The camp closed, but there was no returning to the other California. The two Americans packed up their American daughter and went to Japan. Her father got a job working as a translator for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, and the family settled on Eta Jima, off the coast of Hiroshima, former home of the Imperial Naval Academy. Here cadets had meditated upon the Five Reflections each evening:
1. Hast thou not gone against sincerity?
2. Hast thou not felt ashamed of thy words and deeds?
3. Hast thou not lacked vigor?
4. Hast thou exerted all possible efforts?
5. Hast thou not become slothful?
As a matter of policy, the BCOF encouraged the wives and families of servicemen to settle in Japan. Special schools and shops as well as separate housing were constructed for the occupiers. To sort of suggest that the feeling was mutual, Joan’s parents avoided occupation personnel outside work. Joan’s father took a dim view of the BCOF’s stated aim to enable the Japanese “to witness at first hand Western family life.” Most of the units were Australian, and he did not like the Australians: the condescension of the officers, the yahoo bigotry of the rank and file. The cloddish Perth housewives in their housedresses trying to turn everything into a knotted back alley they could holler across, snapping their fingers at him and yelling in his face. To them all he spoke in the clearest English, chiming with the open tones of the native Californian, and got back a guttural mess, totally untransformed by tongue, teeth, or palate in its journey from the throat. They would demonstrate to him “the democratic way of life”?
After BCOF headquarters was moved from Eta Jima to Kure, Joan’s father endured a brutal commute, taking a bus, a ferry, and another bus to get to work. This itself made him irritable, even as the work became less congenial; mostly he had been translating documents, but now that he found himself working often with the military police in Kure he regularly was called upon to interpret in the type of face-to-face situation that he found, in a word, embarrassing. Their pet Jap, pulling usable English sentences into shape for the Australians. What a job. One night the MPs picked up a man, a civilian, for possession of stolen goods. He’d been arrested near one of the many “roads, wharves, railway yards, local markets, villages, stores, or camp perimeters” that had been declared off-limits to civilians and servicemen alike. Your mere presence there got you a mandatory escort back to headquarters for a little chat. Fraternization was strictly out-of-bounds for servicemen, and the locals had to be watched to keep the booming black market under control. This guy was carrying sixty pounds of sugar in a pair of old Samsonite Streamlite suitcases.
Joan’s father spoke to the prisoner for an hour or more, attempting to urge forth helpful information. Helpful to them all, he suggested. The man called him an inu and mocked his accent. Glancing at the clock, Joan’s father could see that he would miss the last ferry to Eta Jima. The MPs shared their headquarters with the Japanese police, so when the MP sergeant grew tired of waiting, he simply walked the prisoner down the corridor to his good Nip buddies and had Joan’s father explain the situation to them. The cops, who had been playing cards and drinking whiskey, were delighted with the diversion presented by the prisoner. They all headed for the motor pool, which was empty at that hour. Near the edge of the enclosure, by the chain-link fence, there was a concrete stanchion that had two eyebolts driven into it on opposite sides. The purpose of these became clear when one of the police, a plainclothesman, fed the chains manacling the prisoner’s hands through the bolts, securing him to the stanchion. He then took a gasoline can and, carefully pouring out its contents, circled the post. Done, the plainclothesman lit a Lucky Strike and assumed a posture that you might call thoughtful or reflective, standing back from the bound man as if evaluating at a distance, taking in the whole of a thing. Joan’s father noticed that the plainclothesman’s suit was soaked through with sweat between the shoulder blades. The cop took his hat off and then reseated it on his head, gripping the crown of the fedora where it was crimped and tilting his head back into the gesture so that the lank strands of hair falling across his forehead were swept under the crown. He then reached for his handkerchief, but what unfurled when he removed it from his breast pocket was a clean white sock. There was a still moment as everyone measured the extent of the plainclothesman’s discomfiture over the exposure of this improvisation. Rather artful, really. Everything everywhere was running short, why not a sock? The cop balled it up and put it in his trousers pocket. Until then Joan’s father had thought that the tying up, the circle of splashed gasoline were merely features of a type of performance. But the sock incident had put the plainclothesman on edge, tensed him up, and the balletic series of slow relaxed gestures came to an end, and after pulling the Lucky from his mouth and taking a last look at it, he tossed it without warning at the prisoner’s feet, where the immediate flames erupted so high that for an instant it was all Joan’s father could do to see the terrified shape within them.
Eta Jima itself was a beautiful place. Joan became Japanese there, something her parents felt pretty ambivalent about. She got friendly with a girl whose family had lived in Hiroshima. Akiko had a good story. She had been a baby when she was sent away to NijiMura a day or two before the bombing. Then the bombing had taken place, and that basically was the end of the story. The story did have clarifying footnotes, like: This cousin was never seen again, that sibling died of radiation sickness two months later, this uncle had no face, really. Akiko talked about it to Joan in a lively voice, passing on with great authoritativeness the secondhand information that had been instilled in her with the mesmerizing force of ritual. The story’s appeal came from its balancing unities, the simple serendipity of the girl’s having been sent away just before the singular holocaust and the horrorscience fascination of all the human burn and spatter that was its yield. It was the first time that Eta Jima’s proximity to the wrecked city on the other shore became central to Joan’s perception of the world.
The A-bombed city. The place did not seem as if it were quite there. There was the ghost of itself that stood just behind it. Tourists moved in search of the ghost. They strolled through the neat grid of streets taking pictures and more pictures of the blandly pleasant city that was there in the place of nothing. Beneath it all, seared like a pitiless brand, the trilobites of human indecency. The city had wholeheartedly embraced the industry of its own devastation — as if the 350 years of its history preceding the bombing had been consequential only insofar as they had led up to the incandescent moment — while rigorously reconstructing itself in a manner that exhibited an aloofness from the experience. Municipally, the legacy of total war became a mandate to celebrate and aspire to peace. It was all strangely flaccid, curiously devoid of rage, though this Joan was too young to notice. She picnicked in a Peace Park. After the city had been burned to a crisp, the official ambition of Hiroshima, according to an English-language pamphlet, was “to keep advocating to the world people that ‘Peace’ is more than the absence of war, and it signifies a state in which the world people live together without prejudice in a safe and amicable environment, where each person can live a dignified and worthy human life every where in the world, seeking to resolve the various problems confronting humanity … by cooperation and collaboration on a global scale aiming at the realization of everlasting world peace and prosperity of humankind.”