Those first few months in Japan were my favorite of the war. There was plenty to be done, of course, especially for a typist, more work in some ways in the management of peace, than in the prosecution of the hostilities, but a shadow had lifted clear. I’ll admit that I was fond of army life from the beginning, its regularity and routine, its absolute remove from the life I’d left behind. In Australia and then the Philippines, after Bunny retook Bataan, I’d abandoned myself to the steady, useful progress of the days, but always the possibility existed that something awful would pass across my desk. Even the good news—another island liberated, a successful bombing raid—was tinged with death. Now all that was over with. Bunny made it clear from the beginning that the Japanese were to be treated with respect, that it was their job to rebuild the country not ours, that we were here to help, when help was wanted, and when it wasn’t, we were to stay out of the way. Despite all the military trappings, we were basically spectators, civilians in army dress, watching while a nation reinvented itself according to Bunny’s imagination.
Each morning, I woke at 0700, made my bed, showered, shaved, bolted a cup of coffee and crossed Hibaya Park on foot to the Dai Ichi Sogo building, nodding at the locals and saluting as necessary to passing officers. My route took me alongside the Imperial Palace moat. Swans, pale as ghosts, gliding on the water. A pretty wooden bridge. A gatehouse and a stone wall on the other side. You couldn’t see the palace itself. The grounds were too extensive, acres and acres of landscaping right in the middle of downtown Tokyo. The only people allowed across the moat were the Emperor and his staff. Even Bunny sent messages via special envoy. He could have changed the rules but he believed that, if he wanted to win over the locals, it was important to treat their traditions and institutions with respect.
From 0800 to 1700, I typed whatever the powers that be needed me to type. The paperwork was endless and I learned to type without reading at all, to let information pass directly from my eyes to my fingers without registering in my conscious mind and this did wonders for my speed and precision. Now and then, especially if I was typing something from Bunny, a word or phrase caught my eye, and I’d slow down enough to take in the meaning but mostly, I gave myself up to mindlessness. The act was a kind of self-hypnosis, I suppose. That’s how it felt anyhow. Most days, the hours passed in a tedious dream and when the work was finished I could hardly remember a single thing that had crossed my desk. I strolled back through the park like man who has just been roused from slightly-too-long nap.
Walk a mile in any direction and you ran onto acres of devastation, heaps of rubble and rusted metal, old men and young boys sorting the debris for whatever might be salvageable and loading the rest into trucks to be carted off who knows where. If the wind shifted just right, everything smelled like wet ash. After our B-29s had taken care of all the industrial targets and still Japan had not surrendered, the air force ceased to discriminate but by a stroke of pure good luck, the park and the financial district surrounding it, few square miles altogether, were mostly spared. That’s where we moved in—Little America, the locals called it. There was always a crowd gaping in through the windows of the PX at the shelves of canned goods and clothes and souvenir kimonos. “Demokrashi good,” they’d say when you emerged. “Demokrashi OK.” They’d laugh and tug at your sleeve and maybe you’d let them have your loose change. It should have been a sad sight but there was no rancor in it, not from either side. I felt decent and important and part of something bigger than myself. Bunny had set the tone. We weren’t conquering these people we were liberating them from centuries of tyranny. All of us were dimly aware of that there were families living under railroad trestles somewhere in the city and that because of food shortages, a letter from Bunny himself demanding that the War Department “send me more bread or send me more bullets” had passed through the Officers Personnel Section but none of that was our fault, the way we saw it, and it was hard to keep those things in mind at all when Emperor Hirohito was posing for photos in Bunny’s living room and the cherry trees in Hibaya Park looked exactly as they must have looked before the war and Little America was strung with Christmas lights in December and there were wreaths on all the lampposts and even the local entrepreneurs were selling holiday cards, woodcut prints of snowy mountains and brushy pines, the scenes beautiful and quiet, austere by comparison to the cards you bought back home.
A story went around not long after we got settled in. Apparently, Bunny was on his way home from the office one night, when he spotted a GI in an alley getting a handjob from a panpan girl. “You see that,” he said. “They keep trying to get me to put a stop to all this Madame Butterflying around but I won’t do it. My father told me never give an order unless I was certain it would be carried out.” Clifford claimed to have the details direct from Bunny’s driver. I don’t know if the story or its source is true but I know Clifford took it to heart. During the day he escorted Bunny from his quarters at the embassy to his office in the Dai Ichi Sogo building—just two floors up from mine—or he stood guard outside the building while Bunny was at work or he paraded with the rest of the Honor Guard for visiting heads of state, but after hours, he devoted himself to getting laid.
Not a particularly challenging endeavor. With the financial backing of what was left of the government, a group of Japanese businessmen calling themselves the Recreation and Amusement Association, hired thousands of young women to provide “comfort” for the occupation forces. They issued a public statement, in English, within a week of our arrival: “We hope to promote mutual understanding between our conquerors and our people, to smooth the development of diplomacy and to abet the construction of a peaceful world.” The whole business seemed remarkably open-minded and hospitable. Eventually, under pressure from Washington, Bunny nudged the Japs to outlaw state sponsored prostitution but the ban didn’t do much to slow the trade. Those girls had to make a living somehow so they hired out to private houses, or plied their wares in Ueno Station or in the Yurakucho District on the edge of downtown. It was so easy to get laid even Clifford got bored with hookers after a while.
He came into our room one night while I was knocking out a letter to my wife and flopped back on his bed. He didn’t speak so I kept typing. I tried to write home once a month or so. Enough that I didn’t feel guilty. After a few seconds, Clifford started sighing and cracking his knuckles loud enough for me to hear.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You need me to type something?”
“No,” he said.
I went back to my letter. I’d hardly typed three words before he interrupted.
“How come you never go to panpan girls?”
My fingers hung over the home row.
“I’m married,” I said without turning around.
The springs squeaked as Clifford sat up on his bed.
“You’re shitting me?” he said. “But you don’t wear a ring. Do you? I never seen one. And you don’t have any pictures. Have you been hiding pictures of your girl?”
“That’s my busi
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