CHAPTER 4

HANA

Our fathers have all gone to war. Or nearly all of them. Those that were able-bodied and strong. Otō-san left a year after the war with the West began. But Japan has been at war even longer. When I was barely two years old, the Emperor set his sights on China. A great depression had spread across the world. Japan was going hungry. Expanding into Manchukuo meant food and resources that the home islands could not provide. But Manchukuo was not enough. When I was eight, the Empire spread west and south across China, into Nanking, Beijing, and beyond, soldiers and aeroplanes carving the way. Some of the men in our village went to the mainland and came back with tales of adventure.

Japan had been hungry; now it feasted, and still its belly growled.

As our Empire grew, the long-reaching hands of the West tangled with our own across Asia. The British, the Americans, the French—everywhere the Emperor wished to be in the East, the West was also.

What the West forgets is that our Emperor is descended from the sun. The sun shines where it wishes; it shines where it must so that the people may prosper.

And so, when I was twelve, our Emperor struck a mighty blow against the too-greedy Americans. The silver planes that had practiced over the bay in nearby Kagoshima flew straight and true to Hawaii and surprised the lazy Americans. Pearl Harbor was the site of that battle, and it began a new sort of war. One that has grown to swallow the world.

When my otō-san went away, he said, “It is an honor to serve the Emperor.” But I knew he did not want to go. At night, I could hear him whisper through the shōji screens to my mother that America was too mighty. That determination could not feed and fuel an army. That Japan might not win this war.

But history tells us it is not the way of men to be satisfied. It is not the way of empires.

And so he went. Mother walked two steps behind him, holding my hand. We bowed together as he boarded the train. There was music and a whole crowd of people from the neighborhood. We waved flags and sang bright songs about the Emperor. Father reminded me to be brave.

“It is for you that we fight, Hana-chan. My little flower.” But he did not say this in front of everyone. He left it in a note where only I would find it, tucked inside the strings of his prized instrument, his koto. A koto has thirteen strings, and they held the note tenderly as a butterfly. I still remember the pressure of his callused hands, strong from pulling and measuring fabric, thick-skinned from being pierced with needles, maneuvering my own soft fingers to learn the shape of the songs. Tailor’s hands, musician’s hands.

My father’s koto lies silent now, alongside the wall of our second room, just as his shoes stay by the door and his photo rests near the butsudan altar, as if he is already an ancestor instead of a soldier. As if he is dead. His koto’s wooden body lies on the tatami mat like a weeping woman who misses her true love. At least that’s what my mother says. I suspect she is talking about herself. Okā-san should have been a poet. Instead, she is a tailor’s wife, now a tailor herself. And, when I am not in service to the Emperor with my classmates, I am a tailor too. I lie silent as well, my voice stilled. I used to play the koto and sing. “Like a nightingale,” Otō-san would say. He is a poet, too. But my classmates only sing in the service of the Emperor, and the songs they sing are of war.

Okā-san knows nothing of the waving, of the saying goodbye. What would she think—her little girl surrounded by rough soldiers, her daughter watching men go to die? We lie to keep our mothers happy. To do our duty well. We are good little citizens. Whatever we do, it is good.