The Souvenir (10 page)

The front door of the mess hall has been left open for the prophet Elijah, as is customary at a seder. There is even an extra wineglass on the table. On the “Amen!” Norm, Sam, and Morrie escort Yoshio Shimizu inside. The wine has just been blessed, is now being poured. The officers look askance at this breach of protocol. “They brought a
shkutz
,” says a captain, and the men all laugh. My father seats Yoshio beside him at the table and unties his hands. He grabs the Manischewitz and pours him a glass. The wine is sweet like plum wine. It is Passover; you're supposed to recline at the table. You're supposed to drink four glasses of wine instead of one. These are mnemonic devices to help us remember the significance of the story of Exodus told on this holiday.

The seder plate is passed around. There is a bare bone and a burnt egg to symbolize the burnt offering Moses made to God on Mount Sinai. The tradition is for the youngest son to ask the ritual Four Questions. But there are no children here, so nineteen-year-old Private Cohen from Schenectady is drafted for the job. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” How was this war different from all other wars? The men pray they'll never invade the mainland, that God's secret weapon will spare them for next year in Jerusalem. The men chant “Dayenu,” meaning “It would have been enough.” It would have been enough if the Red
Sea had parted, it would have been enough if Moses' staff turned into a snake. It would have been enough if God had spared the firstborn of the Hebrews. They drink more sweet wine. They sing
Chad Gadya
, that children's song:

All the men are high by now, even Yoshio Shimizu, who pounds out the rhythm on the table with a Navy spoon. My father is in such a jovial mood, he even sings that Russian song with all the “heys.”

After the last cup of wine is drained, Yoshio Shimizu rises from the table and faces my father. He presses his good-luck banner, a silk flag, into Norm Steinman's hands, bows deeply, and is led away.

M
OST PROBABLY, IT
did not happen like that. A letter my father wrote in the Communications tent while a hard rain fell realistically depicts his attitudes toward Japanese POWs.

Perhaps the flag was simply abandoned. After Umingan, my father describes a battlefield strewn with objects the Japanese soldiers left behind: “The Nips must have cleared out in such a hurry that they didn't wait to take anything with them. Last night I slept on a Jap blanket and used a real pillow. George even had a mattress. We were all envious.”

Or, perhaps it happened like this: my father kneeled over the cold body of a young Japanese soldier who had fallen in front of his eyes in the fierce fighting around Balete Pass. In the yearbook of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division and World War II, published just after the war, there's a description of Japanese dead “littering a battle-torn hill.” Perhaps my father noticed a scrap of silk still clinging to the lining of the dead soldier's helmet, and plucked it out. Perhaps, in the dizzying heat, he folded that banner carefully and placed it in his pocket. It didn't weigh anything.

I
T WAS A
powerful impulse to imagine my father's enemy as a real person. Of course, my life was not threatened by grenades or snipers. I had the luxury of speculating who Yoshio Shimizu was, what he might have felt, where he came from. I wanted to know if, like his enemy, Yoshio Shimizu had a young child he'd never seen. Did he have brothers, sisters? Did he come from a big city? A small village? Had he suspected that the emperor was not a god but a man? Had he somehow survived the war? Was he a grouchy executive who'd lived in Nagoya all these years? Was he a shopkeeper in Gifu, tormented by nightmares? Had he been a foot soldier or a commander? Had he beheaded POWs in Bataan? Huddled in a foxhole sharing stories about home?

As I imagined Yoshio in more detail, and as I read more about the history and ethics of the conflict, I contemplated what form might best express what I was learning about the war. For many years, creating a performance or dance/theater piece had been the way I gave order to my investigations.

I could create a performance piece or a one-act play about the imagined battlefield meeting between my father and Yoshio Shimizu. I could use images from my father's letters, both real and imagined: the American GIs drunk at the seder with the Japanese POW; the two soldiers singing themselves to sleep at night in their
foxholes; a meeting on the battlefield at night against a projected film clip of the emperor riding his white horse; scenes of my father parting from his young wife; and Yoshio Shimizu, reluctant to go to war, receiving his good-luck flag from his family in Japan.

Inspired, I applied to a foundation in Japan to create this dramatization of the two soldiers and the lost flag. Their rejection was swift and disappointing. It also turned out to be a gift in disguise.

The foundation had misinterpreted my project proposal to mean that I would actually perform
with
the flag. A program officer there took it upon himself to explain why this would be a bad idea:

The program officer's suggestion lit flares in my mind: What if what began as artistic speculation could instead become a physical gesture in the real world? What if it were possible to actually find Yoshio Shimizu or his family and what if I could
actually
return the flag to them?

I
HAD NO
clue how to begin locating a person connected to some fifty-year-old smudges of ink on a piece of Japanese silk. I tried the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, with no success. I was open to suggestions.

A friend who spoke Japanese came up with the address of an organization in Tokyo that sounded quite helpful: the Japanese War-Bereaved Families Association. If I wrote to them, she suggested,
surely they would help me find the family of Yoshio Shimizu. I wrote immediately.

Months passed. No word from Tokyo. It was late 1994, and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II was just half a year away. In the United States, as in Japan, there was considerable debate about how to commemorate this momentous anniversary. The argument about how to portray the dropping of the first atomic bomb was spilling across the Pacific, and igniting incendiary emotions. The politics of memory between the two sides of the Pacific War were deeply conflicted.

In the United States, the controversy centered on the Smithsonian's proposed exhibition about the
Enola Gay
(the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima), with veterans groups accusing the museum of revisionism and historians accusing Congress of pandering to veterans.

In Japan, the loudest controversy centered on whether or not the government should issue an apology for Japan's brutal actions in Asia during World War II. (“A small dry cough of remorse,” is how
New York Times
correspondent Nicholas Kristof termed the government statement that was finally issued.) The newspapers were filled with new accounts of the Korean comfort women forced by the Japanese military to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during the war.

The Japanese War-Bereaved Families Association, I later learned, was one of Japan's most influential nationalist organizations, a potent lobby that was putting its muscle behind the fight to block a war apology in the Japanese Parliament. Although opinion polls showed that the great majority of Japanese was in favor of an apology, the association supported the outrageous claim that Japan had fought “a war of liberation” to free Asians from the yoke of Western rule, and that to admit otherwise would dishonor the Japanese war dead.

If I had known that, I could have guessed their response to my query. Whatever the association discerned were my motives (at the time not exactly clear to me), they wanted no part of my search. They declined without offering any specific reasons.

One Sunday, while reading readers' queries in the
New York Times
, one question made me sit up and take notice: “How do I find the grave of a British soldier from World War I who is buried in a military cemetery near London?” Hmmm. I scribbled my own query to the
New York Times
Question Man: “I would like to find the record of a Japanese soldier who fought in the Philippines in World War II,” I wrote. “I found his good-luck banner in my father's mementos and would like to return it to the family.”

Several weeks later, the phone rang and I picked it up to hear a deep warm voice: “I'm Paul Freireich from the
New York Times
and I'm going to take on your question,” he informed me. “Tell me everything you know.”

Within weeks, Mr. Freireich had located and communicated with a Mr. Chitaru Satake in the Office of Records Research in the Social Welfare and War Victims Relief Bureau in the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare. Mr. Satake had agreed to open an official search through Japanese government documents to find Yoshio Shimizu or his survivors.

I sent Mr. Satake a photograph of the flag and a letter explaining what I knew about when and where the banner was found. I thanked him in advance for his efforts, and then I waited.

O
NE GRANT DID
come through that spring, a modest stipend from the local arts commission to conduct storytelling workshops for recent immigrants, especially those who lived in neighborhoods hardest hit by recent urban unrest. Teaching these workshops brought me no closer to Japan, but by learning to listen more carefully, I began to see how seemingly disparate stories can bring people
together in unexpected ways.

For my first session, four participants showed up. There was Mark, a blind Cambodian; Naz, from Soviet Georgia; Wendy, a Chinese student; and Lucy Mendez, from El Salvador. As an exercise, I asked them to talk about gifts they had received, something that helped them remember the person who gave them the gift.

There were blank stares. Okay, an example. I showed them my wedding ring, the one that my father had bought for my mother when she was just nineteen, the antique gold band formed of five Cupids linked head to toe. “There are five Cupids,” I said, “because my father wanted to have five children. When I see this ring on my hand, I think of my mother and father.”

Lucy suddenly spoke up. “I have a gift from my father. He died in the civil war in our village. I have a lock of his hair,” she said, fingering her own. Naz's father had been killed by a stray shell two months earlier in the ethnic strife in Azerbajian. He'd been a journalist for the daily newspaper in their town. All his life he had wanted to come to America. Naz kept her father's papers and his visa in a black wallet in her purse. Mark rustled in his pocket and pulled out a tiny brass Buddha. His eyes filled with tears. An amulet from his mother, a victim of the Khmer Rouge.

In that humble classroom I contacted a world much larger than my own, a world in which a parent's death at sixty-one from a sniper's bullet or execution squad—rather than at seventy-four from a heart attack—was not so uncommon.

The word
bereaved
comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for “robbed.” Someone or something you love is snatched away from you. By a pirate, a rogue heart, a firing squad. Until I discovered my father's letters, I hadn't realized that the war had stolen him away before I was born.