Another furious-sounding spate of Japanese. “You will be sent to road building in the Kalihi Valley,” the local Jap said. “This is your unbreakable sentence.” He might have been sending them off to Devil’s Island.
The officer growled one more time. The interpreter left it untranslated, which might have been just as well. The officer drew himself up straight, which would have been more impressive if he’d been taller than five-six. Like the rest of the men in the shooting squad, Peterson bowed. They knew what the Jap wanted.
As the officer swaggered away with the interpreter in his wake, Peterson dared breathe a sigh of relief. As far as he could see, they’d got off easy. Road building was road building. How could what they wanted him to do be any worse than what he’d been doing already?
And where the devil was the Kalihi Valley, anyway?
CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU GATHERED HIS SQUAD by eye. “You boys ready to go back to Honolulu?” he asked.
“Yes, Corporal!” chorused the men under him. Of course they called out, “Hai!” at the top of their lungs. He was a noncom and they were only privates. If they annoyed him, he could slap them or punch them or kick them, and no one above him would say a word. No, that wasn’t quite true. Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander, would say, Well done! Keep your men disciplined! Certainly, though, no one above him would complain.
Odds were he wouldn’t smack them around. He had a ready smile and a readier laugh. He’d been a while making corporal; his superiors came right out and said they feared he was too easygoing for the job. But he’d fought, and fought well, in China before crossing the Pacific to land on a beach not far from where he was now. Once he had the rank, he kept his squad in line well enough even if he didn’t thump his men as often as some other corporals and sergeants did with theirs.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. His whole regiment had moved up from Honolulu to the beaches near Haleiwa on Oahu’s north shore to defend against an American reinvasion. It hadn’t come-the Japanese Navy had made sure it wouldn’t and couldn’t. Now the regiment was returning to its previous posting.
“This is pretty country. It’s a shame to leave,” Shiro Wakuzawa said. He wasn’t wrong-it was the sort of country where ferns sprouted from the dirt thrown up in front of foxholes, where coconut palms (the ones that hadn’t been knocked over when the Japanese shelled and bombed the beaches) swayed in tropical breezes, where the ocean was several improbably beautiful shades of blue. But Wakuzawa, who’d been a new conscript when he came ashore here, was such a sunny fellow that he made even Shimizu seem like a grouch.
An older private said, “I won’t be sorry to get back to Honolulu. No whorehouses up here.” With his meager pay, he couldn’t afford to go to a brothel even once a month. But several other soldiers who had no more money nodded. Shimizu didn’t try to argue with them. He also thought getting laid every once in a while was better than not getting laid at all. Getting laid regularly would have been better still. Wish for the moon while you’re at it, he thought.
He led the squad over to where the platoon was assembling. Everyone was clean. Everyone had all his gear. Everyone could stand inspection-everyone already had stood Shimizu’s inspection. Shimizu nodded to Corporal Kiyoshi Aiso, whose squad was also part of the platoon. Aiso nodded back. He was thin and leathery and tough-all in all, a more typical noncom than Shimizu.
Colonel Fujikawa, the regimental commander, condescended to speak to the assembled soldiers before they started marching down across Oahu. “Congratulations, men. You were ready for action,” he said. “I know you would have mown down the Americans if they had dared return to Oahu. We will stay ready in case they decide to try again. Banzai! for the Emperor.”
“Banzai!” the soldiers shouted.
The bugler blared out the order to advance. The soldiers started to march. “Be strong!” Shimizu called to his men. “You were soft as tofu on the march up here. I expect better.” Garrison duty in Honolulu had left all of them soft. Shimizu had suffered on the march up to Haleiwa, too, but hadn’t shown it in front of his men. If he kept up a bold front, he had no trouble ordering them around.
Everything seemed easy when he started out. He laughed at the mynah birds croaking and squawking in the rice paddies that had replaced most of the sugar cane and pineapple plantations past and through which he’d fought. Hawaii hadn’t come close to feeding itself before Japan conquered it. Now it nearly could.
Little blue-faced zebra doves and ordinary pigeons pecked at the growing rice. There were far fewer of them than there had been when Shimizu came ashore. They were good to eat, and people had got hungry enough to eat them. And zebra doves in particular were very tame and very stupid and very easy to catch.
Before long, Wakuzawa started to sing. He had a fine musical voice, and could stick to the tune even when the soldiers around him-who weren’t nearly so good-made a hash of it. Singing helped the kilometers go by. Shimizu had done a lot of it on endless dusty marches through China. The marches here weren’t endless, thank heaven, and they weren’t even dusty, for the roads were paved. But singing felt good all the same.
He thought so, anyhow. After Wakuzawa had led the men in a couple of ballads popular in Tokyo before they sailed for Hawaii, Lieutenant Horino said, “We are soldiers. If we’re going to sing, we should sing Army songs.”
Army songs had only one thing wrong with them: next to popular ballads, they were dull. Singing about the infantry’s branch-of-service color and about dying for the Emperor and living on inside his spirit wasn’t nearly so much fun as singing about women and getting drunk and looking for a chance to get rich and women again. Even the tunes were dull; they seemed more chants than proper songs. How could you care about singing something like that?
After a while, then, the men fell silent once more. Lieutenant Horino looked pleased with himself. To his way of thinking, he’d stopped a minor nuisance. Corporal Shimizu swallowed a sigh. When he was singing, he could do that and not notice the highway and each step along it. Now-thump, thump, thump-each footfall was what it was.
The soldiers trudged through Wahiawa. Like Haleiwa farther north, it wasn’t anything speciaclass="underline" not very big, not very rich. It wasn’t very rich by Hawaiian standards, anyhow. But towns here never failed to remind Shimizu that America was a much richer country than Japan. Cars sat by the curb-so many! They couldn’t go now, because they had no fuel, but ordinary people had been able to buy them. In Japan, cars were for rich men.
Some of the tires on these automobiles had gone flat. Some had been removed, too. Sooner or later, Malaya would give Japan rubber, but she was desperately short of it now. All those tires weren’t doing the people of Hawaii any good, not when they couldn’t drive the cars on which the tires were mounted. Better they should help Japan, then.
In Wahiawa, as anywhere else, civilians had to bow when Japanese soldiers went by. Local Japanese not only took it in stride, they did it properly, showing just the right amount of deference and respect. Whites and Chinese and Filipinos weren’t so good, but orders were not to make an issue out of any bow that showed the right spirit.
A pretty blond woman in her late twenties-not far from Shimizu’s age-bent as the soldiers went past. He remembered seeing a pretty woman with yellow hair as his regiment marched up through Wahiawa. Was this the same one? How could he tell after several weeks?
He’d seen a handful of missionaries in China. But for them, these people on Oahu were the first whites he’d ever set eyes on. They were big. He’d seen that from the moment he landed, when they started shooting at him. But big didn’t mean tough-or not tough enough, anyhow. They’d fought hard, but in the end they’d surrendered.