Genda managed a thin smile. “They would say, Taking Hawaii is the reason we have to put up with these Navy snobs.”
“I don’t give a shit what the Army says.” Hasegawa sounded more like a bumpkin than a snob. “I want to be replaced. I’ve already told Tokyo as much. They need to send a Navy man out here who has the rank to deal with Yamashita. Until they do that, I have no faith that these islands can be held, because the Army will make a hash of it.”
Genda couldn’t say what he was thinking, not to a superior officer. He would have spoken his mind with Mitsuo Fuchida, and was pretty sure Fuchida would have done the same with him. But not with Captain Hasegawa, especially since Genda thought the senior Navy man in Hawaii had made a frightful mistake. Genda was sure Hasegawa would be relieved of his post here. He’d just done his best to make himself impossible. But Genda didn’t think the Navy would send out an admiral to counterbalance the Army commandant. That would have to go through the Cabinet, and Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister, was a general himself.
When Genda didn’t say anything, Hasegawa had to know what was in his mind. The Akagi ’s skipper didn’t push him on it. He just said, “That will be all, Commander.”
“Yes, sir.” Genda rose, saluted, and left the captain’s cabin. Like any ship’s compartment, the cabin had a heavy steel waterproof door. Genda closed it as gently as he could. It thudded into place even so. The sound of metal meeting metal seemed much more final than he would have wanted.
WHENEVER MAJOR HIRABAYASHI summoned the people of Wahiawa at an unusual time, Jane Armitage started worrying. After watching Mr. Murphy get it in the neck-literally-she feared the Jap in charge of this part of the island would offer up another object lesson. One of those had been a thousand too many.
Yosh Nakayama stood up on a table to translate for Hirabayashi. The gardener’s face was impassive as he turned the major’s excited Japanese into far more stolid-seeming English. “The Japanese Empire announces that the island of Corregidor has surrendered to imperial forces under General Homma. The Empire also announces the fall of Port Moresby in New Guinea.” He had to go back and forth with Hirabayashi several times before he got that one straight.
Jane knew where New Guinea was, but couldn’t have said where on the island Port Moresby lay to save herself from Hirabayashi’s sword. She knew New Guinea wasn’t far from Australia. If the Japs were taking towns there, were they looking to go after the Land Down Under next?
Could anybody stop them? Up until the day she threw Fletch out, he’d insisted that the USA could kick Japan around the block. She’d thought he knew what he was talking about. On the evidence so far, he’d been as misguided a soldier as he had been a husband.
“Banzai! for the Japanese Empire!” Nakayama said.
“Banzai! ” the people of Wahiawa said. Jane hated herself for joining the cheer. You couldn’t get out of it, though. Bad things happened to people who tried. It wasn’t even safe to mouth the word without saying it out loud. Somebody would be watching you. Somebody would be listening to you. You couldn’t show your thoughts anywhere, not if they weren’t the sort of thoughts the Japs wanted you to have.
She looked around the crowd. More than a few people in Wahiawa had cheered when the American bombers flew over the town on their way to plaster the Japanese planes at Wheeler Field. There were missing faces these days. What had happened to the men and women who’d disappeared? The people who knew weren’t talking. Not knowing only made their fate more frightening to everyone else.
And who had betrayed them? Obviously, you were a fool to trust any of the local Japanese. That didn’t mean none of them was trustworthy. Some of the younger ones really were patriotic Americans. But others pretended, and were good at pretending. Finding out who belonged to which group could cost you your neck. Much less dangerous to think of all of them as menaces.
Much as Jane wished it did, that didn’t mean all whites were reliable. Some of them didn’t even bother to hide their collaboration. They, at least, were honestly disgusting. The snakes hiding in the grass were the ones that killed when they bit, though.
As for Chinese and Filipinos, they barely entered into Jane’s calculations. She’d had little to do with them before the war started, and she still had little to do with them. To her, they were more nearly part of the landscape than people in their own right.
Major Hirabayashi spoke in Japanese once more. “You can go now,” Yosh Nakayama said laconically. The local commandant had probably said something like, You are dismissed. That was how people who ran things talked. The only thing Nakayama had ever run was his nursery. He didn’t talk fancy.
Jane despised him less than she had when he first became Hirabayashi’s right-hand man. He did what he could for Wahiawa. He passed on the Jap’s orders without glorying in them and without seeming to imagine they came from him. She would have thought more of him if he’d chosen to have nothing to do with the major, but he could have been worse.
She wanted to go back to her apartment, put her feet up, and do nothing for a while. What she wanted to do and what she had to do were two different things. It was back to the potato plot to weed and to pick bugs off the plants and to smash them once she had picked them off.
Every time she looked at her hands, she wanted to cry. Those calluses, those short, ragged, black-rimmed nails… Things would have been even worse if everybody else’s hands weren’t about the same. As Jane worked, she watched tendons jut and muscles surge under her skin. She’d lost weight; she didn’t think she had an ounce of fat anywhere on her body. But she was stronger than she’d ever been in her life.
Of course, she was also working harder than she ever had in her life. Teaching third grade was nothing next to keeping a garden plot going. Somewhere not far down her family tree were farmers. That was true of almost everyone. Now she understood why they’d gone to town and found other lines of work. What she didn’t understand was why anybody who didn’t have to grow crops did. You had to be starving or nuts to break your back like this every day… didn’t you?
On her way to the plot, two Japanese soldiers came up the sidewalk toward her. She stepped aside and bowed as they tramped past. They walked by as if she didn’t exist. That was better than when they leered. When they leered, she had all she could do not to run away. There hadn’t been a lot of rapes in Wahiawa, but there had been some. One of the women had had the courage to protest to Major Hirabayashi afterwards. It hadn’t done her any good. Nobody was going to punish the Japs for anything they did to locals.
Once Jane was weeding with her head down, she felt a little safer. Not only was she less visible, but other locals were around her. They would squawk if Japanese soldiers tried to drag her away. How much those squawks would help… She tried not to think about that.
In fact, she tried not to think about anything. If she didn’t think, she could get through a minute at a time, an hour at a time, a day at a time. Whatever happened, it would simply be… gone. And with most of what happened these days, it was better that way.
AS USUAL, JIRO TAKAHASHI was by himself when he took fish up to the Japanese consulate. He wished Hiroshi or Kenzo would come with him, but he didn’t try to talk them into it. He’d given up on trying to talk them into anything that had anything to do with politics or with the war. Their ideas were as fixed as his. (That wasn’t precisely how he looked at it, of course. To him, they were a pair of stubborn young fools.)
He bowed to the guards outside the building. They returned the courtesy. “It’s the Fisherman!” one of them said. “What have you got today, Fisherman? Anything especially good?” He licked his lips.