Akio Konoshima

"A Soldier is a Soldier"

Author's note: In the autumn of 1950, less than three months after the start of the Korean War, I had the chance to visit my father's native village deep in the Southern Japan Alps of Gifu Prefecture. I was one of the lucky ones. We had left the Army depot in Oakland in June just as the Korean War started, and I and only a handful of other GIs were kept at GHQ in Tokyo, the other 1,500 or so soldiers on board the troopship General Pope, got off the ship in Yokohama and were immediately sent off to Korea.

The flat wooden deck of the river ferry was small. I, with my duffle bag and backpack, and my cousin Isamu with his moped, took up a third of the deck space. Steel cables, anchored on both banks of the river and attached to a motor, which popped and smoked, was used to pull the ferry back and forth. The ferryman, in an old pair of denim coveralls and wearing a conical straw hat, could have been as old as the ferry itself. He was lean, tall for a Japanese, and had a stubby white beard on a face with wrinkles running through weathered, tan skin.

"Ah, Kisa no ko ( Kisa's son)," he said with a smile when Isamu introduced me. The ferryman said he remembered my father well; ferried him across the river more times than he could remember. Looking into my face, he said he could see some resemblance, but that I had my mother's eyes.

As the ferry moved ahead, Isamu pointed across the river to a group of houses stretched along a narrow strip of land above the riverbank. That was where the hon-ke - the ancestral family home -- was, nestled among patches of cultivated land, thickets and ravines just below the start of ridges and then the mountains.

As the wind blew droplets of water onto my face, I recalled my father's tales of trapping pheasants in nets strung along mountain ridges -- maybe those were the same ridges. The pheasants, afraid of flying into the dusk because of hawks, would run into the nets as they scurried over the ridge.

On the opposite bank, the ferryman, after securing he ferry to the wooden landing dock, turned and gave me a quick, overall look, then said with a final nod, "Shikkari shite -- (Keep your chin up)."

"Arigato, " I said. The words of support the ferryman used probably were the same words the man used when he had said good-by to the local youths who left the village during the war to fight the Americans.

Once off of the ferry, Isamu and I, sitting piggy back with my baggage, rode the mo-ped down a narrow gravel road. People still out in the fields exchanged waves or nods with Isamu as we went by. Most were either cousins or related in some way to our family, Isamu said. I would get a chance to meet them later.

As we approached a farmwoman walking beside the road, Isamu stopped. When the woman turned, I was surprised. From behind I thought I saw the walk of an old woman. But beneath her bonnet, the eyes were alert, moved quickly; the face, though ruddy, was still young.

"Ara?" she said, also surprised. "Isamu." This was a weekday. Shouldn't he still be at work? He was an office supervisor and usually came home much later in the evenings, she teased.

"Jo-dan iu-na ... Stop joking," Isamu laughed, then introduced me. She was also a cousin.

"Ah, yokatta, " she said, her face beaming. At last, she said, she was able to thank someone from my family personally for the food packages and clothing sent over by my parents when the war ended.

"Mi-te - Look," she said, turning up the front part of her cotton jacket to show the pull over sweater underneath. I recognized it at once. My mother had knitted it and used to wear it around the house.

Though her enthusiasm seemed to bubble, the harsh meagerness of my cousin's life was apparent. Her teeth were still fairly white, but her gums were an off-color pink, probably from some lack in her diet. Her face was sunburned. Her hands were rough; the fingernails curved in, their cuticles cracked.

As she noticed my looking, she stepped back slightly. "Konna kakko - my appearance, please forgive me," she said. She had to be out in the field a lot with only herself and her son, a 10-year-old, to tend their rice paddies. Her husband, she said simply, never came back from the war. When she mentioned her husband, she paused, seemed to notice my uniform for the first time.

"Gommen nasai, " she said suddenly, bringing her right hand to her mouth as if she had said something wrong - maybe for mentioning the war.

Why? Why should she be apologizing? I wanted to ask. I searched my mind for the proper Japanese words to express my feelings, offer condolences; could find none, and before I could say anything, the moment had passed. Her face, again smiling, hid her emotions as she turned and trudged off to a nearby field even though it was starting to get dark.

The hon-ke stood on a rise at the start of a small vale. In the twilight, I could make out rice paddies; flat rows of vines, probably yams; hedge-like rows of tea plants, and low fruit trees on the side. The thatched roof was about two-feet thick. In spots, where the mortar had chipped off of the outside wall, I could see bricks made of clayey dirt and straw.

Isamu's wife Hiroko, also my cousin, smiled broadly as she came out of the house, followed by a boy of about four, and a girl a year or so older. A circular cotton cap, typically worn by Japanese housewives, offset the mother's round, smiling face as she bowed. Then turning to her son, she said, "Hiroshi, kare ga - he's the American soldier."

The boy stepped forward, bowed quickly, then moved behind his mother, hiding his face in her apron.

As the daughter stepped forward and bowed, Hiroko laughed. Her son had been asking all week who and what a "Beigun no heitai-an American soldier" was. Seeing me probably left the boy more confused than ever since I looked like any Japanese.

"Uncle will be so glad to see you," Isamu said as we sat on each side of a quilt-covered hibachi. (Hiroko had gone to make tea, the children to another room to play.) "It's been such a long wait for him. We all worried about your family when the war started, but Uncle, as the family patriarch, worried most."

He said Uncle became especially concerned when the newspapers reported that the U.S. government was putting Japanese there into concentration camps. "Uncle's anxiety did not ease until the letters and CARE packages from your father started to arrive after the war ended," Isamu said.

"Shikashi, kuro shitta desho -- Still you must have suffered hardships, no?" Isamu asked. He had heard about the wartime evacuation of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes.

"Maa...well, not that much," I said, surprised. I wasn't aware that anyone in Japan even knew about the evacuation.

As I recalled the evacuation - the hot sun at the race track in Santa Anita and the horse stables we were housed in, the barbed wire fences and guard towers surrounding the camp in Wyoming, I wondered what to say. Tell him about hardship? It was not even remotely comparable to the suffering and terror of the war for so many millions elsewhere in the world.

"Uncle is old and often forgets things," Isamu said, changing the subject with my silence. "Unless he can see things for himself, he won't always believe what he's being told. Seeing you certainly will help lift his spirits, relieve his worry, ease some pain."

"If so, I'm glad," I said, but noticed that from the beginning Isamu kept using the word "Oji-san - Uncle" rather than "Oto-san - Father."

"I'm really a nephew," Isamu explained. "I'm the son of the second oldest son of the family."

He was about to say more when a rustling sound came from behind the shoji - paper door -- in an adjacent room.

"Ara ...seems like Uncle's awake," Isamu said. "Chotto gomen - Pardon me for a moment" and got up to go help the old man dress. "Oji-san would not want to waste even a minute before seeing you."

As I sat alone, I scanned the room. In the dim light of a lone bulb, I could see a scroll with the Chinese character for Manzoku - fulfillment; a rural scene of men and women bent over in rice paddies was painted on the screen partitioning the room. A rough-hewn log more than a foot and a half thick ran lengthwise across open ceiling as the main support beam.

What would my own life been like had my father not left the village, I wondered. Maybe I'd be toiling in the rice paddies, raising carp in the pool in the yard, the source of the family's winter protein; hunting wild boars, pheasants, even black bears which, I was told, roamed the region - when Isamu came from behind the screen with his uncle leaning on his right shoulder.

I got up immediately.

My uncle and I looked at each other. The old man's eyes, deep-set, first registered confusion, then filled with tears as Isamu gently lowered him onto the tatami. Once lowered, my uncle got on his hands and knees. I did the same.

"O kaeri-nasai ... welcome home," the old man said as he bowed and continued with further words of formal greeting.

I, my head bowing in unison with my uncle's, just mumbled - words didn't really seem to matter. As the old man bowed, his head wavered. His cheeks were squeezed in because of a lack of teeth; bone structure sharply outlined his face through thinning flesh; his head was bald.

When the greetings were over, I stood up and helped my uncle get seated at the hibachi, I taking one arm, Isamu the other. Through the cotton-filled housecoat, I could feel the frailness of my uncle's body, smell camphor.

Once seated, my uncle studied my face. Like a blind man's touch, my uncle seemed to want to extract more than what his sight would allow.

"Yatto... at last," Uncle said. "It's been so long. Just let me look at you; feel your presence."

The old man then closed his eyes, placed his palms together in prayer, chanting "Namu ami dabutsu" three times to give thanks to Buddha. Then, with his eyes still closed, he continued his prayer in silence.

As we waited for Uncle to finish, Isamu looked over at me to finish what he had started to say earlier. Since our uncle had no surviving children and Isamu's natural father had two sons, he, Isamu, was adopted by Uncle to keep the ancestral home under the family name.

"He had children, then?" I asked.

"One," Isamu said. "He was a ..." Isamu began when Uncle, who, though his eyes were closed, had been listening and cleared his throat.

"Hei-tai - a soldier," the uncle said. "A soldier is a soldier. Some had to..." The old man's voice broke before he could finish his sentence, and he began to cry, tears in large droplets running down both cheeks.

"It's his age and because of Masaru," Isamu said.

"Masaru?"

"Umm...," Isamu said, then explained. Masaru was Uncle's only child.

"He was like an older brother to me," Isamu said. "Masaru did well in school,

excelled in both judo and kendo, was always level-headed and was well-liked. We,

everyone, had such high hopes for him."

The family got one letter from him after his last home leave; he couldn't say where he was because of censorship; then after that nothing.

"When the B-29s started coming over every day, we were all afraid because the military was preparing everyone, even women, for a last stand against an invasion by the Americans," he said. "But we also knew that the war had to be over soon. When the Emperor announced the surrender, many were glad. Though we had not heard from Masaru, we all were waiting for his return."

I could see Isamu struggling with his emotions.

"For months, nothing official came," Isamu said. "Somehow, we all assumed he would be returning; he mattered so much to the family. Finally official word came that he was missing in action, presumed dead. Because they never recovered his body, some still can not give up hope."

"Kino doku deshita ...how unfortunate," I said. Until then I had not known, hadn't been told by my mother or father about Masaru; maybe they didn't know either.

In the silence that followed, I looked, first at my uncle - his eyes closed, tear streaks on his wrinkled face - then at Isamu, whose face was now deadpan; his moist eyes avoiding contact. I wanted to share their sorrow. But Masaru? I hadn't even known of his existence.

My uncle broke the silence.

"Ima made ... Until now..." he said, he just kept hoping against reason that Masaru would return. "Gomen-nasai - pardon my crying," he added, but said when he was helped into the room, he was taken aback when he saw me. His eyesight is weak and though he knew it could not be, when he saw my uniform, my youth, he thought Masaru had returned.

With that, my uncle closed he eyes, repeated "Namu ami dabutsu" in prayer. Isamu, his composure recovered, leaned forward to whisper, when the old man held up his hand; he had more to say.

He sat up straight, turned first to me, then to Isamu, and said, "Isamu, so there'll be no mistake, please explain in simpler Japanese if he does not understand what I am about to say." He would speak slowly.

Uncle paused, looked at the lone stripe on my sleeve, then the brass "U.S." insignia on my lapels.

"Before I go on," my uncle said, "I want to be sure you understand how I feel about you. You are my youngest brother's son, part of our family. But America is your home. As a soldier, Beigun - the American Army - is the only army you should be in."

"Doi To-A Senso - the Great East Asian War," he continued, was a disaster for Japan and for the family. It had to be a tragedy, too, for the families of Americans who died. The grief remains.

"For an old man like me, wishful thinking sometimes replaces reality, especially after wishing so hard for so long," he went on.

"However, your visit to our ancestral home is like the return of a lost one. Naze - why - I don't know. But somehow, thanks to your visit, I now feel better able to face up to the reality that Masaru is dead. May his soul rest in peace."

The old man then again prayed silently.

In the silence I was conscious of Hiroko moving about in the kitchen area humming; the children in the other room playing and giggling; the warmth of the hibachi on my legs; the chill of the night air on my back.