich fragrance into the classrooms. Then, before summer arrived, the ground would be covered with fallen petals. How beautiful that was!
Arishima let out a deep sigh, put the samurai sword on the ground, and sat down on the stone steps. He suddenly thought of a teacher he had in elementary school named Mr. Mishima. Mr. Mishima wore a full beard and had a voice like thunder. At the school, he taught Japanese and kendo. When they were in the classroom studying Japanese, Mr. Mishima wore a black civil servant’s uniform with a mandarin collar. From his belt, Mr. Mishima hung his sword, which would make a sharp ‘tap, tap’ sound as he walked up and down the stairs. All of the students admired him and wanted to be just like him. When they were in the schoolyard studying kendo, however, Mr. Mishima would strip off all of his clothes, with nothing but an padded apron tied around his waist, just like the students. The kendo lessons would last a full three hours, even in rain and heavy wind, until every student was exhausted both mentally and physically. Yet no one dared complain that they were tired, lest they receive three rapid-fire punches to the head, which would descend from Mr. Mishima as suddenly and implacably as a thunderclap before a rainstorm.
During morning assembly each day at the school, the students would all face south toward the imperial palace in Tokyo, and bow in obeisance to the far-off emperor and royal family. The person calling the orders to turn, stand at attention, and bow would be none other than Mr. Mishima, perhaps because he was the most magisterial of the few male teachers at the school, but more probably because his voice was as clear and loud as a heavy bell. The students would not have been surprised if the emperor himself could have heard Mr. Mishima’s voice at his palace.
But all that only reflected the imposing, masculine side of Mr. Mishima’s personality. He also had a tender, sensitive side, which was readily apparent when he taught poetry. His reading voice was delicate and nuanced, and he varied the rhythm, cadence, tone, and pitch of his voice to vividly express the full meaning of the poem. Mr. Mishima had an expressive face and could call upon a rich repertoire of emotions. If there was a particularly moving passage, he wasn’t afraid to weep mournfully in front of the students. Arishima remembered with perfect clarity the time they read “The Brave Bugler,” about a Japanese bugler during the Russo-Japanese War who was hit by a bullet and used his last breath to blow his horn at a crucial moment in the battle, thus saving his comrades — Mr. Mishima cried then. Another time, they read “The Three Brave Human Bombs,” about three Japanese soldiers during the Sino-Japanese War who volunteered to use a heavy landmine to blast a hole in an enemy fence, sacrificing themselves in the process — Mr. Mishima cried then, too.
But the incident that made the deepest impression, that Arishima would never forget, took place one spring day outside the classroom. The students had all stripped down in preparation for kendo, when Mr. Mishima was seized by inspiration and led the students to the cherry trees, where he told them to lie down on the silky-soft cherry blossoms covering the ground. As the students looked up at the sky, with cherry blossoms fluttering down around them, Mr. Mishima’s stentorian voice rang out, “Listen up! Young men dying on the battlefield is as proper as cherry blossoms falling to the ground in spring. What is as redolent? What is as magnificent? What is as poetic?” By the time he finished the poem, Mr. Mishima and all of the students had been moved to tears.
By the time Arishima walked the rest of the way up the mountain to the family home, it was already dusk, and Taro had been back for over an hour. When Arishima opened the door, he found Hideko in the entrance vestibule prostrated toward the door in a ceremonial greeting. When he sat down in the vestibule to take off his shoes, Hideko rushed to take them from him and put them on the shoe rack. Her eyes were filled with tears of joy.
Arishima regarded the plump figure with thin, gray-white hair in front of him, and compared it to his last memory of her, as a slender young woman dressed in a school uniform. If earlier at the train station he hadn’t thought about how old she’d be now, he’s certain he would not have recognized her. After thirty years, the town and surroundings haven’t changed, but the people have. He had probably changed quite a bit himself, he figured.
Taro came to the vestibule from inside the house. He was trailed by a young woman who was about half a head taller than him and holding a two-year old girl.
“This is my wife Yoko, and this is my daughter Shizuko,” Taro said to Arishima. He then turned to the girl and said, “Shizuko, say hi to your great uncle. Quick, greet your great uncle!”
The girl not only didn’t greet Arishima, but buried herself deeper into her mother’s arms and started to cry.
Yoko’s expression changed and she reproached Taro, “You always do this! You know she’s afraid of strangers, yet you keep doing things like this and making her cry.”
Taro looked at Arishima and shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Arishima returned his gaze but said nothing.
To welcome Arishima home, the family had prepared an elaborate dinner, but most of it had gotten cold by the time he arrived. Only the miso soup was still a bit warm. Yoko asked Arishima why it took him so long to get to the house. He responded that he stopped at the school to reminisce and lost track of time.
“When Taro got back he said you would be right behind him. We didn’t think that you would be over an hour late. If we had known sooner we would have waited to start cooking. I’m sorry that the food isn’t hot,” Yoko said, with a displeased expression on her face.
“It’s okay,” Arishima responded.
After dinner, Taro and Yoko only lingered at the table briefly before going about their business, so Hideko took him to his room, and said, “You’ve had a long day. You should go to bed early. We’ll get up early tomorrow and visit Mother’s grave.”
Hideko then left and gently slid shut the shoji door. Arishima looked around the room. There was a freshly-washed comforter laid out on the tatami floor. Next to it was a folded kimono. Next to the pillow was an old porcelain bud vase with a single chrysanthemum in it. The vase was a family heirloom handed down from Arishima’s grandfather.
Arishima slipped on the loose and comfortable kimono and laid down on the comforter. The comforter was a bit rough, and smelled of rice milk. He thought about how, thirty years ago, whenever he returned home from training, he would watch his mother lay out a fresh bed spread for him while she peppered him with questions about the war and his training. The comforter back then always felt a bit rough and smelled of rice milk.
The corners of Arishima’s mouth lifted into a smile, and he rolled over onto his belly, resting his chin on the pillow. That was when he noticed the slip of paper tied to the stem of the chrysanthemum. The note read, “Welcome home from the front, Takeo. We are grateful for your return.” The note was written with a calligraphy brush, and Arishima instantly recognized it as Hideko’s handwriting. Arishima felt a deep contentment, and thought to himself, “how fine it is to be back in one’s home town, how safe and warm it feels to be at home.”
There was a soft knock on the door. The door slid open and Hideko came in, holding a yellowed photograph, and said to Arishima, “This is a picture of you from before. I found it in your bookcase after you left. I was going to use it for a memorial for you, but now that you’re back, I can just return it to you.”
After Hideko left, Arishima sat up and studied the photograph carefully. It had yellowed and was missing a corner. It was from when he graduated from officers academy, and he was in full dress uniform. He remembered that the photo was taken after a magnificent military parade in front of the Nijubashi Bridge on the imperial palace grounds in Tokyo. By that point, the tide of the war had turned against the Axis powers, so to boost morale the emperor himself came out to review the troops.
The emperor wore rimless glasses, a large chrysanthemum badge on his chest, and white gloves. Riding majestically on his well-mannered white horse, he passed slowly in front the ranks of soldiers. Arishima’s breath caught when the emperor’s eyes swept over his unit. He had finally seen with his own eyes the divine emperor, a god manifested in human flesh, and was moved to tears. After the emperor reviewed the troops and started riding back toward the palace, an officer shouted, “The great Japanese empire’s warriors will never yield!”
The soldiers echoed his call, “The great Japanese empire… never yield!”
The officer then shouted, “Death before dishonor! We will commit seppuku rather than be captured!”
Again, the soldiers echoed, “Death before dishonor! We will commit seppuku rather than be captured!”
The soldiers then began to sing the imperial anthem in unison. When they reached the end, the soldiers broke out in thunderous cheers, so loud Arishima thought the sky might collapse. In that moment, Arishima was filled with the same fervor as his fellow soldiers, and couldn’t wait to charge straight onto the battlefields and crush the enemy with his bare hands.
By the time Arishima woke up the next day, it was already quite late in the morning. It was a bright sunny day, and Taro and Yoko were already gone. Hideko was in the kitchen, carrying her granddaughter in a sling on her back, preparing breakfast for Arishima.
“Is Yoko at work?” Arishima asked Hideko as he ate his breakfast.
“Yes. She works as a cashier at the general store in the village,” Hideko replied. “The truth is Taro makes enough money for us to live on, and he has asked Yoko to stay home and tend to the house, but she wouldn’t listen. She said she doesn’t want to waste her youthful years on housework and childcare, serving as her husband’s slave. Ai! That’s just how women are nowadays. What can you do?”
Arishima didn’t say anything at first. Then he remembered how Yoko scolded Taro the day before about their daughter, and said, “Yoko acts pretty mean to Taro. Has she always treated him that way?”
“Not just Taro — she treats everybody that way,” Hideko replied.
Shimotsuke’s cemetery was situated on a hillock just behind the Arishima family home. Arishima watched uneasily as Hideko slowly picked her way along the mountain path, leaning on her cane with one hand while still carrying her granddaughter on her back. He had told Hideko not to bother coming — that he could find the way himself — but she insisted, saying that, while her rheumatism made going up- and down-hill difficult, she had no problem on flat ground. Arishima thought to carry Shizuko, but the girl started crying as soon as Arishima touched her, so carrying her was out of the question. Arishima couldn’t help thinking of when his grandmother was alive. Back then, the older you got, the easier life was, the more respect the younger generations gave you. Whenever Arishima’s grandmother left the house, her daughter-in-law would invariably accompany her and see to her needs. How different things are for Hideko — not only was her daughter-in-law not there tending to her, she had to serve as her daughter-in-law’s housekeeper and nanny. Times had certainly changed, almost unrecognizably so.
Near the Arishima home is a large piece of farmland that had been in the family for generations. Back when Arishima’s father and brother were still alive, they grew rice. After they died in the war, Arishima and his mother planted castor beans instead, one because it was less labor-intensive, and two to answer their country’s wartime needs — they were told that castor oil could serve as a substitute for some petroleum products. But now the field was so choked with weeds and dandelions, Arishima couldn’t even pick out the embankments between the paddies. As they walked across the abandoned field, swarms of grasshoppers leaped onto Arishima’s hair and clothes. He snatched them off one by one, throwing them on the ground and stomping on them testily.
“Young people nowadays have no interest in farming,” Hideko sighed. “They say there’s no future in it, so as soon as Taro finished elementary school, he got an apprenticeship at the auto repair shop. That’s why this field is in the state it’s in.”
“Why don’t you hire a seasonal worker? Even if they only tend to the field for a few months in the summer, it’d be better than letting good farmland go to waste. Not only does it feel like a shame, the weeds are a real eyesore.”
“Who said we didn’t? We hired someone one year. He lived with us in the house at first, but didn’t get along with Yoko,” Hideko explained. “They argued all the time, so he moved out. He built himself a straw hut and lived there by himself, eating on his own, too. But still Yoko argued with him all the time, and he finally quit. No one has touched a hoe to this field since then.”
They finally arrived at their mother’s gravesite. The style of the headstone was more contemporary than the others in the graveyard. One could guess that it was made fairly recently.
“How long ago did mother die?” Arishima asked.
“Five years ago. She died of grief over Taro’s father’s death. He was hit by a car. Someone had to carry the body on their shoulders all the way back up the mountain. When Mother saw the body, she stopped eating, and then took ill. She died a month later,” Hideko said, wiping away tears with her shirt sleeve.
Arishima did not really have any feelings about his brother-in-law’s death. After all, he’d never met the man, and it was hard for him to imagine what the car accident looked like. But thinking about his mother’s death filled him with sadness. He could clearly picture the look of heartbreak and defeat on her face as she lay in her sickbed. No doubt, she died thinking Arishima had already been killed in the war. If she’d known he was still alive, perhaps she would not have died so soon.
This thought brought to mind the scene outside the train station thirty years ago, when his mother and Hideko came to send him off. He remembered how the three of them stood wordlessly to the big banyan tree and tearfully said goodbye on the platform. And then how Mr. Kawasaki’s exhortation to “sacrifice your life for your country and return home with honor!” caused his mother to slap Kawasaki and the fracas that ensued.
“Is Mr. Kawasaki still alive?” Arishima asked Hideko, breaking the silence.
Hideko didn’t answer at first. She made an unhappy face, turned her head to search the rest of the graveyard, then gestured with her chin toward another newer-looking grave marker, and softly said, “over there.”
The trail Arishima and Hideko took home from the graveyard followed the undulations of the mountain, and they were able to hear the rippling sound of flowing water well before they came to the mountain stream. The stream also followed the undulations of the mountain, flowing into a pool, which drained into another pool just below it, and so on, in a chain of small pools down the mountain. In those pools, large black shrimp could be found. When he was a child, Arishima would often come with his brother Takero and swim in these pools. They would also feel their way under the pebbles for shrimp to catch. One time, some villagers taught them to dam the top of the stream with sneeze wort vines, and the brothers went from pool to pool as they drained, picking up shrimp, filling two whole buckets.
“Do you remember the time Takero and I caught two whole buckets of shrimp?” Arishima asked Hideko, smiling.
“How could I forget? That was the most shrimp I’d ever eaten in my life,” Hideko replied, also smiling.
The path crossed the creek at a bend in the trail, and Arishima supported Hideko as they walked on the rocks poking above the surface of the water, carefully working their way to the opposite bank. On the far side of the creek was a broad pine forest, the branches dense with needles. In between the roots were fist-sized matsutake mushrooms. Since no one had picked them, the caps were wide open and had turned brown. Like the rice paddies next to the house, the pine forest was part of Arishima’s ancestral estate. Arishima remembered how, when his father went to work the fields, his mother would come to the forest to pick mushrooms. Because Arishima was too young to work the fields, he would often come with her.
“Don’t you pick matsutakes any more?” Arishima asked Hideko.
“Yoko is afraid to eat foraged mushrooms, so now no one in the family does. Some of Taro’s coworkers from the auto shop do come up after it rains to pick matsutakes to take back down the mountain,” Hideko replied.
As they walked through the forest, they came across a straw hut, not too far from the house. It was crudely built, but had a wooden door and glass windows. A chimney from a wood-burning stove, probably to provide warmth in the winter, jutted out from one of the windows. Arishima searched his memory, but couldn’t recall ever seeing this hut before.
“That’s the straw hut the seasonal worker I told you about built. Ever since he left, no one has lived there,” Hideko said, seeming to anticipate Arishima’s question.
When they came out of the forest, they were back at the family home.
Takeo Arishima’s third day back at Shimotsuke was a Sunday, and the village organized a welcome reception for him. It was located in one of the classrooms at the elementary school down the mountain. The desks and chairs in the classroom felt smaller and more cramped than he remembered, but nevertheless evoked pleasant school-day memories for Arishima. Most of the attendees were young men and women from Taro’s generation that Arishima didn’t know. They had all come to get a glimpse of their little village’s national hero, and perhaps bask in some reflected glory. As for the familiar faces from thirty years ago that he’d hoped to see, there were very few, perhaps because most of the men of his generation had died in the war, and members of his parents’ generation had either already died of old age or were too infirm to come to the reception.
Arishima studied the faces of the young men and women, and couldn’t help feeling a vast sense of loss and sorrow, as if he had found himself stranded on an alien planet. He remembered how, when he was a young man, all the men kept their heads cleanly shaven like monks, and all the women wore skirts that covered their knees. In contrast, the young men in front of him all had hair down to their shoulders, and the women not only wore skirts that couldn’t possibly be any shorter, some of them even ripped holes in their clothing, so their navels and bellies were visible for all to see. In the past, men and women wouldn’t even dare hold hands in public, but now they not only walk around with their arms around each others’ shoulders and waists, they publicly engage in intimate acts that Arishima wouldn’t dare to do even in his dreams. It was all very disconcerting and left Arishima feeling uneasy.
The crowd was fascinated by the details about Arishima’s life on Luban Island, and expressed a great deal of admiration for how he endured so many years of solitude in the mountains. They asked him a great number of questions, many of which reflected how incomprehensible Arishima’s existence on Luban Island was to these young men and women who grew up in the material prosperity of post-war Japan. But to Arishima the primitive conditions that he lived under for thirty years were simply a matter of fact, so he answered every one of their questions directly and without embellishment.
”Mr. Arishima,” one person asked during the conversation, “what was the most painful thing you endured during those thirty years?”
”Losing my two comrades, when they were killed by the Philippine police,” Arishima answered solemnly.
”What about the most joyful thing?”
”There was nothing joyful. I didn’t experience a moment of happiness in those thirty years.”
“Amazing… Just amazing,” Taro’s co-worker Ono said, “Living by yourself in the jungle, with nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no wine, no women… If it were me, I’d have surrendered long ago instead of holding out for thirty years.”
The crowd laughed, and Ono smiled his toothy grin in response, proud of himself for coming up with a crowd-pleasing joke in the spur of the moment. Arishima, meanwhile, simply gave Ono a scornful glance, and said nothing.
“There’s something I’d like to ask Mr. Arishima,” Taro’s other co-worker from the repair shop, Tomita, said while scratching his bald head. “The morning news reported that over thirty years you killed thirty Phillipinos and wounded a hundred. Is this true?”
“I did kill and wound some people,” Arishima replied, nodding his head, “but I don’t remember the exact number.”
Upon hearing this, Fukaya from the repair shop, who had been silent up until now, spoke up. “Having killed so many people, and wounded so many people, how do you feel about it now? Do you feel any regret?”
“I don’t regret it, because it was war,” Arishima replied firmly.
“But the war had ended so long ago — only you continued to fight,” Fukaya said.
“I had not received an order from my commander to stop fighting. In fact, it was the opposite. His last order to me was, ‘No matter what happens, continue fighting… never surrender,’” Arishima said.
Fukaya crossed his arms in front of him, nodded and smiled grimly, then finally said, “Think about it, Mr. Arishima. Suppose you were still on that island, and every superior officer in your chain of command had already died — the government can’t find anyone to fly to that tiny island to read the Armistice Edict to you. Would you continue fighting, and refuse to come home?”
Arishima had never considered this question, and having been presented with it so suddenly, he was truly at a loss. But after considering the question carefully, he was able to regain his composure, and answered decisively, “I would stay on Luban island!”
The crowd gasped and murmured, astonished by the ironclad certainty of Arishima’s response. Arishima, meanwhile, was feeling a growing contempt toward these youths. This generation was not like the previous generation. They were lost. They didn’t know what it meant to be a nation, to be a people. They didn’t know the glory of conquering China, the satisfaction of defeating Tsarist Russia. They only knew how to indulge in decadent materialism. They had completely lost the majestic Yamato spirit.
“You people cannot understand me, because you don’t understand history,” Arishima said after a long while. “You should all go home and look through your history books.”
Everyone looked at each other, then turned their attention back to Arishima, hoping he would explain what he’d just said.
“People nowadays might think that war is evil, that it’s wrong. But I believe war is virtuous, that it’s right,” Arishima said with an uncommonly resolute expression on his face. “War is holy. Sacrificing for your country is divine.”
“Holy? Divine?” Fukaya retorted sardonically. “Annexing our neighbors under the guise of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ is divine? Sending troops to kill countless Chinese people is holy? Sending troops to occupy the South Pacific is virtuous? Launching a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor without first declaring war on the Americans is righteous? History isn’t actually glorious, it’s disgusting. Your generation wants to reminisce about the past, but the rest of us are actually trying to forget it!”
“You don’t understand history,” Arishima repeated, all the color gone from his face. “Japan didn’t choose to go to war. Japan was forced by circumstance to take the path of war. You don’t understand history at all!”
“Yes, yes, we don’t understand history,” Fukaya replied. “Only you, Takeo Arishima, understand it. You understand it so well that even thirty years after Japan itself has surrendered, you continued to wage war on that tiny Pacific island. Mr. Arishima, you’ve been poisoned by the emperor and his generals, but you still don’t realize it. If it weren’t for your generation’s blind servility, we wouldn’t have suffered the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki…”
“Shut your mouth! Do not malign the divine emperor!!” Arishima screamed.
“‘Divine emperor?’ Mr. Arishima, do you still believe Hirohito is a god?” Fukaya asked.
Arishima was livid, and his whole body trembled, but said nothing.
“The emperor is not a god. He admitted it himself to the entire country in a radio broadcast. His ancestor Amaterasu isn’t a goddess that sprang from a rock. It was all just a myth some schemers dreamed up to cement his family’s hold on power. No one believes it any more. You may be the only one in all of Japan who still believes the emperor is a god. Let me tell you, Mr. Arishima, the emperor is exactly like you and me, just a regular person who needs to eat, needs to drink, needs rest, needs sleep…”
“And needs sex!” Ono interjected.
The crowd roared with laughter. As if to emphasize the point, one young man picked up his girlfriend standing next to him and started kissing her passionately. A circle formed around them, with people clapping and cheering, and the classroom dissolved into chaos.
Arishima was silent through all this. He watched the recklessly frolicking young men and women, and a string of scornful descriptors came to mind: disrespectful, obscene, shameless, degenerate, disgraceful, immoral, rootless, subjugated… But he grit his teeth and restrained himself, lest these thoughts burst out of his mouth involuntarily. He felt dispirited and disgusted. Why was he here in the same room with this scum, subject to their humiliation and ridicule? He quietly slipped out of the classroom.
Once outside the classroom, a profound calm settled over Arishima. The light breeze blowing into his face felt particularly refreshing, and he instantly felt reinvigorated, as though every nerve had been washed clean, and the chaos and clamor of the classroom had been tossed beyond the nine heavens. He walked across the red dirt schoolyard to the row of cherry trees. The trees had only green leaves — all of the blossoms were gone, and all the fallen petals had been blown to who knows where by the wind. But that didn’t change things for Arishima. These cherry trees were imprinted so powerfully and vividly in his mind that, as soon as he sat down under a tree and looked up toward the sky, the green branches began to fill with blossoms and petals began fluttering down toward the ground. At the same time, his ears rang with Mr. Mishima’s thunderous voice, reciting, “Young men dying on the battlefield is as proper as cherry blossoms falling to the ground in spring; what is as redolent, what is as magnificent, what is as poetic…” and his eyes filled with tears.
To be continued…
