One Man's Justice (22 page)

The Class A war criminals' trials entered their closing stages, and towards the end of February there was further mention in the newspaper of those in Western Regional Command. The article first covered the charges against those involved in the experiments on eight captured airmen in the Faculty of Medicine at Kyushu Imperial University, then went on to describe how, after the experiments, the livers of the dead airmen had evidently been extracted, marinated in soy sauce, and served at the officers' club of
Western Regional Command. Takuya hadn't heard anything about livers being eaten, and thought that it must be a mistake.

Accompanying the indictment was an explanation of the background to the charges, which further increased Takuya's anxiety. The names of those charged were preceded by the statement that although Western Regional Command had tried to conceal the truth by stating that the eight airmen who died on the operating tables in Fukuoka had been killed in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, ‘the full story had finally been revealed after hundreds of interrogations had been carried out all over the country'. Takuya thought this testified to the rigour of the investigations undertaken by the occupation authorities.

After reading this article Takuya decided it was almost a miracle that he hadn't been caught.

The police had probably already traced his movements as far as his uncle's house in Osaka, then on to Corporal Nemoto's on Shoodo-shima, and from there to his friend Fujisaki in Kobe. They would have been unrelenting in their questioning, and while each of his friends would no doubt have admitted to giving him shelter for a short time, the fact that he was still a free man was obviously due to the fact that Fujisaki and his family had not let on that they introduced him to the Terasawas.

The temperature started to rise as spring approached.

‘Do you want to try your hand at keeping the accounts? You seem to write pretty well, and I think my wife and niece are right when they say that lugging wood around the workshop doesn't really suit you. They're always on at me
about it,' said Terasawa to Takuya as he sat taking a break on a pile of wood.

Takuya didn't know what to say.

‘I remember you saying that you finished high school in Okinawa. The warehouse is in full operation and stock is streaming in, so we need to keep a proper inventory of things. Want to give it a try?' said Terasawa, offering Takuya a cigarette.

Takuya could sense the goodwill behind the offer.

His boss might only have finished primary school, but he treated his workers with an innate generosity which formal education could not teach. He had led a hard life and was extremely demanding when it came to work, but his kindness ensured that a proper balance was maintained. He implied that the idea behind the offer wasn't his, but Takuya had no doubt that Terasawa had thought it all up himself.

The thought of changing jobs made Takuya uneasy. Moving wood around the workshop allowed him to stay in an isolated environment, while if he were to look after the company accounts he would be obliged to go out into the public eye to arrange deliveries and collect payment from clients. He wanted to turn down the offer, but could think of no good excuse.

The prospect of not having to toil away in the workshop was certainly appealing. Although he had been a sportsman during his university days, labouring required a different sort of physical and mental hardness which was starting to take its toll. Deciding that it might seem peculiar if he turned down Terasawa's kind offer, Takuya consented to change jobs.

Beginning the next day he sat behind a desk in the large concrete-floored space in the front part of the house. Obviously there could be no more wrapping a hand towel round his face while he worked, nor could he wear his mountaineering hat all the time. He felt exposed and unnerved without what he now realised had been, at least in his mind, crucial elements of disguise.

Terasawa came in and handed over some money, telling Takuya to go and buy a new pair of glasses to replace the ones he had repaired with a piece of string.

Glasses were the only means he had left to make his face less recognisable in a crowd, so he willingly took the money from Terasawa and went to an optician in an area of town which had largely survived the fire raids. There wasn't much to choose from, but he picked out some with dark-brown horn rims and asked the shopkeeper to fit them with quite strong lenses. He tried them on and looked in the mirror on the counter. The rims of the glasses Fujisaki had given him had been relatively thin, so they hadn't made much difference to the way he looked, but these new ones altered his appearance considerably. On the way back to the workshop he tossed his old glasses on to a pile of rubbish by the side of the road.

The two women made quite a show of their surprise upon seeing Takuya, and Terasawa commented jokingly that he looked like a completely different person, which of course eased his fears somewhat.

Takuya set himself conscientiously to his new job. The accounts book Terasawa gave him was nothing more than a large exercise book with the word ‘Accounts' written on
the cover. While he thought he should hide the fact that he had a degree in economics by keeping the books as simple as possible, he knew that he would have to use some basic bookkeeping practices in order to maintain the accounts properly. He ruled some blue and red lines on the pages and organised them into workable columns.

Terasawa was impressed when he saw what Takuya had prepared.

‘When I say high school, it was a business school, actually,' said Takuya, looking a little embarrassed at the praise.

Terasawa's niece brought cups of green tea to Takuya's desk mid-morning and mid-afternoon. She also told him that amid the desolation a charred plum tree had actually started blooming. Two little clumps of blossom had appeared on one branch sticking out from the blackened trunk, and quite a few people had come to see this. She added that she had noticed couples standing under the tree looking up at the pink flowers.

Teruko often whispered to him that she would be glad to mend his clothes, or do other little jobs for him.

On the eleventh of March, Takuya read in the newspaper that the trial of those involved in the experiments at Kyushu Imperial University had begun at the Yokohama military court. The article described how three hundred people, including foreigners, the families of the accused, and reporters from Japan and overseas, had packed into the public gallery, and how the accused, the public prosecutors and other lawyers had filed into the court, followed by members of the military tribunal. After one of the public prosecutors
read out the charges, each of the accused, including the commander-in-chief of Western Region, had pleaded not guilty, and the day's proceedings were closed after the chief prosecutor made his opening address to the court.

Six days later Takuya came across an article which, in its own way, indicated the probable fate of the accused from Western Regional Command. It reported on the sentencing of naval garrison personnel on Ishigaki island who had been involved in the execution by decapitation, and subsequent bayoneting of the corpses, of three American fighter crewmen. The chief of the military tribunal had sentenced two of the forty-five accused to imprisonment with hard labour, and found another two not guilty, but had sentenced the remaining forty-one men to death by hanging.

Logically speaking, no more than three garrison soldiers had actually beheaded the American airmen, so the others must be the officers who had ordered the execution and those who had bayoneted the corpses. That the list included many soldiers of the rank of corporal or below served to confirm this, the officers undoubtedly having ordered the bayoneting to prepare the soldiers for the battles to come. Such practices were almost routine in front-line units, and there was no place for the will of the individual soldier to intervene in the process. Nevertheless, it was SCAP's position that several dozen soldiers should receive the death penalty regardless of whether they had been acting on orders from their commanding officer to mutilate the dead bodies. By this reasoning, Takuya and those of his comrades who had actually beheaded
B-29 crew members could expect nothing less than the gallows.

He often woke up in the middle of the night and found it hard to get back to sleep, worrying about how someone he had passed in the street had looked at him, or how a man standing on the street corner had seemed to be peering curiously into the factory area. Since taking on his office duties, he had to make regular trips to the bank and to clients in order to receive payments for boxes. Occasionally, he had gone as far as the railway station to arrange for the shipment of an order of matchboxes by freight train. Every time he left the confines of the company premises, the thought that he was stepping into public view unnerved him. At times he thought that for his peace of mind he should take his pistol with him, but he knew that the nerve he would need actually to use it had long since vanished, so it stayed in his rucksack.

Takuya started to think that being attached to Western Regional Command Headquarters had been a stroke of very bad luck. The other graduating cadets had been scattered to postings throughout Japan and overseas. Within the anti-aircraft defence corps, some had taken up positions with ack-ack units and others had gone to command electronic aircraft detection groups. If only he hadn't been assigned to headquarters, he thought, he wouldn't be on the run, but would probably be sitting in an office somewhere, content with his lot.

He thought back to the time when the lieutenant from the legal affairs section had told him to pick out two sergeant-majors to take part in the executions, and regretted
having offered to do his part, too. He had volunteered from a feeling of outrage toward those who had carried out countless incendiary raids, as well as not one but two atomic bombings on Japanese cities, seeing the execution of the B-29 crewmen as a natural and indisputable response to such acts of barbarism. But after the war there had been no adverse media comment about the bombings, the primary objective of which had been to slaughter defenceless civilians. SCAP censorship had probably played a part in this but, even so, the average person in the street was just as reluctant to say anything. Women offered their bodies to American soldiers for money, children grovelled in the streets for sweets, and men bought what the Americans didn't need to sell for their own profit. They must have erased from their minds all memory of the houses being burnt to cinders and the lives lost in the firestorms. Not an iota of hatred about what had happened seemed to remain among the populace.

Takuya, too, came to the realisation that his anger with the American military had all but evaporated. Did the time after a war act as some sort of filtration process, whereby all memories and experiences were expunged from the present and relegated to the past? All that remained in Takuya's mind was the undeniable fact that he had beheaded a POW and the relentless anxiety of being on the run.

He started to rethink the meaning of the badges he had worn as an officer in the army. Wearing an officer's badge was an article of faith, a sign that one was not afraid of dying, and Takuya had held true to it during his days in uniform. However, since leaving the army, the fear of
death dominated his every moment, and the fact that such a change should occur in the two short years since he left his parents' house seemed incredible. Whenever he went out on business he took the less-used roads and walked with his eyes cast slightly downward. If he had to go to the Sanyo line freight station, he furtively slipped the duty station worker a box of matches from Terasawa, smiling obsequiously and acting as ingratiatingly as he could in order to avoid giving the impression that he'd been an officer in the army.

Down on the embankment the cherry trees were blossoming, and crowds of people were said to be flocking in for a festival which was being held at the Ryuumon temple near the sea. Slowly society seemed to be moving back towards normality.

On a day when they knew that the power was to be off, Takuya went with Terasawa and the others to the beach to collect shellfish. The women got up early and cooked some rice with soybeans to use for making rice balls. One of the day workers and his family joined them, and Kameya drove them all to the sea in the lorry.

They crossed the bridge over the Ishikawa river and drove through the residential area of Shirahama, where many of the match factories were located. The beach was on the edge of town, not far from the little fishing-port of Mega, so they could see fishing-boats heading back in after a day out at sea. Men and women in sedge hats were working in the belt of salt fields stretching out on one side.

At this first view of the sea in two years Takuya relaxed immediately. It was a beautiful calm day, and in the distance he could see several small islands, each covered in a lush
blanket of green. A shoal of fish must be just off to the west, as the water was agitated by fish breaking the surface. Seabirds took turns plunging out of the sky into the mass of fish, or sat bobbing up and down on the water's surface.

There were crowds of people there that day, all bent over scraping away at the sand. Here and there, the sun's rays reflected brightly off puddles of sparkling clear water.

Takuya and the others dug away at the sand with metal clamps they had brought from the workshop. They found small clams everywhere, but occasionally, to everyone's delight, they uncovered a really big one. Every so often, Takuya straightened up and stretched his back, surveying the area around them. At the water's edge, he could see little waves curling white at the top before dropping on to the shore. The sea was slightly greener than how he remembered it near his home. Off in the distance a black freighter slowly threaded her way between the islands.

Terasawa sauntered over to him, metal clamp in hand and an old straw hat on his head.

‘Higa,' he said, as he bent over to scrape at the sand. Takuya turned to face him.