My trip plans changed in the summer of 2010 when I learned that civilians were allowed access to Iwo Jima only one day each year and the next opportunity would be March 16, 2011. Since the productive conflicts in Smith’s art—his unresolved tension between art and journalism—matured while he was photographing combat and living in the Pacific during the war, I needed to see that rock formation that juts above the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a tiny, surreal locus for the war of all wars where Smith made a classic war image for Life’s cover, among others. There’s no way I can relate to the terror and carnage Smith saw and sensed on Iwo Jima—the smells being the least possible to imagine—but at least the light would be the same.
I signed up to reach Iwo Jima through a military history tour filled with veterans and their families, scholars, and other enthusiasts of war history. The day trip would begin in Guam on March 16, 2011, at 4:00 a.m.
* * *
Momoko adjusted to the new schedule. She planned to meet me at Tokyo’s Narita Airport on the afternoon of Sunday, February 20. By then my trip had grown from two weeks as originally conceived to thirty days. She would travel with me for twenty of those days.
Momoko later told me that I had impressed her, during the interview process for the job and the lead-up to meeting her in person, by not seeming to care how she looked. I didn’t ask for a photo and she knew I wasn’t on Facebook. Before meeting her at Narita, I had told her to look for a man six feet five inches tall, with dark, thinning hair, glasses, and a goatee. I figured it would be easier for her to find me than me her.
I made it through customs and found an open place to rearrange my luggage. Barely off the plane, I immediately felt Narita to be the most foreign place I’d ever been, my international travel to that point in my life limited to Europe. I had only slept a couple of hours during the sixteen-hour flight and was delirious. Then I heard a soft, hopeful voice, a high-pitched voice, a rounded hum, calling my name in an accent that seemed mostly British, with a hint of Asian: Sahm? Sahm? Is that you, Sahm?
She was taller than I had imagined, at least five foot six, with long, thick black hair hanging straight, well past her shoulders. She wore a thin white scarf with purple dots and a long gray winter jacket (it snowed in Tokyo that week) over faded jeans. Her hair and scarf framed her face, her expression as open and eager as her voice had been in writing and on the phone. She carried a large, full shoulder bag made of muted woven earth colors and a small piece of black rolling luggage was at her feet. She later told me she was nauseated with nervousness at that moment, but it didn’t come across to me.
* * *
Momoko figured I’d be tired and hungry from the travel, so she brought several varieties of dried seaweed and two bottles of water. We collected ourselves, caught up with each other since our last e-mail exchange a couple of days before, and she found our bus to Tokyo.
Momoko took a window seat with me next to her on the aisle. The bus pulled away from the curb and meandered out of the airport toward the highway.
She turned to me and said, What is it about Smith’s nature that interests you?
Wow, the answer to that question is long and digressive, I replied.
Well, we’ve got about ninety minutes to the hotel and then we’ve got three weeks. There’s plenty of time.
We spent the first couple of days in Tokyo wandering around, getting our bearings on Smith’s former neighborhood in Roppongi and seeing Hitachi City. We would begin our interviews on the third day.