The Souvenir (18 page)

The mayor asked Lloyd to say a few words. Bleary with fever, assailed by emotions, and constricted by the formality of the situation, he managed a few sentences until his gracious hosts let him off the hook.

After the speeches, the women working behind the scenes brought out an enormous banquet: platters of colorful sushi, tempura, crab's legs, and red-bean rice, made specially for auspicious occasions. The men chain-smoked American cigarettes. Bottles of beer and carafes of sake appeared. The tone in the room changed. There was laughter, joking. The men came over to slap Lloyd on the back. Our glasses were always full.

The flag was fondled, caressed, examined. “Do you remember where you signed? Look here!” Several people found their names on the flag, where they signed fifty years ago—offering the young soldier good luck as he departed for a foreign land. This kind of flag is called
yosegaki
, which means a collection. A collection of names.

The Shimizu family had embraced the advice that Amy Morita had given them—to think of us as the long-lost friends of the missing soldier. Heady from my never-empty glass of sake and the thrill of this gathering, I felt as though we were.

I remembered that it was the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover and we were the honored guests at the banquet, just as I had imagined Yoshio Shimizu as the honored guest at my father's seder in the middle of a war.

The words we repeat each year at Passover as part of the service took on new meaning: “Since you were once a stranger in the land of Egypt, thou shalt love the stranger as thyself.”

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
, the gathering finally started to break up. The house emptied as everyone left and assembled in the driveway for a group photo. Two lawn chairs were brought out for Lloyd and me. Yoshio's three sisters knelt down on the ground to my right. The elder men, including Suezo and the mayor, squatted to Lloyd's left. Yoshinobu, his two-year-old perched on his shoulder, stood directly behind us. In front of him, between Lloyd and me, his wife
cradled their youngest. Four of Yoshio's old friends held the flag, each one gripping a corner of the silk square. Masako took the left flank. Click. The moment was recorded: We now shared a common history.

T
HE
S
HIMIZUS AND
the mayor were eager to take us to Lake Hyoko, Suibara's premier tourist destination, and introduce us to the Swan Uncle, one of the town's most respected citizens. Masako filled me in on the story of Suibara and its swans.

Until the late nineteenth century, Suibara had been the seasonal home to five-foot-tall whooper swans that arrived each fall from Siberia to escape the rigors of the northern winter. They wintered on Suibara's reservoir lake, limned with pine trees that created a natural windscreen. The townspeople considered the birds “honored guests”; hunting them was strictly forbidden. Each spring, the swans migrated back to their nesting grounds in the Siberian tundra.

After Japan opened to trade with the West, firearms, originally introduced by Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century, were distributed widely throughout the country. The villagers of Suibara began to hunt the once-protected birds. Tokyo shops paid high prices for swan meat, which was considered a delicacy. About the same time, noisy factories sprouted up on land that had been rice paddies, their waste emptying into lakes and wetlands in Niigata Prefecture. The combination of hunting pressure and habitat loss ultimately proved too much for the whooper swans. By the early 1900s, they disappeared altogether from Suibara.

In 1950, inexplicably, after an absence of four decades, eight whooper swans returned to Hyoko Lake from their summer nesting grounds in the Siberian tundra. The villagers were amazed to see the spectacular birds adrift on their lake. They crowded along the shoreline, shouting. Some ran for their guns. The shy birds,
alarmed, took off. If it hadn't been for one very determined man, a farmer named Jusaburo Yoshikawa, they might never have returned.

Yoshikawa dedicated his life to persuading his neighbors to leave the swans in peace, and persuading the whoopers to stay in Suibara. He patiently patrolled the lake day and night, exhorting villagers to avoid frightening the swans. When the lake froze over, he hacked through the ice with an ax, wading out in hip-high boots to clear away the shards so the swans could forage for oat grass on the lake bottom.

Yoshikawa's single-minded efforts originally earned him the title of Swan Fool from his fellow villagers. His wife, whom he persuaded to make daily requests of local grocers for discarded greens for the swans, was called the Swan Widow. But he eventually managed to get Lake Hyoko declared a protected zone, officially the “Winter Habitat of Wild Swans at Suibara”; and that same year, 1954, he received the title of Swan Father. His son, Shigeo, who carried on his father's tradition of caring for the swans, is known as the Swan Uncle.

The magnificent whoopers are now little Suibara's main claim to fame. Their return was Suibara's good omen and then its postwar recovery miracle, bringing thousands of Japanese tourists to the town each winter. The townspeople are both grateful and protective. Schoolchildren in Suibara form swan patrols to assist with feedings, and to insure that the birds are not harassed.

We sat in the observation room at the lake's feeding station with Shigeo Yoshikawa, the bespectacled Swan Uncle. Nori machi, a green tea that tastes like chicken soup, was served. Exhausted from the emotion of the afternoon, no one ventured small talk. We all stared out the windows, looking one way toward a field of purple irises, the other way toward the lake and those few swans still in spring residence; their black-beaked beauty was startling against the
pale reeds. “Louise-san must come back in swan season,” Shigeo announced, with a voice of quiet insistence. The Shimizus all nodded enthusiastically. The idea appealed to me, unlikely as it seemed. Then it was time to go.

The Shimizu family insisted on driving Lloyd, Masako, and me the forty minutes to the Niigata train station. Once we'd located the right track and the right shinkansen train and seated ourselves inside on the correct seats, the family assembled outside the window, the colors of their sweaters and jackets making a somber study in mauves, blues, and gray.

They did not wave, but stayed in their places as if a portrait photographer were taking a long exposure. The women were in the front, the men behind them. Hiroshi, Hanayo, and Chiyono—the three sisters of Yoshio Shimizu—stood elbow to elbow, their hands clasped together and their pocketbooks over their forearms. Behind them: Hiroshi's husband, Suezo; cousin Yasue, the farmer; and beside him, the new patriarch, young Yoshinobu, Yoshio's nephew.

I kept my eyes on the assembled family as the train pulled out of the station. I was relieved that Yoshio's flag was now in their possession—home where it belonged.

 
The Philippines

A
FEW DAYS
later, on the plane to Manila, I kept thinking about the Shimizu family, standing outside our train compartment window.

I tried to sleep. Lloyd and I were both exhausted. Lloyd was barely recovered from the flu. I wasn't sure we had the stamina for Manila in the hot season, and for the journey to the site in the mountains of northern Luzon, where my father assumed guardianship of the flag.

Reading the warnings in
The Lonely Planet
guidebook did not do much to spark our enthusiasm for travel: “Beware of pickpockets, thieving cabbies, strangers who offer drugged sweets, or drunks.”

I'd already inherited an antipathy to the Philippines, reinforced by my father's letters.

That same September, in Luzon before his division left for Japan, he made a sobering trip to the cemetery in the barrio of Santa Barbara. He brought his camera: “Many of the pictures I took were of the boys that I knew and some of the entire cemetery as a whole.”

He went to visit the still-fresh graves of friends like Sam Wengrow, “the Jewish lad from Florida.” Sam had been killed by a sniper on May 29, 1945, after the Battle of Balete Pass was officially over.

After the war, the American Military Cemetery in Manila was designated as the permanent resting place for Americans who died in the Philippine campaign, and soldiers buried at several sites around the Philippines, including the cemetery in Santa Barbara, were reinterred here.

O
UR ACCOMMODATIONS WERE
reserved at the Midland Plaza Hotel in downtown Manila, an unlovely modern behemoth, thirty floors of gray concrete with a shiny marble lobby, uniformed elevator men, and its own coffee shop.

The hotel was a leftover from Marcos's heyday, and tourist business must have been slow. No other guests in that vast building ever revealed themselves to us during our entire stay. No one else appeared in the coffee shop, no one else but us cashed traveler's checks at the front desk. The management must have rented out the rooms to long-term guests. We smelled curries simmering and heard families arguing behind closed doors in the long carpeted corridor.

The security guards chatting in the lobby were armed with semi-automatics. There had been a recent spate of bank robberies in Manila, which were thought to be linked to the guerrilla movement on the southern islands. The hotel porter, a sweet young man named Louis, insisted on walking us the half block to the 7-Eleven, where we bought midnight snacks before turning in. The security guard at the 7-Eleven was fondling a semiautomatic as well.

Our room was really a suite, with two huge rooms and a balcony overlooking Manila Harbor. In Japan, all of the hotel rooms we stayed in would have fit inside this one. And it was cheap, too, by American standards. In fact, after Japan, where buying a cantaloupe was like trading in stocks and bonds, Filipino currency was like Monopoly money. Our first night we both slept fitfully, each waking up several times to the sound of the rasping air conditioner.

In the morning, we had coffee and toast in the Midland Hotel coffee shop, which doubled in the evening hours as a nightclub. Its most distinguishing feature was the painted mural of American movie stars—Marilyn on the ski slope, James Dean lounging, Fred and Ginger (who sported a chapeau resembling a plate of scrambled eggs) dancing the night away.

When we stepped outside the air-conditioned hotel, the force of mid-morning heat nearly knocked us over. We made our way toward the bay, past tiny foodstands selling snacks I wouldn't dare eat: pickled pigs' feet and jars of large eggs glistened in the hot sun. Whenever we stopped, a jeepney—one of Manila's garishly decorated local vans—slammed on its brakes beside us, the driver shouting out, “Want a ride?” As tourists, we stood out.

Trying to get across a boulevard took nerve. None of the stoplights were working, and the flow of jeepneys and taxis and buses was constant and thick. So was the air, wretched with exhaust.