Shimizu remembered the other birds he’d seen when he first came to Oahu: the pigeons and the little blue-faced doves. They’d got thin on the ground in Honolulu, and there weren’t many of them left in the countryside, either. He had no trouble figuring out why: they were good to eat, and food had got scarce. When supplies came regularly from the U.S. mainland, nobody’d bothered the birds. Nowadays, though, they were nothing but meat.
More slowly than they should have, the Japanese soldiers reached the cross road that led west to Schofield Barracks. A gang of American prisoners was repairing it, as the POWs had already done on the north-south road. The prisoners were a sorry-looking lot: skinny and dirty and dressed in the tattered remnants of the uniforms they’d worn before giving up.
“See what happens when you surrender?” Shimizu said, pointing their way. “That’s what you get. That’s what you deserve. Better to die fighting. Better to hug a grenade to your chest and get everything over with at once. Then, at least, you don’t disgrace your family. Honto? ”
“Honto! ” his squad chorused. No hesitation, no disagreement. Surrender was the ultimate disgrace. How could you hope to go back to your home village after falling into the enemy’s hands? You couldn’t. You’d bring dishonor with you, and all your kin would lose face. Yes, better by far to tap a grenade against your helmet and then hold it tight. Everything would be over in a hurry, and your spirit would go to the Yasukuni Shrine.
After the turnoff for Schofield Barracks came the town of Wahiawa, more of it to the east of the road than to the west. Locals on the street bowed, but didn’t pay much attention to the regiment passing through. By now, they were bound to be used to Japanese soldiers coming and going. They were thin, too, though not so scrawny as the American prisoners. Shimizu thought most of them were skinnier than the civilians in Honolulu. He wondered how much of the fish the sampans caught came this far inland. Not much, unless he missed his guess.
No matter how skinny they were, some of the white women wore scandalously little: nothing but shorts that came more than halfway up their thighs and tops that covered their breasts but not much else. A yellow-haired woman perhaps a few years older than Shimizu walked along the sidewalk with her back very straight, doing her best to pretend the Japanese soldiers in the street didn’t exist.
“They look like whores,” somebody behind Shimizu said.
Soldiers nodded, though he wondered why. No whore in Japan would show herself in public wearing so little; it would shame her. From what he’d seen in the brothels in Honolulu, the same held true here. None of the women in Wahiawa seemed the least bit ashamed.
The women did seem cool and comfortable in the warm weather. Shimizu’s feet were sore. Sweat dampened his uniform. He could smell the men he marched with. They didn’t have the sour, beefy reek a like number of Americans would have, but he knew they were there. He sighed, wishing he were marching with almost-naked women instead of his squadmates. That would sure liven up the day.
Not far beyond Wahiawa, the regiment took a ten-minute break. “Leave your boots on,” Shimizu warned his men. “If you take them off, your feet will swell up and you won’t be able to get them back on again. You wouldn’t like that.” Anyone who couldn’t get his boots back on would have to finish the march barefoot. No, the men wouldn’t like that a bit.
When the sun went down, the regiment was short of Haleiwa and had to camp by the side of the road. The officers muttered and fumed at that, which meant Shimizu and the other noncoms were obliged to mutter and fume, too. He didn’t know about anybody else, but he growled at his squad more for form’s sake than from conviction. If he’d had to march another hundred meters, he was sure he would have fallen over dead.
Cooks who’d brought their field kitchens on horse-drawn carts fixed rice for the men. Some of the soldiers had fallen asleep and couldn’t be shaken awake even to eat. “More for the rest of us,” Senior Private Furusawa said.
“Yes, why not?” Shimizu agreed. “For them, sleep is more important. As for me, I wouldn’t be sorry if the cooks slaughtered the horses and fed them to us, too.” Hashi flashing in the firelight, he emptied his bowl amazingly fast-but he wasn’t the first man done. The soldiers who were hungrier than they were sleepy were hungry.
Shimizu told off soldiers to stand watches through the night. One of the benefits of his none too exalted rank was that he got to assign such duties instead of enduring them. He cocooned himself in his blanket and fell asleep. Though he’d been able to eat, exhaustion made the ground seem softer than the mattress on his cot back in the Honolulu barracks.
He wasn’t so happy when he woke up a little before dawn the next morning. He felt stiff and sore. Grunting, he stretched and twisted, trying to work out the kinks. Then he undid his fly and pissed into a rice paddy. Men lined up along the paddy’s muddy edge to do the same.
After more rice for breakfast, the regiment set out again. For the first little while, Shimizu felt like his own grandfather-except that his grandfather had fought in the Sino-Japanese War and always went on about how soft the modern generation was. Then his muscles loosened up and he just felt tired. Tired wasn’t so bad; after yesterday’s march, he’d earned the right to be tired.
“The sea! The sea!” Someone pointed north, toward the Pacific.
“It’s the same sea that washes up against Japan,” Yasuo Furusawa said. He was right, of course. Corporal Shimizu knew that. Like everyone else in the regiment, he’d sailed across every centimeter of it in the Nagata Maru. There hadn’t been any place where he’d had to get out and walk. But it didn’t always feel like the same sea. It was so much warmer, so much bluer, and-except on north-facing beaches in wintertime-so much calmer.
“Remember the waves we rode going up onto the beach?” Shimizu said. “Didn’t that make your bottom pucker up? And it could have been worse. It could have been too nasty to let us land at all. I don’t know what we would have done then.” He had a pretty good idea, though. Ready or not, they would have tried to land. They hadn’t come all that way to sit in the troopships.
“If the Yankees try to land now, the waves won’t throw them around,” Corporal Aiso said. “It’s calm and peaceful during the summer. So it’ll be up to us to shoot them on the beaches if they get that far.”
“If the Navy’s doing its job, they won’t,” Shimizu said.
“If the Navy was doing its job, the Americans wouldn’t have bombed us here,” Aiso said. “If the Navy was doing its job, American subs wouldn’t be shelling us and sinking our ships and spying on us.”
“Well, that’s the Navy,” Shimizu said, and everyone who caught his tone of voice nodded. What can you do about such people? he might have asked. Of course, a sailor would have said, Well, that’s the Army, and sounded exactly the same-half exasperated, half amused. Neither service thought the other had the faintest idea what it was doing.
When the regiment got up to Haleiwa, near the north coast of Oahu, Shimizu expected to turn right and march east. He’d come ashore near Waimea, and the march up from Honolulu had felt a little like running the film of the invasion in reverse. He was taken aback when the column turned left instead. But the beaches past which the soldiers marched were broad and friendly, the country behind them flat and inviting for an invader-flatter and more inviting than where he’d landed. Mountains rose to the south and west, yes, but behind a good stretch of plain now converted to rice paddies.
Fighters with the Rising Sun on flanks and wings rose from an airstrip not far inland. Shimizu smiled to see them as they roared overhead. The handful of planes the Americans managed to put in the air had done damage out of proportion to their numbers till Zeros dealt with them. Unlike the Americans, Japan wouldn’t be caught sleeping. The planes zooming out helped guarantee that.