Of course, nobody dinged a bell at the chief of police, who was diminutive of stature but towering in bearing; in fact, everybody was clearing a path for us, as we left a trail of intimidation and astonishment in our wake, the chief and the foreigner.
“You have a nice town here,” I said.
“We have factory, hospital, post office, newspaper, radio station, electric light.”
“It’s a modern place, all right.”
On the other hand, they didn’t seem to have indoor plumbing. The side streets were unpaved and dusty, and lined with an assembly of bedraggled stores and ramshackle private homes with tin roofs; outhouses were easily glimpsed, even if they did lack our traditional half-moon.
We were four blocks from the waterfront when the street opened onto the town square, built around a rather grand, official-looking white wooden two-story building, colonial-style with pillars and double doors. The place was like an ice cream salesmen convention: everybody going in and out wore white suits or white shorts and white shoes with white Panama hats or white pith helmets or white military caps.
“Court of Justice,” Chief Suzuki said, quietly proud. “My office here.”
But we didn’t go in; the chief had paused at a black sedan parked out front. He barked at a cop in white shorts, caught on his way into the courthouse; the cop bowed, on the run, went inside and shortly thereafter another servile young copper in white shorts, white cap, and black gunbelt came trotting out and saluted the chief. The chief gave him some instructions, the young copper said, “Hai,” and opened the rear sedan door for me.
I took my cue, and the chief got in after me, with the young copper going around the front to play chauffeur.
“Would it be impolite of me to ask where we’re going?” I inquired, as we pulled out between bicycles. The backseat was roomy; it wasn’t a limo, but this Jap buggy with its cushiony black interior was comfortable, even though it rode like a lumber wagon — they’d have to go some to catch up with American automaking.
“Forgive my rudeness,” Chief Suzuki said. “I escort you to meet shichokan.”
“Oh. Local official of some kind?”
“Yes. What you call ‘governor.’” He pondered that for a moment. “Not governor of Nan’yo chokan; he is not chokunin. He is governor of shicho.”
“You mean, he’s the governor of Saipan?”
“Not Saipan only. Governor of all Mariana Islands.”
“Oh... but not of Micronesia.”
“Yes.” He seemed pleased that his intelligence and communications skills were overcoming the limitations of the slow-witted child in his care. “I instructed Lieutenant Tomura to call ahead. The shichokan...” He chose his words carefully. “...anticipation our arrival.”
Then he leaned back, happy with himself over that memorable sentence.
“Does the, uh... shichokan speak English?”
“Yes. Not as well as mine. But he does speak.”
We passed a pleasant park with a bandshell, yet another confounding familiarity in this foreign place; somehow it was oddly reassuring when we glided by a pagodalike shrine on a tastefully landscaped plot.
“Buddhist?” I asked.
The faintest frown passed over the chief’s stone visage. “Shinto.”
“I see. You mind if I roll the window down?”
“Please,” he said.
It was warm in the car, and the only breeze available was the one stirred up by our movement. The chief rolled his window down, just a little, a nice politeness on his part.
“Do you mind my asking what the population of Garapan is?”
The chief said, “Fifteen thousand people. Few thousand islanders.”
Glad he broke it down for me.
I had expected a native village with a small garrison of Japanese troops treating the place like a prison camp; instead, I was in a boom town, attested to by the contemporary residential neighborhood we were rolling through, bungalow after bungalow rising three or four feet off the ground on stone or concrete pillars with neat little yards and gardens of papaya, guavas, mangoes; despite modern construction and style, the little houses wore tin roofs whose grooves sluiced rain to gutters down to cisterns. Occasionally a stone building dating to the period of Saipan’s German domination would rear its head, or a hacienda-style abode going back to the Spanish days. Primarily, however, I was witnessing the boxlike houses — some wood-frame, mostly of newer, cement construction — in the classic gridlike layout of the modern factory town.
But what were they making in this factory town? Were these thousands of people (and natives) all employed by the sugar refinery, and the service industries of the downtown?
On the fringes of the city, finally, were clusters of the poor indigenous housing I’d expected, the thatched wooden shacks before which sat heavy-set middle-aged native women in faded sarongs fanning themselves with palm leaves. I felt strangely reassured.
“Where are the native children?” I asked. I’d seen very few, except a handful of filthy bare-assed toddlers.
“In school. We bring these simple people kansei.” The chief winced in thought, briefly, realizing I wouldn’t understand the meaning of that final word. “Rules,” he explained. “Law from society.”
“Civilization?”
He nodded, as if to say, Not quite, but close enough.
As we left the city, moving along the wide, well-paved road that seemed to be leading us into the green hills, bright red hibiscus grew along roadside hedges beyond which stood guardlike rows of palms, their broad leaves whispering with a hint of wind. Then our sedan turned down, and up, a gently sloping gravel road boarded by blooming flame trees, a riot of red and orange under the dull gray sky.
We ended up in a crushed-stone cul-de-sac, where a number of other black sedans were parked, their radio antennas bearing tiny white flags with red suns. We came to a stop, and the young copper came around and opened the door for his chief. I was reaching for the travel bag at my feet when Chief Suzuki said, “You will not be needing.”
So I left the bag behind — and the nine-millimeter tucked away inside, rolled up in my spare priest attire. The young cop chauffeur stayed behind, too, as I followed Chief Suzuki up a wide crushed-stone path through an immaculately landscaped Oriental garden, with perfectly squared-off hedges and flawlessly rounded bushes, to stone pillars bordering stone steps that rose in landings up a terrace at whose crest sprawled a latticework-decorated white wooden structure, red-roofed, cupola-surmounted, swimming in a sea of red, yellow, white, and purple chrysanthemums, emerald explosions of palm trees standing watch.
This would seem to be the governor’s mansion.
At a slant-roofed portico awaited a Naval officer in a green denim uniform — long pants, jodhpurs, a black-holstered revolver, and something else: a samurai sword. I decided I liked the more casual uniform better.
We were immediately ushered inside, into a world of sliding wooden-frame rice paper walls, hardwood floors, and Buddha-belly vases of dried flowers. We removed our shoes, trading them for slippers, and were escorted into a large sunken octagonal chamber that might have been the living room, but was more a receiving-area-cum-office. The furnishings were sparse but of an impressive dark-lacquered teakwood: three chairs arranged before a massive desk, behind which a higher-backed chair awaited an important posterior.
The possessor of that posterior was a short, heavy-set individual of perhaps fifty, wearing the same white uniform as the chief of police, but with a black string tie, and without a gunbelt, or samurai sword either. His face was pleasant and round, fat enough that his features were getting lost in it, distinguished by a mustache and goatee, his thinning black hair combed forward and plastered to his forehead like a spreading spider.