A Thousand Stitches (13 page)

But at the moment I climbed out of the plane, the wind was just the part of nature that had lifted me and carried me aloft, part of the beautiful package of green mountains and blue water, of shimmering islands and towering peaks. I'm sure I didn't completely suppress my exultant grin—or my shaking legs—as I stood at the side of the plane—the wonderful, wonderful plane—saluted the instructor, and said “Thank you, Sir!”

Two
weeks into our training, when we were anticipating our solo flights, Lieutenant Takeuchi assembled the entire division. There had been another mishap. It was minor, but it was the third that week. We knew he couldn't tolerate such sloppiness. “Rows one, three, and five, about face,” came the shouted order. I was happy when I realized that I didn't know the cadet I was now facing.

“Legs apart!” and then the pause, just enough time for us to think about what was coming.

“Go.”

I took a step forward, my head high, my right arm raised, and put all my strength into the punch. It landed hard on the cadet, just as his landed on my left cheek. The Lieutenant had keen eyes. “Tanaka, Yamashita, Ogonogi, and Minoda, and those you are paired with, stay where you are. All others, two steps back. Hup!”

I was glad I had learned the rules the last time and didn't have to go through it again, under the Lieutenant's close scrutiny. My left cheek, like those of all my buddies, was hardened by months of this discipline.

As
the days of training went on, our grips on the controls became firmer and firmer, but we never resisted the movements of the instructor. Then came that wonderful day when right after takeoff I heard, “Okay, Student Imagawa, you're on your own,” through the tube. It took me a second or two to realize that the instructor's hands and feet were off the controls. I began to sweat but kept on doing exactly as we had trained. My turns were smooth. The descent seemed to go well. “Five meters,” I yelled, and pulled the throttle and control stick back, but just a bit too fast. The plane glided about a meter off the ground for about three seconds and then thumped to a landing. I was lucky that it wasn't bad enough to damage the landing gear.

After three days of this, I had my first solo. Once I was in the air, I was overwhelmed with the joy of flying and the power in my hands. I was in full control, not only of one airplane: I controlled the entire world! The scenery below was especially beautiful. I wanted to ease the plane into a roll or a loop, but didn't know how, so I brought the plane in for landing, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. The landing was perfect. I wasn't surprised—it was part of the absolute and powerful purity of the experience.

A few days later, after all of us completed solo flights, we began advanced intermediate night training—loops, slow rolls, quick rolls, pursuits, and dodging pursuits. Nose diving from 1,500 meters and pulling up at 500 meters was fun. The hardest was formation flying. The Model 93 had a maximum speed of only seventy-five knots, so if you fell behind it was hard to catch up. But we were flying every day. The more we flew, the more we loved it.

This
time because it was just our squad, the remedy was “Navy spirit injection.” We had had four less-than-perfect landings, and Utsumi had ripped his uniform. “Take position,” shouted the Lieutenant. All too familiar with this from our days in Mie, we bent over, pushed our butts out behind us and held our arms straight out in front of us. The Navy Spirit Injection Stick was four feet long. Lieutenant Takeuchi moved down the line, whacking each of us as hard as he could on the bottom. When the injection was accomplished, each of us, in turn, despite the effort involved, stood up straight, saluted, and said, “Thank you!” We made sure we were loud, and sincere.

To our regret, we weren't in the air all the time. Once we had our basic skills under control, only one squad at a time trained. The others worked on Morse code, aircraft engine maintenance, athletics, and rifle and bayonet training. Life at Izumi had settled into a routine.

Very early in the morning of the first Sunday of April, Lieutenant Takeuchi marched into our barracks and announced that we were going sailing. As we jumped to attention, he laughed at our surprise, “Well, you
are
naval officers, aren't you? We're going to sea.”

The ship was a small workhorse minesweeper, but it was painted battleship gray and flew the magnificent rising sun battle emblem, with its bold, defiant beams radiating to the borders of the flag. The smell of the paint reminded me of the Japanese fleet visit to San Francisco.

We sailed from Izumi across the Ariake Bay to Amakusa. Lieutenant Takeuchi announced that we would have a short shore leave and that he had arranged for a quick tour around the small town. The Lieutenant walked at the front of the group, with the guide, a tall, thin elderly woman with a toothy smile and sun-dark skin. Although she looked like a farmer's wife, her manner of speaking reminded me of Hoshino-sensei, my history and jurisprudence teacher. Could it have been only three years ago that I sat in his classroom? Before the war began, I was shocked when he made sarcastic comments about “you-know-who” taking over. “You-know-who,” General Tojo, had been Prime Minister for two and a half years now, and the war against the United States was more than two years old. And I was a naval cadet and a pilot, part of a great and glorious historic adventure.

As we climbed the hill to the Castle, the old lady told us about Amakusa. “In the early eighteenth century, many of the local farmers converted to Christianity. With the new religion, the Jesuit missionaries also taught the farmers a taste for self-determination. When the cruel persecutions of the Tokugawa Shogun culminated in an outright ban of Christianity, the local farmers rebelled, seizing this castle and the one at Shimabara. There were long, bitter sieges during the winter of 1737–38, and the rebels were eventually defeated in fierce, bloody assaults by the Tokugawa troops. The few rebels who weren't killed in the battles were only able to save their families and keep their heads if they smashed statues of the Virgin Mary and stamped on crosses. Christianity was officially obliterated, and the area came under the direct control of the Shogun. In 1739, the Tokugawas ejected all Portuguese and Spanish from the country. Only the Dutch and the Chinese were able to continue to trade, and the Dutch were restricted to the island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay.”

The exhibits in the small museum on the ground floor of the Castle were touching because they were somewhat ridiculous. “Imagawa, take a look at this,” called Utsumi, who was joking around with Kobayashi. He was pointing at the neatly labeled “Christian scissors” in a display case.

I smiled but didn't reply. With the guide's words still in my head, I drifted from thinking about foreign religions to foreign influences, and then the interplay of words took me across languages and cultures:
Amakusa
,
Amakusa
…Heavenly Grass, Grass of Heaven, Grass Heaven, what's the translation, what's the best way to say it in English? And what about
Amanogawa
? It's poetic, I thought, that the Japanese for Milky Way was River of Heaven, Heavenly River. And
Amanohashidate,
Bridge of Heaven, Heavenly Bridge, one of Japan's three most famous views, the sandbar with the beautiful pine woods where, supposedly, the Japanese gods had conceived the islands of our country—the story I had heard my second week at Bancho. Now I was mixing not just English and Japanese, but Shinto and Christianity. Why had English popped into my head? It wasn't part of my life any more. In fact, it was the enemy. The fact that I had spent so much time around Christianity had no relevance to my life now. But here I was in the area that sparked Japan's isolation for almost 150 years, learning that much of what happened had been triggered by ideas that came with Christianity, with foreign religions and foreign ideas.

Ridiculous but not really harmful, I had always thought as I sang “Rock of Ages” with the Grahams, enjoying the music, thinking everything else was silly. While Utsumi and Kobayshi laughed, I thought of Mrs. Graham sitting at her dining room table in Matsuyama, cutting out a pattern for a new dress for Jane, while Morgan and I played with tin soldiers on the floor at her feet. “Christian scissors” at work in Japan two hundred years after the bloody battles of Shimabara and Amakusa.

My musings about religion and foreign influences had faded by the time we got back to the dock. Before we sailed, the staff from a local restaurant delivered a delicious picnic lunch. We feasted on the fish for which the area was famous, fresh vegetables from local farms, and mounds of perfectly sticky rice balls, some sprinkled with black sesames and others wrapped in sheets of seaweed. We cruised back to Izumi in the fading light. I stood with my friends, feeling completely alive and content, the breeze on my face, my senses full of the briny, mollusky smell of the sea, watching the yellow, pink, and then red of the sky as the sun sank. Lieutenant Takeuchi, who had been so tough on us for so long, stood with me, Utsumi, and Kobayashi for much of the return trip. He too seemed content just to be there. His only comment was, “A good day.”

As we headed back to our barracks in the dark, I wondered if I would ever again experience the rising joy of a journey across water, and thought of all the wonderful ones I had made, even in my short life: the ship pulling away from San Francisco Bay, and then across the majesty of the wide Pacific, and my many ferry trips across the serenely beautiful Inland Sea with its islands floating and shining in the sun.

We
knew that our time in Izumi was limited. As we awaited our orders, we looked forward to our next assignments and took pride in the inevitability of our fates. But the mood of our elders, including the senior officers, was rather elegiac. The town wasn't big enough for an officers' club, but, as Lieutenant Takeuchi told us, the local people were very kind. I'm sure now that their affection had a great deal to do with their awareness of our fate. Even though they lived with the privations the war had brought, they were willing to share what little they had with us.

The
Sunday after our sailing excursion, local families invited the cadets on home visits. Kobayashi and I teamed up. It took us twenty-five minutes to walk to the home of “our” family. When we arrived, everyone was waiting for us: Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka; Reiko, the oldest daughter; two younger girls; a baby boy; and a maid. Kobayashi and I grinned at each other: lucky, lucky, lucky. Reiko was the prettiest girl in Izumi, no question about it.

After a delicious dinner, only Kobayashi, Mr. Tanaka, and I remained at the table. I leaned back on the
tatami
and thought, this
is
a warm and wonderful place. The lovely Reiko brought another container of
shochu.

“Thank you, my dear. That will be all for tonight,” said Mr. Tanaka. I thought of my father, and his love of alcohol, as Mr. Tanaka filled my glass again. The local liquor was strong. It had a big, broad taste, like the oily local fish, like the white radishes as big as watermelons, and like the pungent purple potatoes.

The
next Sunday Reiko sat with Kobayashi and me at dinner and responded to our questions. I wondered then and I wondered over the next few weeks whether she liked me or Kobayashi better. But it didn't really matter. We were short-timers. Short-timers in Izumi, short-timers in this life. That second Sunday, by the time Mr. Tanaka and I had finished the third container
,
I stopped thinking about Reiko and realized I had learned to love
shochu.
Kyushu really was quite wonderful. I only made it back to the barracks because Mr. Tanaka took me on his bicycle. My sober-sided friend Kobayashi trotted alongside.

I was
delighted when a letter from Mother arrived at the end of April announcing that she was setting out to visit me. She had been released from her nursing service in Zentsuji in March and was back home in Matsuyama. She wanted to see me before I was transferred somewhere far away, and she was coming by herself because Father had seen me since I had left Matsuyama.

She traveled from Matsuyama across the Inland Sea to Oita by ferry, and by train to Izumi. I was shocked to see how thin she was. I was used to her being rather plump, and remembered Father's loyal jokes about the unattractiveness of skinny women. Mother said that everything was scarce, especially food. She also brought the news that she and Father were moving back to the family home in Ishii Village because our Yanai-machi house in the city was going to be torn down to create a fire break. The city was expecting bombings. I was horrified. I had never imagined that the war would reach Matsuyama.

Mother must have noticed my distress, but clearly didn't want to talk about it. She reached in her bag and pulled out an old
furoshiki
that I could remember her carrying on shopping trips in Japantown when I was small. “Isamu dear, I have something wonderful for you.”

“Yes, Mother?”

She untied the
furoshiki.
It fell open, revealing a delicate white silk cloth with bright red stitches: a beautiful
senninbari
.

“I saw that Shizuyama girl, Michiko, on the corner by the train station. She was asking passersby. I stopped to talk to her since you knew her at Bancho. Well, was I surprised when I learned that she was making it for you. How nice of her. I had her bring it round as soon as she was finished. It turned out quite well, didn't it?”

I took the long silk scarf and ran my fingers over the stitches. I thought of Michiko making the stitches and pictured her standing alone near the station asking others to take a stitch for her. I had wondered why I hadn't heard from her. My last letter from her had arrived shortly after we began training in Izumi. Michiko had written it in late January, and it had been forwarded to me from Mie. I had had no answer to the letters I had written her about learning to fly, about our trip to Amakusa, about where I thought I might be going next, about how I thought I might never see her again.