One Man's Justice (21 page)

Takuya edged backward two or three steps before turning round and scurrying a few more paces back down the path. The sickly-sweet smell of death still clung to his clothes, and as he scrambled up the embankment he was hit by a wave of nausea.

Back beside his handcart, Takuya retched as he stared at the blue cloth down among the reeds. Had the man been murdered, or had he starved to death? Takuya had seen only the man's feet and part of his back, but he guessed that the man had probably been at least middle-aged. He knew he should report it to the police, but of course that was the last thing he intended to do. Being questioned by the police was just too risky.

The dead man has nothing to do with me, he thought. Eventually that woman picking wild vegetables, or maybe some children playing in the reeds, would find the body. If the man had simply collapsed and died on his way somewhere, his body would be carried away and disposed of.

Takuya lifted the handle of the cart and started walking. The revolting smell persisted, clinging to him. He retched again and again as he walked down the road. This smell was different from the one that had wafted up from the shallow graves when they had exhumed the decapitated bodies to destroy the last evidence of the fate of the American airmen. That smell had been something akin to wet, rotting cardboard, but it was equally pungent. Maybe there was a difference when a corpse decomposed in the sun.

Despite having no proof, Takuya somehow sensed that the man had died a natural death. But if that was so, why had he wandered off the road and down into the reeds? Had he been so hungry that he'd remembered his childhood days and gone searching for birds' nests? Or had he ventured down the embankment to look for wild vegetables? The thought of that poor man lying there dead, face down among the reeds, deeply affected Takuya.

He tried to picture the families of the men who had been executed in that clearing in the bamboo grove. They would have had parents, perhaps brothers and sisters. Their families would have mourned their deaths and no doubt despaired at the fact that there were no remains on which to focus their grief.

As a crewman on a B-29, the man whom Takuya had
beheaded had been party to the slaughter of countless Japanese, but the clear memory of the man in his mind included nothing of what Takuya imagined a murderer might look like, no suggestion of anything criminal. He had just been playing his part as a cog in the wheel of the American war machine in its attacks on the Japanese mainland and, even if that had resulted in the slaughter of civilians, it was unlikely that he felt any guilt about his part in the process. To him, there may have been only a tenuous connection between the bombs that tumbled out of his plane's bomb bay and the carnage down on the ground.

Takuya mused that his involvement in the executions was essentially the same in nature as the actions of the man he had killed, in that both were merely carrying out their duties as military men. The difference was that whereas the killing committed by the American had been by bombing, which precluded witnessing the bloodshed, Takuya's act had involved wielding the sword with his own hands as he beheaded the airman. The fact that the American had killed countless people as opposed to Takuya's one victim brought him some comfort.

Takuya shook his head and frowned. He wished he had never seen that blue cloth. As recollections of that afternoon in the bamboo grove swirled inside his head, he felt ashamed of his loss of nerve. These days he hardly ever checked his pistol to make sure it would be ready for that moment of truth if he was cornered, and he even doubted he'd have the courage to pull the trigger if the worst came to the worst.

The reeds waved this way and that before bending right in unison as a gust of wind blew from downstream. Takuya fixed his eyes on the ground and pulled the cart off down the road.

Temperatures dropped with each passing day. There were no articles in the newspaper about a murder, and, as the body in the reeds must have been found by now, the authorities must have decided that the man had died a natural death.

Takuya delivered his cartloads of matchboxes, his routine unchanging from one day to the next. He had attached a long canvas strap to two points on the deck of the cart so he could move it more easily, and, once a hard knot of muscle formed under the skin on his shoulders, pulling the cart was no problem at all.

The first colours of autumn could be seen on the low hills near Himeji. Fine weather continued, with pleasant days followed by glowing red sunsets.

One day towards the end of autumn, when the reds and golds of the surrounding hills had begun to mute to softer yellows and browns, Takuya saw something that made him stop in his tracks and stare down the road. A convoy of four US Army trucks, their canvas canopies rolled up, was moving towards him, kicking up clouds of dust.

He had often seen American lorries and Jeeps trundling along the main road and over the reinforced concrete bridge just downstream from the rickety old wooden bridge he pulled his cart across, but never once had he seen them using this old road. It was barely wider than the wheelspan of a big lorry, making it impossible for two vehicles to pass.
Maybe they were lost, or maybe they had decided to take a shortcut. There were no side paths to push the cart off into, and all that separated the road from the paddy fields on both sides was a narrow ditch.

The lorries were coming towards him at considerable speed, but for the life of him he couldn't think what he should do. His load of matchboxes stuck out on both sides of the cart, so if he didn't move it off the road there was no way a lorry would be able to pass.

For a second he thought of turning round and heading for the last crossroad, but that was almost a kilometre back down the road, so there was no way he could make it in time. There was nothing to do but push the cart to one side of the road and hope that the lorries would be able to squeeze past. He summoned all his strength and hurriedly pushed the cart back a few metres to a spot on the side of the road where it was slightly wider than where he had been standing.

The sound of the trucks' engines and tyres grew louder as the front vehicle closed rapidly on him. The sunlight reflected off the windscreen so he couldn't see inside, but he could see an elbow sticking out of each of the windows.

The lorry's horn blasted the air for what seemed an age, leaving his ears ringing. The full width of the road was taken up as the convoy bore down on Takuya and his cart. Fear seized him at the thought that the driver might not slow down at all, and would instead choose to smash both the cart and Takuya out of the way. The tyres looked enormous, and the chassis with its white star on the side was far higher than that of any Japanese vehicle he had ever seen.

The sound of the horn was followed by the screeching of brakes, as the lorry halted ten metres short of the handcart. Takuya clasped the bar tightly as he stood his ground. Shouts of surprise came from the soldiers sitting in the back of the lorry, and heads poked out to check why they had stopped so suddenly. Seconds later the vehicle was engulfed in the cloud of dust floating up from behind.

A fresh-faced young soldier leant out of the window on the passenger side, yelling something and gesticulating excitedly at Takuya to get out of the way. Evidently enraged, he shouted the same thing again and again with increasing urgency.

Takuya moved the cart. His vision seemed to blur for a moment as sweat poured down his forehead. He manoeuvred the cart forward and backward to get it as far off the road as he could.

The horn rent the air once again before the vehicle started to roll forward. Edging the cart back, he looked up to see a husky, red-faced man sitting behind the steering-wheel. The man leaning out of the window on the passenger side was still furiously shouting something at Takuya. The lorry closed on him, and the wheels kicked up little stones as they turned.

Realising that it was impossible to keep the cart up on the road, Takuya stepped down into the ditch, pulling the handcart with him. One of the wheels slipped down off the road and Takuya leant over sideways trying to keep the cart from toppling over. He threw all his weight against the cart's metal bar and just managed to stop the weight of the load from tipping the cart into the rice paddy.

The truck rolled forward on a course which would take it within inches of Takuya's cart. The soldiers in the back, both black and white men, seemed to be laughing as they looked down at Takuya. They all had sub-machine-guns slung over their shoulders or resting against their knees as they stood peering down over the side.

As Takuya concentrated all his might on keeping the cart from slipping into the paddy field, he pitched his gaze diagonally up at the Americans. Maybe this looked comical to the soldiers, for a gale of laughter erupted from them. This was the first time he had seen foreign military up close since the afternoon of the day the war ended. Every one of them seemed to be smiling.

As the leading lorry passed him and moved off down the road, the second one approached slowly. Once again the back was full of soldiers looking down at Takuya and his cart perched precariously at the side of the road. A round-faced man with mousy hair leant out of the passenger window, smiling widely at Takuya. He couldn't have been much more than seventeen or eighteen years old. The cab went past and the back came level with Takuya. Again the soldiers smiled down at him, their eyes seemingly genial. Takuya could sense a fawning, obsequious expression coming across his own contorted face.

Suddenly one of the soldiers thrust his upper body forward and swung the steel helmet he had been hiding behind him down onto Takuya's head. The lack of anywhere to retreat, and the speed with which the helmet was wielded, made the blow impossible to avoid. The other soldiers must have been waiting for that moment, because a loud cheer went
up from them. Takuya caught sight of a black soldier giving the culprit a few congratulatory slaps on the shoulder as he felt himself and the cart slowly tipping over sideways into the rice paddy. The load of matchboxes spilt into the water and Takuya felt his face slap hard into the mud.

The soldiers' jubilant faces quickly moved out of view, and the remaining lorries accelerated down the road now that the obstacle had been ejected from their path. The clouds of dust settled and the noise of the engines faded into the distance.

Barely conscious, his eyes almost shut, Takuya's first thought was to see this as an officer of the Japanese army being insulted by a lowly American soldier, but for some reason this didn't anger him in the slightest. He just couldn't understand the grinning looks on the young soldiers' faces, their joyful animation as they celebrated Takuya's difficulty. He felt that the soldier's smashing him over the head with a steel helmet was part of some frivolous game, like the bomber crews whiling away their time inside the B-29s by flipping through pornographic magazines and listening to jazz.

Some time passed before he slowly opened his eyes again. There was no pain, but his ears were ringing as though a hundred cicadas had got inside his head. He tried to get up, but the side of his face was stuck to the mud and wouldn't move. His vision seemed to be all right, for he could see the bar of the cart directly above his head, as well as the canvas strap hanging down on top of him. Beyond these he could see the clear blue sky, with only a few delicate clouds.

A man dressed in peasant clothes appeared. Takuya felt
himself being lifted and dragged out of the paddy field and up the slope, where he was helped into a sitting position on the side of the road. Some more men, probably ten in all, appeared around him. Some tried to push the cart up out of the mud, and others carried his spilt cargo back up on to the road. A man wearing shorts asked him something, and while Takuya could sense himself replying, the sound of his own voice was drowned out by the ringing in his ears.

He looked up at the blue sky and the clouds moving across it. There were women in work clothes among the crowd. Takuya could feel someone holding him in an upright sitting position.

People were milling around the handcart, stacking the load back into place. The cicada-like ringing seemed to echo from one side of his head to the other.

Terasawa appeared in front of him, talking frantically. Again he felt himself answering but was unable to hear his own reply. Kameya's face came into view, and Takuya felt himself being lifted into the lorry. The glare of the sun made him squint.

He closed his eyes.

Takuya spent three days recuperating in bed.

‘You poor thing,' said Terasawa's wife every time she put some food down beside his pillow. The ringing in his ears was gone, but he still had a splitting headache.

Evidently a farmer working in a nearby field had seen Takuya toppling into the rice paddy with his handcart. The people who came to his assistance after the trucks left had seen the company name painted on the cart and sent someone to report the incident to Terasawa, who had rushed to the scene with Kameya in the lorry.

‘We told the police, but they just nodded and said that when it comes to the occupation forces there's nothing they can do,' explained Terasawa in a despondent tone.

Takuya couldn't imagine pulling the cart again. If US Army trucks had chosen that road once, they might choose it again, and if he got in their way a second time the same
thing might happen again. He sensed a strange malevolence in those cheerful Americans. Their physical size equally overwhelmed him. Thinking of how intimidated he felt now, he couldn't believe that just two years ago he had the nerve actually to stand up and behead one of their countrymen.

When Takuya asked timidly if he could be switched from deliveries to a job in the workshop, Terasawa agreed without a moment's hesitation. He said that he understood Takuya's reluctance to get back out on the road, and that another man had been asking for a job doing deliveries.

For four days Terasawa's wife nursed the swollen wound on Takuya's head with antiseptic. Five days after the incident, Takuya came back to work again on light duties, and two weeks after that, when he was fully recovered, he started on heavier duties, carrying pieces of timber around the workshop.

By now the hills in the distance were covered with a white blanket of snow.

Orders for matchboxes went up with the increase in the black-market production of matches. Production capacity was pushed to the limit, and to compensate for the time lost during the day because of the power cuts.

At the end of December, Terasawa's wife's niece, a well-built twenty-five-year-old by the name of Teruko, came to live with them to help with the housework. She got up early in the morning to help Terasawa's wife boil the sticky concoction they used as glue each day. In addition she helped with the cooking, washing and cleaning, and went out to collect the week's rations.

A bathroom was added on to the house and hot water was generated by burning the scraps and sawdust from the workshop. Terasawa let the staff who lived away from the workshop take turns soaking in the new bathtub after work. He also followed rises in the wage market, and increased his workers' wages as often as he could. At the end of that year, Takuya's live-in wage was raised to one thousand three hundred yen a month.

Kameya sometimes spent his spare cash down in the brothels near the station, returning late at night.

‘Do you want to come down sometime?' he asked Takuya, holding up three fingers to indicate that three hundred yen would buy the services of a young lady for an hour.

Takuya smiled and said nothing.

Lugging timber around in the workshop was hard work, but not having to venture outside lifted a weight from his mind. As when he'd been pushing the handcart, most days he kept a small towel wrapped round his face, more for function than disguise now.

In his free time Takuya gazed at the white walls of Himeji castle or tried to imagine what was happening in his village back in Shikoku. Almost two years had passed since he left home. He wondered what his parents and brother and sister had done during that time, and whether his father and mother were still in good health. They must be wondering what had happened to him, too. The police would be checking their mail, so sending them a letter was too risky. All the same, he wished he could put their minds at ease with the knowledge that, for the time being, he was still alive and safe.

As New Year approached, Terasawa bought a stack of greeting-cards and, after stamping each of them with the company seal, got Teruko to address them, which she did in immaculate, precise handwriting.

Takuya toyed with the idea of sending a New Year's card to his parents. He could write Terasawa's company address, he thought, but of course he would have to use a false name, something new, neither Kiyohara Takuya nor Higa Seiichi. At first glance his family would think it strange to be receiving greetings from a stranger, but they'd soon recognise his handwriting and realise that he was safe and well, living in Himeji.

After thinking it through this far, Takuya suddenly changed his mind. Maybe he was slowly starting to cave, he thought. When he left his parents' home, Takuya had told himself that there would be no return, and that he would never see his family again. He had known that evading the authorities hinged on cutting the bonds with his home, and that was as true now as it had been two years earlier.

But, as time passed, Takuya's resolve started to waver. Sending New Year's greeting-cards was so ritualised that receiving one from someone with whom you normally had very little contact was nothing out of the ordinary. Surely the police wouldn't notice his one card among the dozens of others? He pondered a little longer, convincing himself that there was no risk involved. Letting his family know that he was still alive was something he just had to do.

After getting one of the company-stamped cards from
Terasawa, Takuya thought hard about what to write. Something as bland as possible would be best, and addressing it to his younger brother rather than his father would make it safer still. He wrote ‘New Year's Greetings' at the top, followed by ‘Wishing you and your family all the best for the year to come.' They were very nondescript words, but he was sure that his family would read between the lines and recognise his message.

That night, Takuya went to the mailbox in front of the makeshift ration distribution centre. There was a chance that a member of his family might try to visit him at the address on the card, but surely they would realise that this could be fatal for him.

He headed back home with an extra spring in his step at the thought that even a tenuous connection was about to be made with his family.

At dinnertime on New Year's Day, 1948, Terasawa brought in five bottles of beer and a large bottle of sake for them to drink with their meal of rice cakes and vegetables boiled in soup. He had even obtained some dried fish to supplement the meal. By all accounts match production in the area was increasing by leaps and bounds, and Terasawa's production of boxes, and therefore profits, was also rising. By this stage he had increased the number of staff to almost twenty workers.

Terasawa often spoke of hearing rumours that the match market was about to be deregulated later that year, with the old wartime rationing and control regulations possibly being abolished. He told them that, while the overall quality of the matches was still inferior, production levels were
basically meeting demand, so the regulations were becoming pointless. Terasawa said public discontent was running high over matches which frequently snapped or failed to light properly, and that government offices in Tokyo and Osaka were starting to handle appeals from citizens' groups for something to be done about the situation.

‘There's certainly something farcical about making matchboxes when more than half of what goes in them is going to break anyway,' Terasawa lamented.

The front page of the morning newspaper on New Year's Day contained a long message to the Japanese people from General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied Powers, in which he laid out a plan for Japan's future as a nation. Takuya scoured it for mention of war criminals, but found nothing.

After the New Year's holiday came to a close, however, the newspapers featured lengthy articles almost daily, recounting the proceedings in the Tokyo trials of Class A war criminals. Takuya read every one of them, but since that article the previous September about the imprisonment in Sugamo of the high-ranking officers, there had been no further mention of the POWs held by Western Regional Command, something which worried him intensely.

Although he had long since recovered from the physical damage caused by the encounter with the American soldiers, emotionally he was far from healed. The pitiful feeling of helplessness he had experienced as the helmet smashed down on his head was still rooted in his mind. It was a feeling less of humiliation than of having been absolutely crushed in defeat. Everything they did seemed
lighthearted, he thought. If they caught him they would probably make a comedy out of leading him to the gallows and placing the noose round his neck. He remembered that the Americans had adorned the B-29s with caricatures of naked women and pictures of flames painted on the fuselages to show how many raids they had taken part in.

On his job carrying timber around the workshop Takuya kept a lookout for anyone approaching from outside. Houses were being built in the vicinity of the railway station, and the boundaries of this new residential area were gradually pushing farther out.

With the price of materials increasing at a frightening pace, Terasawa decided that the best thing would be to stock up on timber and striking-paper and, as the existing warehouse was already full to capacity, to build another one next to it.

It appeared more and more likely that the sale of matches would be deregulated soon, and an article in the newspaper on the twentieth of January reported that a special ration of matches was to be given to each household. Families with three members could buy two small boxes, those with six people four boxes, ten people eight boxes, and ten boxes could be purchased by households comprising ten or more people. The price was set at one yen twenty-three sen, and normal ration coupons for household goods would suffice. This was proof that production levels were at last starting to meet demand.

Maybe the news that matches were going to be removed from the list of regulated goods was encouraging more operators to start manufacturing, for the number of stranges
coming in to buy large quantities of matchboxes had increased considerably. Thick wads of notes were handed over in exchange for cartloads of matchboxes. The buyers, dressed in all sorts of clothes, were obviously black marketeers, and none of them knew much at all about the product they were looking to buy. Every time these strangers approached, Takuya worried that they might be plainclothes policemen.

With the drop in temperature came occasional light flurries of snow. The icy winds that blew across Himeji stole the feeling from Takuya's hands, and that winter he again developed painful chilblains on his ears, fingers and toes.

The new houses built near the station hid the lower part of Himeji castle from view, but the white towers and donjons stood out in stark relief against the clear blue of the winter sky.

Towards the end of January the newspapers were dominated by articles about the poisoning of twelve workers at the Shiina-machi branch of the Imperial Bank, but in early February Takuya found one that mentioned Western Regional Command. On the second of February the legal department of the US Eighth Army had announced the names of twenty-eight people, comprising sixteen military personnel, including the commander-in-chief of Western Regional Command, and twelve staff of the Faculty of Medicine at Kyushu Imperial University, who had been charged and would be tried together publicly by the Yokohama military tribunal. The charges were divided into the three broad categories of vivisection, cannibalism,
and the unlawful execution of B-29 crew members, with a note at the end of the article to the effect that Professor Iwase of Kyushu Imperial University had already taken his own life.

Takuya had secretly hoped that the trial of the seven officers from Western Regional Command, including the commander-in-chief, who had been held in Sugamo prison since September 1945, had already ended. Now he knew that in fact it was just about to start, and that the number of people charged had increased to sixteen. The article he had read almost a year and a half ago had mentioned seven suspects incarcerated in Sugamo prison, six of them high-ranking officers, and the other, Lieutenant Howa Kotaro, the only one who had actually taken part in the executions. That the number of suspects had increased to sixteen meant that another nine of the soldiers who had participated in the executions must have been arrested and charged.

Takuya had taken part in only one of the three executions, so he didn't know for certain how many people had been involved altogether, but he surmised that it must have been around fourteen or fifteen, meaning that including himself there were still four or five men at large. Shirasaka had mentioned giving Lieutenant Hirosaki demobilisation papers and telling him to run, and Takuya had done the same for his friend Himuro in Osaka. If those two men were still at large, another two or three more must be on the run.

SCAP would have wanted to start the trials, and would have instructed the Japanese government to arrest the
remaining suspects. The government in turn would have entrusted the police with the task, which they were no doubt doing their utmost to carry out. Again Takuya felt as though the net was somehow closing in around him.

He started to feel uneasy about having sent the New Year's card to his family in Shikoku. Using a false name was one thing, but maybe he shouldn't have used a card with his real address in Himeji printed on it. But then again, if the police had been suspicious about the card they surely would have sent someone to Terasawa's workshop by now. He assumed that the fact they hadn't was proof that the card had slipped past the censors unnoticed.

Takuya tried to imagine the lives his comrades were leading as fugitives. Like him, they would have assumed false names and tried to change their appearance, and would probably be leading secret lives somewhere as labourers. They would no doubt pay just as much attention as he did to the newspapers, and would have seen this article. How wonderful it would be, thought Takuya, if they could all evade capture.