The Nicholas Linnear Novels (22 page)

No one disturbed him then save for Cheong, who seemed invulnerable to his infrequent wrath. At times she would stay on the
futon
with him until he was awake but at other times she was up early, working in the kitchen, having shooed the servants away.

Cheong prepared the meals on the weekend. She would have cooked every day, Nicholas knew, because she loved to do it, but the Colonel forbade it. “Let Tai do the cooking,” he told her somewhat crossly one day. “That is what she is paid for, after all. Your time should be your own, to do with what you want.” “Do what?” she had said. “You know very well what I’m getting at.” “Who, me?” She pointed to herself. “Me only ignorant Chinee, Colonel-san.” She said this in pidgin English, though she had superb grasp of that language. She bowed to him over and over. The Colonel was exasperated by her parodies—she was a brilliant mimic, picking up individual accents and idiosyncrasies with astounding rapidity—because they struck so close to reality. He did not like to recall those aspects of the hazed Asian shore so close to them across the
genkainada
: the utter disdain with which the English and the Americans alike treated the Chinese and the Malay; as if they were some subhuman species, suitable only for menial and sexual labors. The Colonel had taken Cheong in his strong sun-browned arms and kissed her hard on the lips, holding her tight around, knowing from experience that this was the only way to silence her, that the expression of his anger would only egg her on.

That particular Sunday morning, Cheong was already up and slicing fresh vegetables when Nicholas came into the kitchen.

Oblique bars of sunlight jazzed the windows, turning them sparkly. The drone of a distant plane could be heard, preparing to land at Haneda. Low on the horizon he could see the flying V of the geese, moving away from the ellipse of the rising sun.

He kissed her and her arms went around him.

“Will you go to the
dōjō
today?” she asked quietly.

“Not if Father will be home.”

She split green beans. “I think he has a surprise for you today. I was hoping you would decide to stay.”

“I felt I should be here,” he said. “I wanted to be.”

“There may come a time,” Cheong said without looking up from her cooking, “when that will not be possible.”

“You mean with Father?”

“No, this applies to you.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“When your father and I left Singapore, So-Peng was already dying. It was to be a relatively slow death and he had much to accomplish before the end. But as he said to me, it would be the last time we would see each other; and he was right.” Her hands moved in a blur along the wooden counter, blithely dissociated from her words. “I knew that I must take your father and leave Singapore behind forever; our life lay elsewhere; it lay here. But my heart broke at leaving So-Peng. He was my father; so much more than a father and I so much more than a daughter. Perhaps that was so because we had chosen each other; it was our minds rather than our blood that were the same.

“That day, as we left, I paused on the porch of his house as I had done so many times when, as a child, I was about to go out, when So-Peng put a hand on my arm. It was the first and last time he touched me as an adult. Your father was already somewhat ahead on the street. ‘Now you are me, Cheong,’ he said to me in the peculiar Mandarin dialect we used only among ourselves in the household.”

“What did he mean?”

“I don’t know—I only suspect.” She wiped her hands, dipped them in a bowl of cold lemon water, began to slice again, swiftly and deftly; this time it was cucumbers. “I cried all the way through the forest until we reached the clearing where the Jeep was parked. Your father, of course, said nothing, though I’ve no doubt he wanted to; he would not shame me that way.”

“Did you have to leave?” Nicholas asked.

“I did, yes,” she said, for the first time looking up from her work. “I had my duty to your father. That is my life. I knew it that day and so did So-Peng. It would have been inconceivable to him that I should stay with him, that I should abandon my duty. It could not happen. To abandon duty is to destroy that which makes any individual unique and capable of prodigious feats.

“Duty is the essence of life, Nicholas. It is the only thing over which death has no dominion. It is true immortality.”

As it turned out, the Colonel had the entire day free and, it being spring, he took Nicholas to the Jindaiji Botanical Park in the city for the traditional cherry blossom viewing.

On the way they dropped Cheong at Itami’s; she had promised her she would go with her to see her uncle who was ill.

The morning’s haze had lifted and a strong easterly wind had already banished the low-lying mist; wispy cirrus arced like a series of Impressionist paintings newly hung in a museum’s vast gallery.

So, too, the park seemed to have been dropped wholesale from out of the heavens. The heavily flowering trees, their long branches bent low under the weight of the palest pink blossoms, took on an ethereal otherworldliness. At other times of the year the park perhaps showed its rather austere beauty. But this was April and the splendor displayed here was breathtaking.

Kimonos and brightly colored oiled paper parasols were much in evidence as they made their leisurely way along the winding paths beneath the two skies, one low and fragrant, the other far out of reach. They stopped at a vendor selling sweet tofu. The Colonel bought them each a portion and they ate the confection slowly as they moved on. Laughing children passed them, indulged by their parents, and young couples, arm in arm. There were many Americans.

“Father, will you tell me something about the
zaibatsu
?” Nicholas asked.

The Colonel spooned a bit of tofu into his mouth, chewed reflectively. “Well, I’m sure you know quite a bit already.”

“I know what the
zaibatsu
are,” Nicholas said. “Four of the largest industrial complexes in Japan. And I know that for a brief time just after the war many of the
zaibatsu
’s top executives were tried for war crimes. I don’t really understand that.”

The Colonel was obliged to stoop slightly as they passed beneath low-hanging branches. They might have been flying, passing through rose-colored banks of clouds. Modern Tokyo seemed never to have existed, to be, rather, a manifestation of some science fiction tale. An Easterner walking here at this time would have no difficulty in understanding this. Symbols abounded in Japan, acquiring their own potency. For the Japanese there was perhaps no more powerful symbol than the cherry blossom. It stood variously for renewal, purification, love and ineffable, timeless beauty: basic concepts to the Japanese spirit. All this passed through the Colonel’s mind as he decided where to start.

“As in all things Japanese,” he said, “the answer is not a simple one. In fact, its origins lie elsewhere: in Japan’s long militaristic history. With the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan made a strong and concerted effort to turn away from both the isolation and the feudalism that marked the two hundred-plus years of the powerful Tokugawa shōgunate. This also meant turning away from the traditionalism which, many felt, was the backbone of Japan’s strength.”

They turned off to the right, heading down a shallow incline toward a small lake. The shouts of children’s voices drifted up to them through the foliage.

“But with this new policy,” the Colonel continued, “this Westernization, if you will, came, quite naturally, the eroding of the samurai’s great power. After all, they had always been Japan’s most stalwart traditionalists. Now they were branded reactionaries, for they vigorously opposed all that the Meiji Restoration sought to create. I know that you are well aware that since 1582, when Hideyoshi Toyotomi became shōgun, only samurai were allowed to wear two swards—the
katana
was the samurai’s province alone. Now this was all changed. The Military Conscription Act forbade the wearing of the
katana
and, by creating a national army composed of commoners, effectively did away with the class barrier that had exalted the samurai since its inception in
A.D.
792.”

For a time they strolled by the side of the lake, its pure chill blue contrasting with the pink-white of the blossoms. Toy sailboats drifted across the water, their white sails billowing, their tiny captains running gleefully at the verge of the land to keep up with their progress.

“However, the samurai were not so easily beaten,” the Colonel said. The miniature sails, moving so steadfastly over the water, recalled to him perfect prints out of Japan’s internecine past. “A great majority of them fought back directly and, when they were defeated, they formed societies. The main one was called the Genyōsha—the Dark Ocean Society—but there were others such as the Kokuryūkai—the Black Dragon Society. These societies, which are quite active today, are reactionary organizations that believe strongly in imperialism and a manifest destiny for Japan upon the Asian shore.

“Now the Genyōsha was born in Fukuoka and is based there still. But since that part of Kyūshū is this country’s closest approach to the continent, it’s not very surprising that the Genyōsha should be most virulent there.”

Nicholas thought of the Mongol invasions, of the violently nationalistic feelings that must have been nurtured there by such precipitous incursions. And this led him back to thoughts of Satsugai.

They found a bench beside the water, sat down. On the far side of the lake a child held a handful of colorful balloons and, farther away, over the massive treetops, he could see plastered against the sky the quivering fragile presence of a box kite; it was painted in the image of a fire-breathing dragon.

“Having failed in their bid to overtly overthrow the Meiji regime, the members of the Genyōsha next set about subverting the Restoration covertly, from within. They were clever men. They knew that the Meiji oligarchy, which propounded industrialization, would need economic expansion in order to fuel this. To them, this must involve the exploitation and eventual subjugation of China.

“Working within the prescribed political framework of the new Japanese society, the men of the Genyōsha sought to make allies in the highest levels of government. They made their intensive target the members of the General Staff, where a reactionary philosophy was the norm rather than the exception.

“They were aided in this by the upcoming general election of 1882. The Genyōsha made deals with the incumbents. In return for their seeing that these politicians were returned to office, the society was assured that this regime would follow a vigorously imperialistic foreign policy. Accordingly, the Genyōsha hired toughs, importing them into each district of the country. Beatings were not uncommon. It was an election of fear.”

Two American Army officers passed by with their families in tow; they wore their uniforms like a badge of honor, treading the ground like the conquering heroes they were. Perhaps they saw where they were, what went on around them, but surely they understood none of it.

“With the implementation of this policy and the success of Japanese expansion into Manchuria and Shanghai came the vested interests of the Japanese businessman abroad. A growing economy was now crucial to Japan and its rate of growth was prodigious. Out of this caldron rose the four enormous industrial combines comprising the
zaibatsu
.”

“Then Kansatsu was right when he said that economics must take as much responsibility as militarism for Japan’s road to the war,” Nicholas observed thoughtfully.

The Colonel nodded. “In many ways, Japan was a primitive nation by world standards; the Tokugawa had seen to that. But, on the other hand, they understood perhaps better than any others the purity of their country. But I’m very much afraid it’s one of the things that MacArthur missed. Oh, he knew enough about the culture to leave the Emperor just where he had always been despite the hue and cry that he be tried and executed as a war criminal. You see, quite apart from the fact that, from the first, the Emperor had done all in his power to aid the Americans after the war, MacArthur was well aware that any attempt to dethrone him would throw Japan into utter chaos; it was a tradition that even the mighty shōguns dared not tamper with.

“Yet also from the first the Americans propounded the myth that the guiding force behind the Japanese war effort came entirely from the military.” He licked at his sticky fingers, took out his pipe. “Nothing could have been further from the truth. It was the members of the
zaibatsu
who backed the country into a corner from which war became the only viable economic alternative.”

“But what about the Japanese people as a whole?” Nicholas asked. “Surely they did not want war.”

The Colonel placed his pipe, unlit, between his teeth. He looked up, watching the gentle bobbing of the laden boughs in the wind. “Unfortunately there is a long history here of the people being led. It comes from being so long in a feudal society, of giving blind obedience to the Emperor, the shōgun, the
daimyo.
It’s inbred.” He sat upright, half facing his son on the bench, one hand holding the bowl of his pipe. “It’s not surprising, then, to learn that there was little concerted antiwar sentiment just before the war. In fact, the Social Democrat Party, who had been openly antimilitaristic in their stand when Japan invaded Manchuria, lost much of their constituency in the 1932 general election. It was the tiny but ineradicable Communist Party that became the lone Japanese voice raised against imperialism during that time. It was little more than a reed in a hurricane; the
zaibatsu
and the Genyōsha had efficiently manipulated key individuals in both the government and the media; war became inevitable.”

They both looked up at the sound of running feet. To their left a pair of uniformed policemen rushed down stone steps three at a time, their arms spread wide on either side for balance. People looked up. There was a harsh cry. Children turned; the toy sailboats rocked unattended and unwatched. Several of the American officers hesitated for an instant before taking off after the police. Nicholas and the Colonel stood up and began to drift with the crowd around the left side of the lake.