In the evening, we had a special course in navy calisthenics.
December 28
Our third time rowing the cutter. About fifty strokes. I can think of nothing more beautiful and orderly to look at, and yet more arduous to do myself But I have to pull my own weight.
Navy mottoes: Iron will. Order. Initiative. And above all, praxis.
But honestly, I know my heart always harbors the antitheses of all these elements of virtue, side by side with each of them. Weakness. Slovenliness. Passive maintenance of the status quo. And above all, just going through the motions. As for that last one: I’m really not shrewd enough to pull it off, though I sometimes feel that you have to pull it off if you want to survive in the military.
“Ingenuity, Yoshino,” Fujikura said to me bluntly during a cigarette break. “Ingenuity. I tell you this because you’re rather naively honest. We can do what we’re asked to do without letting ourselves be cast into the mold of this insular navy world. If you can’t salvage at least that much independence, to what purpose have you lived such a free and easy life at high school and university? Of course, the brass would be furious if we didn’t at least appear to fit their mold, and that’s where the ingenuity comes in. You know, the novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa once said, ‘There is also a truth that can only be told through lies.”’
Fujikura still won’t use military talk like kisama, ore, and omae,[1] unless a supervisor is within earshot. He seems to enjoy putting up a little resistance. I don’t always agree with him, but I can listen to anything with an open mind so long as it comes from Kashima or Fujikura. Among the four of us, it’s Fujikura and Kashima who rebel most strongly against the navy atmosphere. Sakai is the most amenable, though he’s timid and somewhat whiny. And I’d say I’m just about in between.
The navy adheres to a diet of brown rice, and before each meal a voice bellows instructions from the loudspeakers. Dinner is ready! Wash your hands! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly! Chew thoroughly and eat slowly.
We always heard that in the military you have to eat quickly, or else they teach you a lesson. To prepare ourselves we even staged an eating contest at a restaurant we used to haunt called Ogawa-tei, if only for fun. But I find that in the navy it’s actually the other way round. I don’t know whether this has anything to do with it, but the sailors, to a man, empty their bowels with remarkable frequency, quite as if their bodies had somehow altered. I myself take a good hard shit three times a day, every day. The bathroom is always packed during short breaks. If you delay getting in line, you miss your chance. It’s quite painful to engage in battle drills while holding at bay so urgent a call of nature. This is especially true when you have to stand at attention. Your lower abdomen feels bloated, and you have to struggle not to let out a fart. Maybe I should get up in the middle of the night and finish off a portion of the business. That might be an example of “ingenuity.”
January 2, Showa 19 (1944)
A new year begins. Our first march to Iwakuni. For the first time since joining the navy, I breathed the air of the outside world. Chickens clucking. Children playing battledore and shuttlecock in their Sunday best. A drunk peddler taking a leak by the road, his bicycle at his side. The sights and sounds of the holiday impressed me vividly. The waters of the Iwakuni River ran clear, with round, white pebbles covering the bottom. The landscape around the Kintaikyo Bridge reminded me of the country near Togetsukyo Bridge in Arashiyama, in the western suburbs of Kyoto. We returned to base in the evening.
I want something sweet. For two weeks I have been craving botamochi. What preoccupies me most since I entered the navy? Well, I find myself always thinking of food. I don’t have any sexual desire at all, probably because I haven’t had any experience, but I certainly desire mame-daifuku, beautifully browned over red-hot charcoal. Just one more time I want to sit down to some breaded pork cutlets at Ogawa-tei.
We are eating white rice for the first three days of the New Year. I am so used to staring at brown rice day after day that freshly cooked white rice, with its moist, pearly finish, is precious in my sight. Lunch was served at 1000 on New Year’s Day: salad, steamed fish cake, herring roe, sweet black beans, beef, and soft azuki-bean jelly, immediately followed by two parcels of treats, an apple, and four satsuma oranges. We were told, however, that we had to polish it all off at the table. We were forbidden to set anything aside for later. We wondered why, but as they say, we haven’t mastered soldiering yet if we are forever asking why. Nobody openly opposes that idea, and yet isn’t it true that skepticism is the father of modern science? And isn’t the navy, above all, founded upon the modern science of the West? I mean, the navy is hardly the infantry. Naval officers know perfectly well that soldiership alone can’t move its warships and aircraft. Isn’t this all something of a paradox?
Anyway, it seems that if you wish for something from the bottom of your heart, you will be heard. Last night, unbeknownst to me, someone laid three dried persimmons in my hammock. And there was another anonymous gift today of five miso-seasoned rice crackers. It requires supreme skill to eat rice crackers without making any noise. They say that, even now, with the world cut in two by the war, there are ways to get steel from Sweden or equipment from the United States, if you only have the will to do it. And in much the same way, we aren’t shut off completely from the outer world. For example, the father of S. in my outfit is a man of some influence in the city of Otake, and he manages to send food in through the executive officer at the naval barracks. This accounts for the miso-seasoned rice crackers, a bequest from S.
Kashima belongs to the outfit bunking next to us. As New Year’s Eve wound to a close, he was startled by a sharp, goblin-like cackle, coming at him from above: “Hey, Kashima! Kashima!” Before he could recover from the shock, he was hauled up onto a broom closet. There, with Drill Instructor Ishii at his side, Kashima found himself forced to wolf down dried persimmons and twenty-odd boiled eggs. The story goes that Kashima’s father came for a visit bearing various morsels for him to eat during the New Year holiday. However, he was not allowed to see his son. “Well, it’s a shame to waste this,” he said. “Please share it with the instructors.” And he left all the food for them. Many fathers and mothers reportedly come out to visit their sons only to be turned away. Some try to bribe their way in, and the drill instructors have been known to wink at the practice. I don’t like this sort of business, but I could sell my soul when it comes to food. Needless to say, last night’s dried persimmons came from Kashima.
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