CHAPTER 12
HANA
Laundry. Always laundry, hanging in the wind to dry. Mariko, the others, and I gathered the clothing from the lines first thing today. We’ve had no new boys since yesterday afternoon, but the staff is always busy. So now, with our arms still aching from hauling and tugging and tucking this morning’s bedsheets, Mariko and I sit in one of the base offices, sewing and patching staff uniforms, pretending not to listen when news comes in on the wire next door.
“Do you remember Hakata-san and how his toes had teeth?” Mariko asks me. She holds up an olive green sock, bald at the heel, the ball of the foot missing completely. “Corporal Sanyo’s entire foot is a mouth. He must eat dirt and rocks to chew a sock so badly!”
I smile, but it fades as I remember nervous little Hakata-san. Some of the Nadeshiko tried to give him courage in his final days. They spoke of cherry blossoms and sunrise, the temple where he played as a child, and the dark forces coming to wipe it all away. And he, bright as the sun, was the only one to stop it. They’d painted him a hero, and he became one, for a few shining moments, when he bowed to us and mounted the wing to his plane.
His toes had teeth.
His plane did, too.
Hakata-san body-crashed gloriously into an American ship.
At least, we think he did. There were many enemy fighters in the air. The escort planes did not stay long enough to confirm his end. But a ship went down the day he flew out, so we consider it our elder brother’s work. His and his comrades.
“Don’t look now,” I say to Mariko, and hold up a pair of underwear. “Sergeant Ito has teeth somewhere else!”
That is when the radio crackles: a flotilla of American ships has been spotted heading north toward Okinawa. With them they bring fighter planes and bombers, fire, blood, and death ever closer to home. Through the wall we hear the men exclaim, “At once!” and orders are given down the line.
Mariko and I stop our stitching, eyes only on each other, waiting, trembling on the branch of uncertainty.
“There you are!” The commandant turns the corner, startling us. “Eavesdropping, no doubt.” We lower our eyes rather than deny it, and bow our heads in deference.
“Just as well,” he says. Commandant Asama is a bulldog. He rumbles and growls deep in his chest, and it raises the hairs on the backs of our necks. But it takes a strong man to run an army base. It takes a bulldog to run a war. “Tell the other girls to get ready. We have a new flight coming this afternoon. A big action in the works.”
My cheeks are suddenly damp. I don’t dare look up. I am a ghost. It is better to be a ghost. From the corner of my eye, I see a tear drop onto Mariko’s half-mended sock.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Get going!”
“Yes, Sensei!” We leap to our feet, tossing our mending back into the basket. The staff men will understand. Pilots always take precedence.
The other girls are dragging new branches onto the roofs of the barracks when we arrive out of breath. Half the group drag the dried-out boughs to the woodpile. The rest wipe sweat from their foreheads, surveying their handiwork. They look proud, for the moment. Capable and strong.
“Attention! Attention!” Mariko cries. “We must make ready for a new flight!”
Shoulders drop. Heads turn. We never know when a new unit will arrive, or when they will leave for their final attacks. The pilots tell us it has to do with weather, ship locations, and strategy. Most depart at dawn, using the dim light as an element of surprise. But the army’s decisions are mysterious to us Nadeshiko. Sometimes I imagine the Emperor as a great bird flying over the ocean, able to see the enemy, to direct his might against them. But then I see flight after flight take off, with few reports of success, and I wonder if we are merely throwing lives away like pebbles into the dark.
Of course, Sachiko is smiling. “I wonder if there will be any cute ones this time,” she whispers loudly to Kazuko, who has the good sense to shush her. Sachiko wrinkles her button of a nose, but her tongue stops revolving for once.
“Has something happened?” Poor sensitive Hisako has read our faces as clearly as headlines.
“The Americans are nearing Okinawa,” Mariko says. Every Nadeshiko goes still. In the silence, I think of my father. His voice, his hands. Are they both raised in fear now? Or righteous anger, as they kill? Okinawa is so close to home . . .
I am the Philippine Sea, the waters of East China.
I am the Sea of Japan.
I feel the ships on the water like gnats on my skin, biting, nipping, tearing me raw.
I feel my dead beneath me. Taihō, Shōkaku, Hiyō—great warships, now gone, along with the sailors they carried, sunk in battle as the winds of war swept through the Philippines last June.
The newspapers spoke of ships and aircraft loss—not of fathers, of sons. We all heard the whispers—less than half of our aeroplanes returned. It is why our tokkō are so young. Final replacements for what has been squandered.
Such a scandal! How could our great military have been so wrong? How could they have thrown so many lives away? The prime minister of Japan and his government resigned, so great was their shame.
And now another American flotilla marches on my back, my waters no longer a barrier, but a road, crawling up the spine of our defenses, moving closer and closer to the heart of my world. What will happen when they arrive?