The Souvenir by Louise Steinman

Author:Louise Steinman [Steinman, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-790-6
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

The sullen resentment on the faces of middle-age men, the women’s smiles, the cheerful greetings of the children must have elicited a peculiar set of emotions. In his letters, he never admits to feeling he is in any danger, though he mentions an expedition by jeep with his buddies to a distant village, where it occurred to them that the inhabitants “may not even know yet that the war is over.”

After a few weeks, his letters take on a more positive tone. He noted that after the Japanese realized “we’re not going to hurt them in any way” they seemed “sincerely happy to have us here.” They were “very polite and outwardly friendly—most cooperative, no trouble at all.” They were industrious workers and meticulously clean. “Sometimes I think even their custom of removing their shoes to enter their homes is a good one,” he conceded.

His biggest thrill came from the spectacle of the Twenty-fifth Division engineers collecting and destroying Japanese military equipment. “Our Cannon Company Boys are towing the Nip planes and then the tractors roll over them—then the flame throwers burn them up—I feel as gleeful seeing this happen as the Nazis did when they burned books.”

On his rambles through Gifu, the former resort town twenty miles north of Nagoya, where the Twenty-fifth Division eventually established a garrison, he kept his eye out for souvenirs to bring home, but none met his standards. “Most of the trading is for kimonos—but although one can get them for about ten packs of cigarettes, I haven’t seen any that I would be proud of. They are all made of sleazy rayon, commonly known as shmate—but most of the boys were grabbing anything they could get.”

There was one thing, however, that caught his attention. High on the shelf on the second floor of a bombed-out department store in Gifu was a doll—an emperor on a white horse. He wanted it for his daughter. Before he could reach for it, another soldier grabbed it.

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