Fire Flowers (4 page)

Eugene knocked briefly on the door and we bustled into an office, disturbing a balding NCO who was rubbing his head as he frowned over a typed article. His desk was cluttered with sheets of copy and framed photographs of plump, corn-fed children.

“Hal. This is Dutch Van Buren, Editor-in-Chief of
Pacific Stars and Stripes
. Dutch, this is Harold Lynch. Hal's the best photographer in the Third Army. And he can write too—you just wait until you read what he can write . . . ”

“Okay, enough,” Van Buren said, holding up his hands. “I've got things to deal with. Lynch, you're very welcome. Sit down. Eugene, why don't you give me a break and get out of here?”

“He's thrilled to be here, Dutch!” sang Eugene in falsetto, skipping out the door. “The crucible of change!”

Van Buren rolled his eyes as he shook my hand. “Oh, my aching back. You know that guy? You've got my sympathies. Well, I guess you're here now anyway. You know much about
Stars and Stripes
?”

“I read the paper on Guam. We all did.”

“Sure you did. Well, as you know, the
Stars and Stripes
has been in circulation all the way back to the Civil War. We're here to inform—just as any of the big papers are.” His voice took on the tone of a prepared speech. “But in contrast to them, Lynch, we have a very specific audience—the average GI. Doesn't mean we don't go after the big stories. He's interested in the big stories. He understands the political angles. But he also wants to be entertained. He likes to see how the big stories affect the little man.”

“Human interest, you might say?”

“Exactly,” Dutch said, pointing at me. “You've got it right there.”

“Fine. That suits me fine.”

“But in addition to that,” he said, picking up his pen and waving it at me, “we've got to produce stories that the Japs'll understand. So that they'll see what we're doing here. What we're trying to build. We've got a duty to do that too.”

The images of devastation I'd shot on the long ride in from Yokohama that morning were still fresh in my mind. Dutch must have noticed my expression, because he gave a sheepish smile.

“Well, heck, of course, we had to take a wrecking ball to the place first. Only stands to reason. But the next trick is to build something up. A peace-loving, democratic country.”

“‘The Switzerland of Asia?'” I suggested, quoting MacArthur.

“That's right,” he said, pointing at me again. He stood up, gesticulating in the manner of a Roman senator. “Elected representatives. Votes for women. A free press. It's a fine experiment we've got going here, Lynch.”

He turned to a filing cabinet against the wall. As he did so, I glanced at the typed article on his desk. A bureaucratic report, something about land reform. Big swathes of blue pencil had been drawn through it, initials and letters circled in the margin. Further down, blocks of text had been struck through with black ink.

“The crucible of change, Lynch,” Dutch was saying, as he rummaged about in a file. “It's our privilege to have front-row seats.” He turned, smiling, and handed me a small square of paper: “Don't lose it.”

My press pass. The scrawled signature of the supreme commander himself graced the back. I was impressed.

Dutch held out his hand. “Welcome to
Stars and Stripes
, Lynch. I think you're going to fit right in with this bunch of nuts. A man like you could really make a name for himself here.”

“Thanks, Dutch,” I said, shaking his hand. “I'll see what I can do.”

 

I'd been billeted to the old Continental Hotel, not far from the redbrick ruins of Tokyo Station. When I arrived I was astonished and delighted to find that I'd been given a small room of my own. For the first time in years, I wouldn't be bunking down with a dozen other men, subjected to an unceasing battery of locker-room jaw about pinups and football and the Brass. The carpet was worn down almost to the board and an ancient black ribbon of flypaper hung from the ceiling. But as I unpacked my kit and set up my handful of books on the chipped table by the window, it already felt like home.

The view outside was uninspiring. A streetcar line bisected a gravel road, a row of ruined buildings on the far side. I poured myself a drink, and as the alcohol began to glow in my stomach, I sat on my cot and picked away the epaulettes from my jacket, along with the insignia of the 3rd Recon Squadron. I patiently sewed my woven
Stars and Stripes
press badge in its place. That made it official, I thought.

A clang came from the road and I glanced out. A streetcar was crawling valiantly along the track, so dilapidated that I felt like applauding in sympathy. The windows were cracked, the sides all dented. Expressionless passengers squeezed up against each other on the outer deck, leaning precariously over the guardrails.

 

It didn't take me long to find a “human interest” piece. While out exploring the neighbourhood down by the banks of the river, I discovered an old man living under a jury-rigged tarpaulin strung between two poles. He was naked but for shorts and an old raincoat, and he held a bamboo fishing rod, the float bobbing out in the river. I took Eugene and a Japanese-American translator named Roy down there one afternoon. We tapped on the tarpaulin, and after a moment the man emerged from his shelter and stared at us. His old face was lined like a boxer's, his beard as coarse as a brush.

He squinted as Roy explained that we'd like him to tell us his tale. After stroking his beard and looking out at the river for a moment, he gestured at his scatter of belongings. We sat down cross-legged on the ground as he filled a bent jerry can with river water and put it on a little hibachi grill to boil for tea.

I'd expected him to be half crazy, but, in fact, he was the model of eloquence. He'd been a bargeman once, he said, waving at the water. Over the years he'd managed to save enough money to buy a boat of his own. After that, he and his two sons made a living ferrying coal and timber from the factories and yards out to the big ships in Tokyo Bay.

I recalled the picture postcards I'd seen of Tokyo before the war: the waterways bristling with lantern-lit skiffs and wherries, ferrymen carrying drunken revelers up and down the canals as fireworks burst in the summer sky. The river was almost silent now, long strands of weed floating around the mooring posts.

After the fire raids had begun, the man said, he and his sons had taken to sleeping on the boat, thinking they'd be safer out on the water. One night, he'd been sleeping out on deck, his sons in the cabin, when the sirens had sounded and the planes started to float in.

I had a sudden premonition of what he was about to describe. Eugene was scribbling away in his notebook, smiling encouragingly.

Mis-tah B—
this was what the man called the B-29s, waggling his flat palm toward the horizon in demonstration—drifted in very low that night. In wave after wave the planes came, clouds of bombs tumbling from their bellies. From the river, it soon seemed that the whole city was ablaze, red and orange flames dancing across the sky. From somewhere, what he called a “firework” landed on the boat. To his amazement, it squirted fire all over the deck, fire that stuck to the water and blazed away in the blackness. He shook his head at the memory.
Napalm
, I thought, picturing the dewy blue flame I'd once seen spurting from a cylinder that had gone crazy after falling loose from a bomb bay on Tinian Island.

The deck of his boat, piled high with coal, quickly caught on fire. The old man leaped into the water, shouting for his sons to come out. But just then, another white incendiary whistled down and squirted fire all over his body, and he swam desperately to the bank, struggling to escape the flames.

Like an accusing ghost, he opened his coat to show us his torso—a marbled mass of pink welts and sinewy grey tissue.

From the bank, the man had stared out at the blazing hulk of his boat, its glowing heart of coal, pleading for his sons to come out.

He closed his eyes. He shook his head. The barge had swiftly disintegrated into a mass of ash and cinder. By the next day it had dissolved away entirely.

The smoke from the brazier fluttered in the wind, the water in the can still tepid. A sheen of perspiration covered my forehead and a vein was pulsing in my temple. The old man gazed upstream, as if he hoped to see his boat come floating back down the river at any moment.

I took off the lens cap of my camera and asked him if I could take some photographs. With a bow of his head, he agreed. While I was taking the pictures, Eugene asked how he was now surviving. The man pointed at the river and made a hurling gesture as if casting a line, then an eating motion with his hands.

“He catches fish?” Eugene said. “Well, how about that.”

I could see the story spooling out in his head—“The Lonely Fisherman,” perhaps—accompanied by a photograph of the old man proudly holding up his day's catch. But the old man was running his fingers through the air with a repetitive gesture and Roy was frowning. He shook his head: “No, he means rats.”

“Rats?” Eugene said. “Don't tell me he eats rats.”

The old man ducked his head into his chest, clearly embarrassed.

Roy explained that rats—big bloated ones—often came floating down the river. The old man fished them out and barbecued them on his hibachi.

So there it was. Our first story. We thanked the man and presented him with a packet of cigarettes, which he tucked into his raincoat pocket before touching pressed palms to his forehead.

“Is there anything else he needs?” I asked.

The old man cocked his blunt head for a second. He knelt down, hands on knees. Would it be possible to bring him a flask of soy sauce? I promised that it most certainly would. The old man touched his forehead to the ground.

We clambered up the slippery bank to the main road. When I looked back, the old man had already disappeared back into his shelter.

 

That afternoon I processed the prints in the darkroom in the basement while Eugene typed the story in the newsroom upstairs. I knew the picture I wanted as soon as it emerged in the developing tray. The old man sat cross-legged like a ragged Buddha, looking out at the lonely river, his carved face and wild fisherman's beard silhouetted against a sky piled with grey cloud. “A certain enigmatical quality,” as Eugene later put it.

The piece he wrote was too sensational for my taste. It lingered on the peculiarities of the man's diet and spent little time on his account of the fire raid. Dutch ran it on the third page that week anyway, and I felt a glow of pride to see my byline beneath the photograph. I'd been published for the first time.

Later on that day though, Dutch called us into his office. He looked shaken.

“I've just had a call, gentlemen,” Dutch said, “from Brigadier General Diller of the Public Relations office.”

I'd heard the name already, generally accompanied by blasphemy. Brigadier General LeGrand Diller—“Killer Diller”—was part of MacArthur's inner circle, his head of Public Relations. A surly, stony bastard by all accounts, he dictated the official line, and took any criticism of the Occupation as a personal slur against his general.

“He demanded to know what I was doing running stories about old men eating rats. What exactly was I implying? That the Japanese population is starving?”

Warily, I pointed out that the population was, in fact, starving.

“Not according to Supreme Command it isn't!” he hollered, slapping a hand on the table. He rubbed his head and accused us of being morbid, of wanting to land him in a whole heap of trouble.

I had a flash of inspiration. I told him we'd planned the story as the first in a series, to show how much life in Japan would improve as the country became accustomed to the Occupation. We'd necessarily started with some poor fellow living in the pits.

Dutch scrutinized me. “Well. You'd better just run any- thing like this past me in the future,” he said.

I told him that we would.

“No stunts!”

I assured him we were not here to play stunts.

As we were leaving, he called out: “I liked your picture in any case, Hal!”

The rest of the staff certainly found it highly amusing. They'd been gathered outside Dutch's office, eavesdropping upon our dressing down. For weeks, we couldn't go anywhere without them holding up their hands like little paws and twitching their noses. One day a spoof story appeared on the notice board, claiming that rat meat was going to be brought onto the ration.

But the publicity didn't do the old bargeman any good. The Tokyo police somehow got wind of the story and they trooped down the next week to clear him out. Half the city was sleeping in holes and ditches at the time, but the authorities apparently considered it a violation of Japanese dignity for the old man to have so publicly shamed himself by talking to us about it. When I went down later that week with a flagon of soy sauce and some sake, he was gone. All that was left of the random clutter of his shelter were some charred sticks and a bent jerry can.

T
wo
yankii
sailors—enormous black men in flapping white trousers with tiny hats perched on the tops of their heads—were strolling amongst the clapboard stalls and counters of the Ueno Sunshine Market. I was quietly stalking them—
Captain Takara, 1st Ghost Army.
I'd collected half a dozen long cigarette butts already, and one of the sailors was about to fling another one to the ground.

The markets had sprung up like mushrooms almost the day the war had ended, at all the main train stations on the Yaman­ote Line: Shimbashi, Shinjuku, and here at Ueno. At first, scruffy men and women had just laid out whatever they had to sell on patches of bare earth—cups, pens, any old rubbish. Next came the soldiers, returning home, their houses destroyed and pockets empty. One morning, I'd watched as one of them, thin as a rake, sold off his entire uniform piece by piece. First his greatcoat, then his boots, then his shirt and trousers, until he was standing there shivering in his underwear, and I thought for a moment he was even going to try and sell that, and go off with the money wedged between his buttocks.