16. A Japanese Soldier
This sounds an awful lot like MacArthur. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. If you were a soldier and not of that opinion, he would help you on your way to glory whether you liked it or not. Such a disposition was good for MacArthur because it gave him insight into the Japanese warrior.
What about the last Japanese soldier? You know the one. He was wandering in the jungles of Mindanao all the way into the sixties, carrying his gun and the love for his emperor, and these two things along with some grubs and wild banana had kept him going. Then they found him and sent him home, maybe with a stack of old newspapers — a lot of newspapers. Never mind, he must have had a good deal of reading time in the hospital. That’s a myth actually — not the soldier, but the fact that they found him. If they were looking, they would have found many more people. I know that jungle well. Somewhere, behind a clump of bamboo, are Granddaddy and Tio Jack. In a dark cave are my grandmother, my mother, some uncles and aunts. And if they’d bothered to look at all, they would have found me, because we’re all in that last stronghold of the Pacific Campaign or the Co-Prosperity Sphere, as much a part of the jungle as that Japanese soldier or a banana plant or a mosquito. And the jungle is a part of my family. The war lives and breathes like a congenital virus manifesting itself when one is weak. Some of us are less susceptible than others.
17. My Tita Meli
I will use my mother’s eldest sister as an example. In her mind, people die and that’s okay. During the war, lots of people died, which wasn’t okay, but they would have died anyway. In addition to that, we’re all Catholic, so aren’t we supposed to want to die? Don’t we envy the dead their proximity to God? Besides, the more of the family who are dead, the more people there are to intercede on our behalf.
I’m not sure what Tita Meli was doing during World War II. If her behavior now is any indication, she was probably dispensing wisdom and making sure everyone had something to eat. She married shortly after the war when she was eighteen years old. The man she married — a mestizo doctor — was forty-three. He built her a house, far from the rubble that had once been Intramuros, with a fountain and a garden and graceful Corinthian pillars. He took her to Spain where she bought the chandeliers that hang in the sala. He commissioned their life-size portraits that hang in the drawing room. She lived with her mother-in-law, Feliza, and Granddaddy, who spent his final years in a sprawling apartment in the basement of Tita Meli’s house. Tita Meli and her husband, Tito Jaime, prospered. Or they squandered. It’s hard to say, but they never seemed short of anything. They had five children, the youngest of whom died of a kidney ailment in the sixties. Tito Jaime died five years ago. He was in his eighties. His death had nothing to do with the war, but was caused by a stomach cancer, which, true to the nature of stomachs, consumed from within.
Position
IN MARCH OF 1521, Magellan sights the islands. At first, his hands clawed around a telescope, he thinks Saipan to be a sleeping monster. Who else would inhabit this liquid hell where no breeze blows? The crew is starving, eating leather straps and sawdust, hunting rats through the dark, rotting carcass of the ship. They have survived fourteen months of hardship and a mutiny; here, on this sheet of glass that Magellan has called “Mar Pacifico,” they fear that they will meet their maker, or the devil himself. The crew has wondered at Magellan’s defiant health. They call him “Spawn of Satan” and point to his clubfoot as proof. For someone whose progress on land is slow and labored, Magellan has no equal on the water. He lowers his telescope and blinks, then raises the telescope to the horizon again. The pope has divided the earth in two. The East has been given to the Portuguese, the West to the Spaniards, and he, a Portuguese, is sailing in the name of Spain. He will learn that the West never stops, keeps winding round and round, and the earth belongs to whoever is strong enough to take it.
Magellan’s ships, the Trinidad and the Victoria, draw closer to Saipan.
In the distance, Magellan can make out flat white planes — triangles — shifting across the surface of the water. Could this be the sun refracting, coursing to the left, then right, drawing closer then angling quickly away? Could this be his mind, at last succumbing to his strange diet of leather and rat meat? Maybe these shifting sheets are from the past, a pleasant image heralding his death, because these are sails and the darting movements are boats gliding over the glassy surface of the sea. Sails. As a youth he had owned a small skiff. At the edge of the world, has he encountered the past? Has he wound back to 1495, when, as a youth, boats had been a joy and diversion?
The men are loud, spirited. Their joyful shouting is a strange sound. They have been silent for so long. Magellan is not being lured into the past, nor is he hallucinating. They have reached land and the sails belong to the fishing boats of Chamorro natives. Magellan closes his eyes, confident that when he opens them again he will see his sleeping monsters revealed as islands. Soon he will be navigating his way into the shallows, looking for a place to anchor.
Despite the welcome relief of food and water, there is not much to recommend Saipan. Even the Chamorros are supposed to have been stranded there on a canoe trip from Indonesia, their landing an accident of poor navigation, their decision to remain a mystery. Magellan names the islands “Islas de las Velas Latinos” because of the triangular shape of the Chamorro sails. Magellan registers Saipan in history, much as three billion years earlier, the island registered itself on the surface of the Pacific.
In the seventeenth century the islands are renamed the Marianas after an Austrian princess. The native population is all but wiped out by the Spaniards. Beyond this naming and slaying, there is nothing remarkable about the Spanish occupation of Saipan. In 1899, Spain, facing bankruptcy, sells the Marianas to Germany for four and a half million dollars. The Germans are getting a bargain. They see the value of these desolate islands strung across the Pacific, hard pebbles scrubbed by salt waves. Guam. Tinian. And Saipan. Isolated. Ignored. Saipan’s very value is that it is nowhere. Saipan interrupts. It is not the Pacific.
There is much use for something that is Not The Pacific.
Saipan is an island of foreign aggressors, warriors wanting something better, a refueling stop on the way to what is worthy of conquering. The Germans show their hand in the Great War and, after years of battering Europe, lose Saipan (a slap on the wrist), and before Saipan can be allocated to some other deserving European, Japan has claimed it. Japan, the gnat, the least worthy member of the League of Nations, is also looking to conquer. The Meiji Diet has its eyes fixed on China. As a result, in the early years of the twentieth century Saipan is outfitted with a sugar refinery and a fishing fleet staffed with Japanese and Korean labor. These two industries support a significant civilian population. Sharp spears of sugar cane bristle on the island’s back and the natives are armed with nothing more than the broad blades of industry. The fish bubble up from the depths and are netted. Women bear children. Tidy huts are erected beneath the shade of palms bordering the sandy, swept grid of streets.
In the late thirties, Japan refuses America access to the Marianas. A fortress like none that has ever been known is being constructed. One forward-thinking Japanese writer, Kinoaki Matsuo, writes, “The islands are scattered like stars across the routes of the United States Navy either perpendicularly or horizontally. It will be impossible for the U.S. Fleet to reach her destination.” One thousand islands scattered like beads across the Pacific combine to create a fortress calculated to stymie the American fleet. But what is the assumed origin of the U.S. Navy? What is the destination that will lure its shining ships through this net?