On Wednesday, March 9, Momoko and I were back at Tokyo’s Narita Airport bidding farewell. She returned home to Yokohama and I headed to Saipan.
Two days later, on the afternoon of Friday, March 11, I was swimming off Saipan’s Red Beach, where U.S. forces had come ashore in 1944, when a man with a bullhorn emerged and bellowed, Earthquake in Japan! Tsunami coming! Please get out of the water! Earthquake in Japan! Tsunami coming! Please get out of the water!
We were ordered to evacuate to the upper floors of our hotel. Everyone was hysterical. I considered putting on my running shoes and jogging up into the nearby mountains. Instead, I walked swiftly to the hotel’s laundry room where I’d put two loads in driers before swimming, my bathing suit the only thing I had that was clean. I noticed that several Saipan locals didn’t seem the least bit worried. I inquired. The water around this island is so deep, it absorbs all tsunamis. Not a problem. Feeling better, I put on dry clothes, assembled my computer and valuables in my backpack, and took the stairs, as ordered, to the upper floor of the hotel, where a large group of Russians were wearing orange life preservers (nobody knew where they’d gotten them).
It was eerie to leave Japan after a deep and emotional experience and to barely escape the disaster and fallout, to be safe on a small island nearby. Momoko was stranded in Yokohama (her parents in the U.K. and the States), unable to get a flight out for nine days. I felt responsible for her being there alone. The damage to Japan’s nuclear plants conjured images of World War II’s atomic bomb destruction and it stirred my new impressions from chemical-ravaged Minamata. Intertwined were thoughts about the new friends I made by following Smith there.
* * *
Saipan is part of the Northern Mariana Islands along with Guam, Tinian, and Rota. It may have been the battle of 1944 there when the twenty-five-year-old Smith became an artist. Saipan is a beautiful, lush patch of rock and thick vegetation, only twelve by five miles, with a deep history of indigenous people, the Chamorro, who lost control of their lives forever when the Spanish colonized the place in the early sixteenth century. Japan took it over in 1918, and the United States invaded and wrested control during World War II. Smith made some of his first vintage war photographs during that battle. The paradoxes of war, beauty in destruction, and the fate of hapless individuals against the onslaught of collective forces are themes that Smith investigated for the rest of his career, and his trademark printing techniques—producing tensions between dark and light shades that John Berger once said were essentially “religious” for Smith—may have been conceived on those battlefields, too.
In Saipan, I met an intriguing man who helped me track Smith’s path through the island. He was the sixty-three-year-old historian Don Farrell. Before I left home, I was told he’s the best battlefield tour guide in the Pacific. He grew up in the American West, in various places like Spokane, Washington, and Billings, Montana. He was sent to military reform school for making explosives. He was kicked out of reform school for making corn liquor. He roamed around and eventually worked his way through Cal State Fullerton with a degree in biology in 1974. He moved out to the Northern Marianas in 1977 to teach math and science and later worked for the local government in Guam. Farrell’s wife of thirty years is a native Chamorran, and they live on Tinian. This place is his home; he’s not a visiting scholar. He wrote the local history textbooks they use in schools here. He became tearful telling me a story about a Chamorran family that was elated to find the only known photograph of their grandfather in one of Farrell’s textbooks. It was the first time the family had ever seen that picture.
Farrell looked like a cross between a ZZ Top guitarist and Colonel Sanders—the long white beard, potbelly, and a twinkle in his eye. He walks around in flip-flops, shorts, tropical shirts, and loves to drink beer. He’s also an authority on the local cannabis. He described the situation for me this way:
[The island of] Palau has the best soil for growing buds, and they know how to take care of their plants. Their buds are gold. They have the highest levels of tetrahydrocannabinol of any buds in the world. That old California stuff that everybody thought was so great back in the seventies is water compared to this. You can’t get good smoke on Guam or Saipan because the soil is no good. Smoke growers in those places buy soil in the hardware store and grow their buds in fifty-gallon metal drums in their backyard. If you go to almost anybody’s backyard barbecue out here you’ll see a drum like that.
I’ve watched Terrence Malick’s Pacific war movie The Thin Red Line countless times. Sometimes when I’m working in my home office, I’ll play it on the TV in the background, like it’s classical music or opera. The rhythms of its audiovisuals are sublime. Some critics are annoyed by Malick’s use of voiceover, though. I know what they mean: While Malick’s camera pans an intricate jungle root system with sunlight cascading through foliage, a character’s voice softly murmurs such things as “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” “Why does nature vie with itself?” “Who are you to live in all these many forms?” It can be tedious. But after spending some time with Farrell walking through the lush jungles of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, pondering the unimaginable carnage that took place on these tiny dots of land populated by uninvolved natives, abstract thoughts and unpredictable images begin floating through your brain. The insanity of war is still accessible there today. The European theater is more definable, like a football game, with home territories and borders; the Pacific is hazy and hallucinatory.
Farrell and I were standing on the top of Saipan’s fifteen-hundred-foot Mount Tapochau looking down into Death Valley, imagining Smith crawling around with his cameras, and he squinted at me like a pirate and said, “Are you getting what you need?”
I wasn’t sure what I’d find on the islands to help me tell Smith’s story. But I think what I discovered may say more about him than did the oral-history interviews from the previous three weeks in Japan.
* * *
I arrived in Guam only to learn that my day trip to Iwo Jima was canceled by the American and Japanese embassies because of the earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan. I was disappointed, but I understood the decision. A government-sanctioned sightseeing trip to a remote island was inappropriate while Japan was undergoing the tragedy, no matter that 140 Americans had gathered there for the trip, with a mirror group in Tokyo.
Smith made stunning photographs of the Iwo Jima battle, and I am disappointed to finish this book without seeing that tiny piece of volcanic rock poking up out of the ocean. It measures only four and half miles long and two and a half miles wide, yet we (Americans) had 800 ships and 200,000 troops off its shores in 1945. The absurdity of that reality must have impacted young Smith, who was from landlocked Kansas: We’re fighting the war of all wars over this?
Before I left home, my friend the writer Allan Gurganus handed me Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Seven Japanese Tales. In a story called “A Portrait of Shunkin” (1933), a bitter student attacks his beautiful, blind, and masochistic music teacher, leaving scars on her face. Her lover, also her apprentice, pokes his eyes with needles to blind himself so he can’t see her blemishes. It was the ultimate absolutist Japanese aesthetic gesture. The photographer David Vestal, Smith’s friend and advocate, once told me that Smith’s problem was that what he saw wasn’t there, so the camera had no way of recording it. That’s why he had to work so hard in the darkroom. All of Smith’s master prints made after the war have an absolute white color and an absolute black somewhere in the picture, often in several places. This is the graphic war John Berger saw playing out in Smith’s work. Maybe combat in the Pacific did that to Smith. Maybe it was in his blood. Whatever the origin, for Smith, there was more truth in darkness.