One Man's Justice (14 page)

Takuya blew on the glasses and wiped them with the cloth he had tucked into his belt. They were a bit strong, he thought, but probably wouldn't put any strain on his eyes. He attached some dark string to the left lens and hooked that over his ear. Everything looked slightly blurred, almost as though he were looking at the outside world through a film of water.

Fujisaki led Takuya out of the back door to the factory area. In the corrugated-iron workshop a middle-aged man was pushing a foot pedal on the cutting-press, each movement of the machine producing a complete cardboard box ready to be folded into shape. A few metres away a man was brushing the company name in black ink through a thin metal stencil on to the cardboard, and beside him two women were working deftly to fold the boxes into shape and stack them to one side.

Takuya followed Fujisaki into the workshop, casually greeting each of the workers as they looked up from their tasks. Fujisaki introduced him to the man working the press as being from Okinawa, adding that he would be handling deliveries from now on. The cart he would be using was standing to one side. It had obviously seen better days, the wheels leaning inward and rust creeping along the handle frame, but it looked as though it could carry a decent load.

The next morning Takuya piled the cart high with boxes and pulled it out through the back gate. After passing several rows of houses which had survived the bombing, he walked down a road through the ruins, the sea now visible on his right, with a number of what looked like freighters anchored
just offshore. The low range of hills straight ahead of him was covered in a thick blanket of green.

The cart creaked as it moved forwards. Takuya slowly wound his way downhill, straining against the handle with every step to keep it from getting away from him. The effort required him to stop more and more often. Sweat poured down his brow and clouded the lenses of his glasses.

At last he reached his destination, an improvised warehouse owned by a box wholesaler, hastily constructed down on the reclaimed land along the wharves. A surly-looking old man sitting in a shack marked ‘Reception' took the delivery documents without saying a word. Then he got to his feet and waved his approval for the cart to be taken into the warehouse. After a quick check to see if the load matched the documents, the old man grunted that Takuya should unload his cargo and take it to the back of the big shed, where boxes and bags of all shapes and sizes were stacked neatly in rows.

After getting the man to stamp ‘Received' on the job sheet, Takuya picked up the handle of his cart and started to retrace his steps to Fujisaki's factory. People had already begun building shelters here and there among the charred ruins. Men and women walked along the road, others rode past him on bicycles. Determined to avoid the gaze of passers-by, Takuya fixed his eyes on the ground ahead of him whenever someone approached.

No one around him could be trusted any more, he thought. Since the surrender, the newspapers had been full of articles espousing the tenets of democracy, renouncing in no uncertain terms anything to do with the politics
or military of wartime Japan. The Imperial Army came in for the strongest criticism. Without fail, the thrust of the commentary was that Japanese militarists had started the war and that the Allied powers had had no choice but to respond in kind. Those charged with war crimes were cited as symbolising the outrages committed by the defunct Imperial Army, and without exception those writing the articles supported the measures being taken to rid the earth of such reprehensible criminals. On the radio, too, there were broadcasts exposing atrocities committed by the Imperial Army and denouncing those charged with war crimes. Ordinary Japanese citizens were nothing less than victims of the war, with the blame laid fairly and squarely on the military.

It seemed that, in keeping with such media coverage, the people in the streets would be falling into line with the intended message. Among the comments of prominent leaders of public opinion there had even been drastic statements to the effect that imposing the ultimate penalty upon war criminals was a requisite for establishing democracy in Japan.

Assuming this represented the new rationale for society, every passer-by was potentially as much an enemy for Takuya as the occupation authorities or the police. Any one of them who found out that he was charged with war crimes would be likely to go straight to the authorities. SCAP must know that he was on the run, so pictures of him would be on the walls of police stations all over the country. Each moment he spent in the public eye was fraught with danger. The only solace, he thought, was that confusion still reigned
in Japan's cities. But that too might be false, for while the increase in crime involving vagrants and prostitutes must be keeping the police occupied, instructions from SCAP would surely give efforts to find and arrest war crimes suspects priority.

When he reached the factory Takuya sat down wearily on a straw mat inside the workshop door. He was exhausted from his labours, and the mental strain of cringing each time a passer-by cast more than a glance in his direction had taken its toll. Still, he was pleased that the day's work had at least slightly lessened the weight of his debt to the Fujisakis.

Looking through that day's newspaper, he saw that eleven Allied nations, headed by the United States, had charged twenty-eight military and political leaders, including former prime minister Tojo Hideki, as Class A war criminals. The acts in question were said to have been committed between 1928 and 1945, and fell into three major categories: conspiracy to commit aggression, aggression, and conventional war crimes, these last being further broken down into fifty-five separate counts. The article went on to state that the International Military Tribunal would first be considering charges against the Class A war criminals, and that the arrest and trial of the Class B and C suspects would soon follow. It closed with the comment that ‘War criminals are the enemies of mankind, utterly repulsive beasts of violence.'

As he read the list of the twenty-eight men charged as Class A, he imagined that they would all end their days on the gallows. If this article was a reflection of current public
opinion, the average Japanese citizen would agree with the Allied position, and therefore would no doubt call for the execution of all those implicated in such crimes. Who knows? he thought, maybe even Fujisaki and his family saw him as a ‘beast of violence' for his part in killing the American airmen. He felt uneasy at the thought that he might not be safe where he was after all.

Power cuts were still happening every day, and production in the workshop languished far short of that required to generate any sort of profit. In one sense, the lack of electricity was a blessing in disguise, as without sufficient paper the workshop could not run to full capacity anyway. Takuya's delivery duties were limited to once every three days, and he spent the rest of his time picking up cardboard offcuts and bundling them for fuel, or sweeping the workshop and the open space behind the house.

Fujisaki's mother's attitude toward Takuya had changed discernibly. She often muttered, ‘Getting rations is all very well, but stretching what we get to feed us all isn't so easy.' The amount and quality of the rations were now even worse than during the war. The designated staple, rice, was more often than not substituted with corn flour, potatoes or wheat bran, and the vegetable allocation was down to one giant radish per week, to be thinly sliced and divided up among several households. She often went out to the countryside with her son, hoping to barter a few articles of clothing for anything to help supplement the food rations.

The family's only entertainment was listening to the radio. Takuya sometimes joined them in the living-room to listen to the day's broadcast. There were programmes
providing details about soldiers returning from overseas, and others for people seeking information on the whereabouts of family members in the armed forces. One interview with an economist made Takuya feel quite uncomfortable sitting in the living-room with Fujisaki and his family.

The economist forecast that Japan was on the verge of a food crisis of cataclysmic proportions, stating that the official current allocation of rice to each individual was barely enough to avoid starvation, and that when this absolute minimum requirement was calculated for the total population, the amount was almost twice the size of the previous year's total rice harvest. From this he deduced that at least ten million people would starve to death, and that most of them would be living in urban areas. He went on to say that no rice had reached Tokyo and other big cities for the last twenty days, and closed by saying that city residents must be prepared to eat grass to avoid starvation.

From around that time on, Fujisaki and his father both became increasingly taciturn. After dinner they either played games or sat silently reading the newspaper, neither one looking at Takuya. Takuya had no choice but to excuse himself as soon as the family had finished eating dinner.

More often than not, Takuya spent his evenings sitting in the little room at the back, squashing the fleas crawling over his clothes. Most of those he dispatched were a pinkish colour, gorged with blood which spilt out on to his fingernails as he crushed them. Occasionally he would hold a piece of underwear up to the electric light and find lines of delicately formed eggs, like tiny rosary beads, sitting neatly inside the stitching. He pierced each of them individually
with a needle before going on to check the next piece of clothing. Other times, after he had got under the covers on his futon, he would take the pistol out of his rucksack and caress it in the semi-darkness. He wiped the barrel with a cloth and tested the tension of the trigger with his index finger. When he held it up to his nose, he could just detect the faint smell of gun oil.

In May, the opening of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East proceedings against Class A war criminals received daily coverage in the newspapers.

The attitude of the Fujisaki family to Takuya grew colder with each passing day. He had asked them to put him up for four or five days when he first arrived on their doorstep, but that was now more than three weeks ago. Though he was supposedly working to earn his keep, pulling the cart to the warehouse three times a week would hardly make the Fujisakis regard him as anything other than a freeloader. Almost certainly they would be reading the newspaper coverage of the war crimes trials, and by now could only see Takuya as an increasingly unwelcome guest.

On his way to the box wholesaler's warehouse one day in mid-May, as he guided his cart down a gentle slope in the middle of the ruins Takuya noticed two policemen walking up the road towards him. He regretted having pushed up the peak of his service cap so he could wipe the sweat off his brow, but he could hardly pull it down over his eyes now, so he simply trudged forward, looking at the ground as though he were tired out.

He edged the cart farther over to the other side of the
road, away from the approaching policemen, his heart pounding furiously and cold sweat pouring down his neck.

The two policemen approached Takuya and his cart and then passed by, but just as he thought he was in the clear he heard one of the men say, ‘You, there. Stop.'

Takuya felt the blood drain from his face, leaving him white and chilled. His first thought was to drop his cart and run for his life, but his feet were anchored to the spot. He turned half round sheepishly.

The closer of the two policemen stepped over to the cart and put one hand on the folded cardboard boxes. Bending over slightly, he lifted up each box in turn to look in the gaps between them.

‘Where are these going?' he said, moving round in front of the cart. Takuya pulled the job slip from the inside pocket of his jacket, which was stuffed down in the load of cardboard boxes. He realised that the policeman was only checking to see if the load included any controlled goods, but all the same he was afraid that he might get a clear look at his face. The scar on his left cheek from where he'd cut himself on a branch as he fell from a tree as a child was still clearly visible, and the thought that this might give him away started a wave of panic which threatened to overcome him.

‘Anything besides boxes on the cart?' asked the policeman, casting only a cursory glance at the paper before switching his gaze back to Takuya's face.

‘No, nothing else,' said Takuya in a muffled voice.

The other policeman had by now moved round to the front of the cart. ‘You're as white as a sheet, and the sweat's
streaming off you. Something wrong with you?' he said, with a suspicious look in his eyes.

‘Yeah … I came back from China with tuberculosis, but I have to work to buy food,' said Takuya, pursing his parched lips.

‘Tuberculosis?'

‘Yeah.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Higa Seiichi.'

‘Higa?' said the policeman in a sceptical tone.

‘Higa,' said Takuya, tracing the characters out on top of the cardboard boxes. ‘From Okinawa. It's a common name there.'

‘Okinawa?' replied the policeman, apparently happy to leave it at that. The stern look had melted from his face as he ran his eyes once more over the cart and its load.

Satisfied that all was in order, he turned back to Takuya. ‘You went white as a sheet when you saw us coming. So we thought something was amiss. If you're just ill, we won't hold you up any longer. On your way,' he said, and nodded to his colleague that they, too, should be off.

Takuya picked up the bar at the front of the cart and stepped off down the slope, feeling another deluge of sweat stream down his face. The policemen had probably mellowed at the mention of Okinawa, the only part of the Japanese homeland where combat had taken place. Shirasaka's advice had paid off in an unexpected way.

As Takuya manoeuvred the cart down the gentle incline, he chastised himself for the stupidity of his behaviour with the police. It was pathetic that losing his composure had
obviously made them suspicious and led to their questioning him. Since being warned by Shirasaka in Fukuoka that he should flee, he had been back home and then on to Shoodo-shima after travelling through Osaka, and had caught sight of policemen on any number of occasions, but never had he been as intimidated as today. The incident with these two policemen brought home how much his nerve had weakened in this last month on the run. If he panicked every time he came across the police, it wouldn't be long before he gave himself away and was arrested. He longed somehow to instill in himself the backbone he had before the war ended.