Home at the End of the Journey

In the early winter light, the Yasukinu Shrine illuminates strangely, almost a ghost in the bustling center of Tokyo in 2006. There is a sheer quietness, almost otherworldly, a monster from the past. I hurry past it, eyeing the monument, then up the hill, to the Indian Embassy. I think of stopping, to see it again, maybe to see my grandfather, though I know that my grandfather never made it out of New Guinea in 1944, and his body never reclaimed by the government or the family. He would have been almost ninety if he were alive. But I have my recent dead to mourn, my father who passed away nearly three months ago, and that death is still raw. And ever since his death, all deaths are hard to take, to understand, and the present moment, the living must keep going, and this point, I have to worry about getting my visa on time.

Only through my father’s death did I begin to think about the body as a property, the ownership constantly shifting, sometimes ours, sometimes belonging to the State. How much paperwork did we fill out first, the doctors filling out the death certificate, then multiple copies of permission to transport the body, from the hospital to our house, then from our house to the temple, then to the crematorium. Then another form to cremate his body; then to bury the ashes.

W hen we travel, we are under the auspice of the State of our nationality, and we pay not for the travel, but as a cargo in a plane, paying nearly $1,000 for a thirteen-hour of flight perched on a chair. There is no comfort, unless you are paying for the first class flight. There is no rest. One becomes, in a truest sense, a cargo with awareness of the self. In the 21st century, the body has become something that can be paid for, something like a cargo. But maybe I’m criticizing the 21st century too much in reality, the body has always been subject of the State, and the Western idealism of the right of an individual has been, at the end, only a longing, a way of turning the eyes away from the reality. That the State, in whatever form, whatever shape, ultimately controls the body, and sometimes the spirit of the citizens. Take, for example, my mother’s father, Shiro. Born in 1918, he was a career army officer. With my grandmother dead and most of his sisters dead or dying, not much is known about him except for some photos, postcards he had sent from the various posts China, Tokyo and a government document, an army resume. There are a series of photos taken in one day, his face taken from various angles, his face startlingly familiar my brother’s eyes, my sister’s nose. This was a required photo the government had all its enlisted as well as drafted men take so that when they died, the photos could be used as their portraits. And there is a copy of the family portrait my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and his three children one of them, my mother as a two-year-old that he must have taken with him. The army resume traces, in its mechanical precision, where he had been, which unit he belonged to, where he died, even though where he died is still up in the air because I can’t find the name of the river listed in the resume on the official war-time map of New Guinea. All I know is that: the official version of where he died, when he died, and the cause of death. That he did not die from illness or hunger, as was the case of most men sent to New Guinea, but that he died in the battle, on July 8, 1944, by a river called Sakai River. He had turned 26-years-old two weeks before, on June 25th . His body rots in New Guinea, and memory of him now that the carriers of the memory are dead or dying belongs to the State. The spirit the soul belongs to the State, and it has not come home. It has been captured in the glass case, entombed in the Shrine, in that monstrous monument, because he died for the State.

In the most obscure way, the State, under a different name and constitution, still claims our bodies sixty years later. It still laid claim to it.

W hile my father was in the hospital, getting radiotherapy on cancer cells that kept eluding the doctors all that summer, I was searching for my grandfather in books and documents in archives in Tokyo, U.S., and Australia, looking for a trace of a man who existed nearly sixty years ago, and who I know only through my mother, though she was only three-years-old when he died, and all that time, he was in China, then later on, in the jungle of New Guinea. Perhaps my obsession started when I was in Australia for a month, sitting in a cottage, trying to write a story about a death of a parent. At that time, we believed that my father was cancer-free, and I was only writing a hypothetical story, fictional, about a girl who could’ve been me, and the bravery of the mother and the girl. Perhaps because I wanted to believe that death could be virtuous, that it could make people saintly because my father was not. And because my father’s sickness was too real, I wanted to bring out the very human side of him. The story was written; when I typed up the last word, I felt raw, but light, because I had given the girl hope, a magical ending, where though her mother did not come back to life, I gave her a rope to hold on to. That will lead her out of the darkness. And I still had three weeks left in the residency fellowship. As I looked into my files, I knew what I wanted to write about about a boy in war, fighting in a war that didn’t make sense to him. It was mid-May. J. and I were sitting in his kitchen, and we started to talk about the Australian version of WWII, and the air raids in the northern coast. And my utterance, “I don’t understand how anyone can go into a battlefield, knowing that they will die.” All the images I grew up with Japanese pilots standing around in the airfield, their boyish faces smiling, drinking their last farewell sake; the last battle cry, the attack, knowing that there is no way out.

VI.

A nd my father, with his suitcase and en suites, going to the most volatile part of the world the Middle East in the early 70’s, waving his hand as he got on the bus, surviving through several revolutions, landmines, internments in refugee camps, always coming back with a suitcase late at night, and waking up early in the morning to go to work, slipping into the routine of the everyday salaryman the next day.

VII.

Maybe cancer cells are like soldiers hiding out in the deep jungle of New Guinea. No matter how much the bombs fell to flush them out, there are more. These soldiers wanted to live, as much as cancer cells, too, want to live.

VIII.

Something clicked. My father. His cancer. My grandfather. The will to live. Fighting and dying for one’s country. Citizenship. Loyalty. This is something I need to write about. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write about, but I knew that it had to be about a boy, maybe 18, serving the country.

IX.

A fter I got back to Tokyo and the routine of going to the University to teach, grading papers, and, in between, I read all I could about the Tokko Special Force pilots— autobiographies and biographies of wartime soldiers, learning all I could about flying a Zero, all the while keeping an eye open for my grandfather’s name in archives. All the while, my father was going through his treatment, 25 doses of radiation every other day. And I also began to write. The first fifty pages came easily about a boy who grew up in America, a Japanese-American boy who came back to Japan with his family at the onset of the Pacific War. I read through the manuals of the Japanese army code of conduct, flight instructions, navigation, meteorology, going through the history of Japanese military. And meticulously, obsessively, I read the last wills of the Tokko pilots as well as the 1,000-page magnum opus of a book titled, The Wills of the Century, a collection of letters and poems and diary entries written by Japanese war criminals after the war, most of them written the night before their executions. I felt I was getting close to the question How do you face death? but at the end, I could not fully understand, to inhabit the mind of the men whose job was to die. How do you wake up in the morning knowing that your job is to die?

X.

It is human nature to resist death, to push it away, to fight again, to rage against the dying of the light. Here’s the proof, I told myself: my father, the most rational, most intelligent man I know, begging the doctors to keep going with the treatment when they told him that prognosis didn’t seem promising. It is the myth of the dying: to die beautifully, to die as close to a saint as one can, calmly, acceptingly. No one wants to know that their fathers or sons died a very human death, screaming, afraid to die, at the end. To protect the living from excess grief, we beautify their end.

XI.

It is the only kindness left. This is the way how we console ourselves to the grief, and perhaps for our inevitable end, too.

I have been riding this country bus for nearly an hour. Old people get on, get off, and there’s only four of us left a young man from Tokyo, stylish with a Louis Vuitton briefcase, tapping away on a small mobile computer; an old lady and her aging daughter; and me. I want to imagine that this old lady is making a pilgrimage to her brother or if I’m inclined to be romantic, her fiancé who died as a Tokko pilot. Throughout the research I decided not to use the word Kamikaze. It has too much historical baggage, too much American stereotype attached to it. How many times have I seen that word associated with fanaticism? Even 9-11 World Trade Center terrorists were referred to as kamikaze pilots: a group of fanatics who would do anything, including killing the innocents, including giving up their own lives, to get their message across. But, in war, the politics forces us to become the participants, there is no more innocence under the State. I felt that keenly only several days ago when I was in Nagasaki. In a small chapel tucked right in an alley in the gift shop arcade leading to the Grover Mansion as well as the Great Urashima Chapel, there, a portrait of Father Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz. And my first thought, albeit inappropriate, was, What are you doing here, Father Kolbe?

Father Kolbe, the martyr of Auschwitz, who stepped in front of the SS soldiers, quietly, calmly, and said, “I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children.” Father Kolbe, twenty years before his death, had set up a printing press in Nagasaki, working furiously for the mission until he was transferred back to Poland. Then the war broke out. I still do not believe that the war should involve civilians, but in a small way, under wartime, logic and common sense is replaced by something abstract called propaganda and patriotism, a microstate, and in the eyes of the enemy, women, children, the elderly, they all represent the State. The pilot of Block’s Car, as he scrutinized the cloud pattern and found the 15-minute opening over the city of Nagasaki, was not thinking about individuals who went about their days, as usual. He was only thinking of doing his job, and his job was not to kill anyone. No. His job was to drop a bomb over a city, and turn around as quickly as he could. He was not thinking that there could be a POW camp; he was not thinking of children and women. In his eyes, it was only a job. A job he’d been preparing for such a long time, sacrificing so much of his life, just for that one second when he pushed the release button. He was just doing his job in a way my father would get up every morning at 5:30 a.m., put on his suit, to put in fifteen-hour days. And as I stand in front of the panels of photos of Tokko pilots, most of them in their early twenties, some smiling, most looking fierce as if they were pushing aside their youthfulness, they, too, were doing their jobs. They, too have the similar look the tight lips, the face of a man, though these are really boys, still hovering between youth and manhood. Did they ever know what it meant to be a man? There they are, boys my students’ age, and I wonder underneath the headphone music, the baggy pants, the appropriated westernization, that they, too, are fundamentally these boys, these men.

XIII.

T hey, too, were trained for one thing after 1944, like Charles Sweeney who flew over the sky of Nagasaki. As the war worsened, the pilots dying in the southern sea, one man Father of Tokko decided that, instead of shooting down one plane, it was more effective for one plane to drag down an entire ship. And, from then on, the veteran pilots my uncle, for one were pulled out of battle and put in a squadron to guide the young pilots who flew their planes like a fleet of young geese learning to fly for the first time. The young ones, most of them their first combat flight, were asked to dive three thousand feet down the air for a target as small as a pin. There is a myth about how, by 1944, Japan didn’t have any fuel or resources, and these pilots flew out where the Americans were with only one-way fuel. That may be true, but on a practical side, they had to make the plane light enough to be able to dive. The planes were stripped of everything except for an engine and the steering. Usually, only the squadron leader had a radio, to tell the headquarters, “Target in sight. We’re ready to attack.” The guiding squadron would fly back; the battalion would dive head first, avoiding curtains of machine guns. In the NARA archive, I came across footage of a Tokko pilot, miraculously dodging shield after shield of bullets, diving head first into the camera, diving, diving, but not quite making it, and falling into the sea only a few feet away from the ship. Another plane exploding in midair. Another of a live pilot, in the sea, and the camera does not zoom. The face is blurred. He is looking at the camera. Then he reaches in, pulls something, and he explodes. There is a part of me that wants to put the face to the name, to make this pilot’s death as well as all the pilots’ deaths human. But who would want to know that their sons did not die dragging down a ship full of enemy like he had promised, but died alone, in the eye of the indifferent camera? I am not sure how long I can stay here. Under the glass cases, where all 1,200 pilots of this particular base have flown, southward, always south, I feel as if my life, all the pains of a woman living in the luxury of 21st century middle class, with all the privilege of the country called Japan, amount to nothing. My life is a privileged life, a life of a woman, not better than anyone, but privileged nonetheless. I get on the bus. I feel that I have stepped into a world where death carries too much weight, and where things cannot be explained by mere words. There is more immediate death at home, and that’s where I need to be.

XIV.

My passport, the one I’ve carried for ten years, is riddled with entry stamps and exit stamps, visas of various nations, mostly America. There is one country missing France in 2004. As I stood in Charles de Gaulle Airport, a yell from the immigration officer: Japanese, Brazilians, come over here. And I went over through the immigration office without getting stamped in, and entered France to stay for two months without the proof of entry or exit. It was a time of fierce anti-American sentiments in France, and Brazil was the first country which tightened its immigration against the U.S. as a protest against the superpower. Japan? Japan has been harmless. Is harmless. Because after WWII, it has put its head down and focused on rebuilding the war-torn nation that was completely flattened out after a year of intense air raids. And for its aggression, it has put in money into oversea development to atone for its past. As my father had done. Putting his head down, day after day, working, doggedly, flying to this or that country with the bulldozers he developed, to tear down bullet-riddled buildings, to help nations rebuild themselves. I was exempt from the scrutiny of French immigration. And my lack of French, in a country so proud of its language and culture, was an amusement, a stereotypical Japanese tourist walking around Paris, speaking only Japanese in shops and the French, speaking back in Japanese.

XV.

It is December. I am in India. Sharmistha and I are in the car, driven to only where she knows, through the dark highway, on a narrow street where dogs with hanging teats walk amongst children and men. She tells me that this is a special place for her, a shrine of a Sufi master, where she came accidentally or in life, there is no accident but fate when she was going through the darkest period in her life, when she was so beaten down that she had no choice but to get on her knees and yell, I don’t know what else to do, and submitted to a greater force in front of this grave. And in the darkness, where there was no entrance, no exit, she felt something shift in herself. Though the darkness continued, she knew, somehow, that there was going to be an end to this dark night, though she did not know when. It is nearly seven at night. It is dark, India dark, as we drive through the streets. “Here,” she says. An alley brimming with people and children and hawkers and dogs and bicycles. We get out of the car and enter into the heart of the city, heart of a neighborhood: a bazaar. A labyrinth of colors: lapis, turquoise, mauve, fuchsia. Colors not part of home. Fabric, sheer, dense, with the elegant scripts of the Koran. Icons. Tapes and languages of so many levels and vegetables and women squatting amongst the wares. Women holding out their babies; men holding out their hands. I know I stand out, made taller by my boots, and fairer-skinned than the people around me. Turning left, then left, then left again, as if in this neighborhood, right does not exist, and the only direction is left. Then, right. Sharmistha whispers, there are many working class people here. And I think of the working class people home, me; every nation carries a different face of the class. But in this neighborhood of left, nothing makes sense except Sharmistha, who is my guide, and who can translate the meanings of life here. The profane space of this bazaar. As we get closer to the center of the neighborhood, the stalls change their contents. From everyday wares to flowers and religious cloth. Here we are, we need to take off our shoes here, Sharmistha whispers. We take off our shoes, her short brown boots and my tall black boots standing out amidst slippers and sandals. And suddenly, as we cross the door frame, the space shifts. On the marble floor, coffin lids painted green jut out, and homeless men drape their arms over the coffins, sleeping against them. A man sleeps next to the long gone, in the same posture of a corpse. First, the saint of music. We cover our heads with scarves and sit outside the sarcophagus since women cannot enter the interior. Men walk in circles around the coffin. The coffin covered in cloth after cloth. Flowers sprinkled on top. The same one I saw in Bali. The marbled floor of the shrine is hard; cold, but at the same time, yielding. We walk toward the center of the shrine, where the Sufi master lies, dead 600 years. A man walks with a 6-year-old boy in his arms. The man carries love, a burden. The boy’s legs are twisted like gnarled sticks. Women, all shrouded in scarves and veils and cloths, huddle outside, and Sharmistha and I join them. We watch men bow down, walk backwards out of the sarcophagus. A man open a green cloth, places it gently on top of the mounds of cloth, and sprinkles red flowers. Then I remember: these are the same flowers we placed in my father’s coffin, the ones that dyed my father’s bones pink. My father’s bones they were not ashes when it came out of the crematorium oven were a mottle of shocking pink, electric blue, and bleached white. Same flowers. This thought is carried away as a prayer blares out of the stereo. The Koran drifts in the air, lazily, and men bow. A beggar woman sits in the dark, only her eyes and her startlingly clean feet illuminating in the shadow. Sharmistha nods at me, and whispers that there’s something else she wants to show me, and leads me to an open-roofed, fenced-in gravesite made out of marble. There, three coffins jut out. “Graves of the women; they must have been his students,” Sharmistha whispers quietly. “They can always see him, their master, but no one can look in.” Three coffins are quiet, open to the elements. There are writings on the lids. No one visits them, but they are, as they have been, looking over the master, protecting him, adoring him, from a distance. But they are at home here. In their formal distance. We walk back, careful not to step on the dead, careful not to let go of the sacred, even through the profane, holding each other’s hands tightly. We are quiet. The bazaar has muted, and we walk as if we are in the sea, late at night, and we are the only two left, insignificant. Two pilgrims who started the journey together in France, and somehow found ourselves on an unexpected pilgrimage to the bodies of the unnamed women in New Delhi.

I am standing in front of the Christian grave in Nagasaki. Having climbed up hills after hills in the August sun, I’m not sure what I am looking for. In my hand is the map of Nagasaki with all its Christian-related monuments drawn in. Around my neck is a heavy medium-format camera I’ve been carrying, for what? It is a strange moment: I am walking through the Christian Nagasaki, retracing the 500 years of Christianity, suddenly overlapping with other faces of the city. This city I have been excavating, peeling, one layer at a time, for the past week. The city that encompasses so many layers of stories, so many layers of history, that some neighborhood corners have too much history to understand. Here, the Atomic history overlaps with Christian history, which overlaps with the Western history, all swirling, all 400 years of history, in one. And here I am, standing amidst the Christian graves, and I choose one at random: a Christian family, their tombstones stained from that day when the sky broke open for a fraction of a second and a light fell, sucking the air up, turning the city into ashes. The date: August 7, 1945. A child, his Christian name Miguel, 6-years-old, died a week later. And right next to it is a gravestone of a twenty-year-old man who died on February 16, 1945, in New Guinea. A Sergeant Major. His Christian name, Paul. And next to it, a woman, Maria, who died on August 7, 1945. And the newest one is engraved with a man’s name, Joseph, who outlived his entire family. Joseph, it says. Joseph, the father of Christ, who remained in the background in the Scripture. And all around, there is Simon, there is Magdalene, Beatrice. Did the plane that day know that there was, on the ground, a group of enemy who carried Christian names? The enemy with the Japanese face, who believed in the same god the pilot believed in. Who entered churches every Sunday, who believed in the Paradise? Does it matter? No. Nagasaki was chosen that day not because of its location but by chance, because the first target was cloudy. For the pilot, it was a mission. It was work, a day’s work, and like any job, the man’s concern is not with the consequences, but with doing the job. There is no morality in work; there is no questioning. When we have work to do, we must do it, whether we like it or not. That’s what we’re paid to do. That is what god has cursed us with, to toil the land until we die, and the land, now that farming is a dying art, has been replaced with papers, or sometimes, in the case of war, triggers.

XVII.

2007 will be the last year of the government-sponsored expedition to collect bones of the war-dead. Everywhere, the government sent out expeditions to New Guinea, Rabul, Iwo-Jima, Siberia, all the places where the army could not retrieve the bodies behind the battle line, to collect the bones. For Japanese, the body is the proof of death; bones take on more significance than the spirit itself. I am not sure if my grandfather’s bones have already been found, then spirit sent off with the ritual prayer. I’m not sure where his spirit is, though there’s a gravestone in the family grave plot in my mother’s hometown, right next to my grandmother. My grandfather landed in New Guinea in 1943, and where he died a year later was near where he landed a year prior. A march a retreat for a year, never-ending retreat. By the beginning of 1944, all supplies were cut off; men were ordered to find food on their own in the vast primitive jungle of New Guinea. By March 1944, there were reports of encountering men from different units, lost from their battalion, gaunt, dying from malaria, from starvation, from all the illnesses that they had never encountered. A government statistic says that my grandfather’s unit, 237, started out with 4,018 men; by the end of August 1944, after the Battle of Aitape, only 700 surviving soldiers. 17.4%. At the end of war, August 15, 1945, only 14 out of 4,018 are alive. The exact survival rate is 1.14%. And there was my grandfather, barely 26 when he died by the Sakai River, with three children and a wife at home, with two brothers in the war, ready to fight his last battle. Why did he die on July 8th , two days before the Battle of Aitape? Was it night? Or did he see the sun? As a sergeant, did he lead, or did he stay behind? Was death instant, or was he left to die? Where was he? What was he thinking as the command came? He must have known that all the supplies bullets, food, had been exhausted and that Australians and Americans, as they set up their camps, listening to radio and eating canned food were advantageous. He was, afterall, a career officer, who had first served as the Emperor’s Guard, then later on throughout campaign in China. It was a lost cause. I am trying to locate him in history, to make him personal, but the only image I get is from the film reel from the Australian archive: bodies on bodies of emaciated Japanese soldiers in a river, their bodies rotten, disgraced, mortalized in a film, but anonymous in their death.

XVIII.

We place my father’s red scarf, his golf hat, and his best suit in the coffin, but not his passport. The last trip he took: Ethiopia, 2005. Where he is going, nationality does not matter because it is beyond the State. Where he is going, what matters is what life he had led. He is ready for the journey: wearing the pilgrim’s outfit, with a rosary in one hand and a cane in another, he is ready to go to the otherworld. We wish him a safe journey. We close the lid of the coffin. XIX.

At the end of the journey, home is the only place we can go back to. My father’s urn is placed in the grave, and a heavy sheet of stone covers it. He will have to be alone until my mother’s eventual death, then my brother’s and his family. My grandfather’s spirit who died for his country or who died because it was his job to die as a career officer, may or may not be at Yasukuni Shrine. His body may still be in New Guinea under the overgrown vegetation. After all, it has been nearly sixty years. Maybe there, in someone’s attic in America or Australia, is a photo of a Japanese family his mother, his wife, and three children, meaningless, except for as a war souvenir, an old veteran’s proof of having fought in a war and come back alive. And there is a meaning for that veteran, but for a different reason. And if that old man dies, then there will be no meaning attached to the photo. It will be thrown away.

XX.

I sit in the Indira Gandhi Airport, waiting to board. There’s a delay, and there are no seats left in the waiting area. The entire terminal, all twelve gates, is filled to the brim. I sit on the floor and watch the Tibetan monks in their mauve sweaters and robes carrying white backpacks; Korean tourists and Sikhs in business suites and Indian migrant workers all holding their passports in one hand and boarding passes in another. Here, it does not matter whether you hold on passport or another. It does not matter whether you are entering India or leaving. What matters is that this is a transitory place, an illusionary space created out of one common thing: that we are all in the various stages of going home. We all want to go home. With or without our bodies.