AUTUMN. For more than thirty years, it had been only a word to Jiro Takahashi. It was always summer in Hawaii. A little warmer, a little cooler, a little drier, a little wetter-so what? Summer, endless summer.
But now, against all odds, he was back in Japan, and he had to remember what seasons were like. Southern Honshu had always prided itself on its good weather, with the Inland Sea helping to keep things moderate. Jiro supposed it wasn’t as bad here as it was up in Hokkaido, where they got real blizzards every winter. It still seemed chilly and nasty to him.
I’ve been spoiled, he thought.
The authorities were doing their best to keep him happy. His broadcasts from Hawaii had made him something of a celebrity in the home islands. A grumpy celebrity wasn’t good.
He thought he would have been happier if they’d let him stay next door in Yamaguchi Prefecture, where he’d been born. He’d visited his old village. He had a brother and a sister there, and a few old acquaintances. It proved more awkward than he’d expected; no one knew what to say. After so many years apart, he didn’t have much in common with family or former friends.
Maybe the people who ran things were smart to keep him in a big city. He could visit again whenever he wanted to-if he wanted to. Yamaguchi Prefecture remained overwhelmingly rural. It was livelier than it had been when he left, but next to the hustle and bustle he’d known in Honolulu it seemed, if not dead, then very, very sleepy.
For instance, it had no town with first-rate broadcasting facilities. They wanted to keep him on the radio, as if his broadcasts could somehow compensate for the loss of Hawaii. Nobody ever came right out and said Hawaii was lost; it just stopped showing up in the news. Jiro hoped his sons had come through the fighting. He also hoped they were happy under American rule once more. He knew he wouldn’t have been-and he knew the Americans wouldn’t have been happy with him.
He got off the trolley at the stop closest to the studio. It was only a block or two from the domed Industrial Promotion Hall in the center of town. When he looked north, the Chugoku-sanshi Range loomed over the city skyline. The mountains didn’t have snow on them yet, but they would by the time winter was over. He hadn’t even seen snow since coming to Oahu. He supposed seeing it wasn’t so bad. Dealing with it… If he had to, he had to, that was all.
“Hello, Takahashi-san.” The local broadcaster’s name was Junchiro Hozumi. He reminded Jiro of a cheap imitation of Osami Murata. He cracked crude, stupid jokes and breathed in your face to show how friendly he was. He did have a smooth baritone, though. He said, “Today shall we talk about how you came back to Japan?”
Jiro thought about that. He remembered how terribly overcrowded the submarine was, and how the stink almost knocked you off your feet. He remembered the heart-pounding fear as the boat sneaked, submerged, past the American ships that had by then surrounded Oahu. He remembered the shrill pings of the enemy’s echo-tracker, and the crash and boom of bursting depth charges. He remembered how the submarine shook, as if in an undersea earthquake. And he remembered how fear turned to terror.
Did Hozumi understand what he was asking? Did he want his listeners hearing things like that? What would the government do to him-and to Jiro- if they went out over the air? Nothing good; Jiro was sure of that. As tactfully as he could, he said, “Maybe we’d better pick something else, Hozumi-san.”
For a wonder, Hozumi got the message. His grin was wide and friendly and showed a gold front tooth.
“Whatever you say. How about being able to eat proper rice now that you’re in the home islands again?”
“All right. We can do that,” Jiro said. The rice here was better than the horrible slop he’d eaten after the occupation started. The ration was larger than the one people on Oahu had got, too-not a whole lot larger, but larger. He could talk about that and let people here think he was talking about the whole time he’d lived in Hawaii. He’d begun to understand how the game was played.
The studio reminded him of the one at KGMB from which he and Murata had broadcast. The routine seemed much the same, too. Had the Japanese borrowed from the Americans? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Even the engineers’ signals through the glass were the same.
“Good job,” Hozumi said when the program was done. “Good job!”
“Arigato,” Jiro said. He’d got through another one, anyhow.
When he left the studio, he took the trolley down to the shore and stared out across the Inland Sea at Itaku Shima, the Island of Light. From time out of mind, the tiny island had been dedicated to the goddess Bentin. The chief temple was more than 1,300 years old. Pilgrims came to visit from all over Japan.
Hawaii didn’t have anything like that. Jiro nodded to himself. Even if the weather here couldn’t match what he’d left, Hiroshima wasn’t such a bad place after all.