Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI's Secret From Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda

Author:Terese Svoboda [Svoboda, Terese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, Personal Memoirs, History, General
ISBN: 9781555970451
Google: W2mMRlVgcPQC
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

“…the little red­-­caped statues.”

While Sherman and my husband reconnoiter the grounds for shade, an acolyte whisks Hikaru and me inside the main site’s air­-­conditioned quarters. Amid lace­-­covered furniture and cups of cold smoky tea, the priest in charge lectures us on Japanese­-­American history. The San Francisco Treaty, in 1952, was the end of U.S. dominance, he tells us, not the declaration of peace signed at the end of World War II. Hikaru doesn’t go into the occupation of Okinawa. He insists that no military had married at his shrine before 1955, the year he took over the records, and certainly this would be where they would marry, given the shrine’s size and importance. Hikaru whispers to me that perhaps Sherman’s theory of a bogus wedding is right.

Although the priest began to work at the shrine too late for my concerns, he wants to validate his position as a leader in the community. Hikaru nods as he goes on and on about what he remembers of the GIs in the 1950s. I have lots of patience for their exchange since we are so air­-­conditioned, but finally I get to the point: I tell him I believe that my uncle committed suicide because he was haunted by something that happened in the prison.

The priest brings tears to my eyes by saying he admires my quest, that in Shinto beliefs, it is important to put the spirit to rest, whether mine or my uncle’s. I haven’t considered my spirit, the one that is pushing all these people in this heat to discover what happened to my uncle’s ghost, or just the ghost of his ghost.

My husband and Sherman have collapsed under the shade of the roof over the holy well. We stagger several blocks to an air­-­conditioned supermarket, where the two of them take a very long time selecting cold snacks. Hikaru and I decide it’s a great place to waylay exiting old women with our questions. We station ourselves just outside the air­-­conditioned doors. The first woman we talk to moved to the area too late to answer anything. The second, a hunchbacked eighty-eight-­year­-­old with a perfectly round face straight from Japanese iconography­—­even Hikaru says so­—­has nothing detailed to tell us. While a mist of cold air rises off her crippled figure, she bottlenecks the exit with her heavy bags. We must move on.

At the Nakano Historical Museum, the curators can’t find any books we haven’t already seen at the other libraries, but Sherman and my husband meet a T­-­shirt­-­clad worker who turns out to be a country­-­music aficionado­—­“I like country music too much”­—­who also chased the soldiers around the stockade for chocolate. “The daughter of my mother’s friend, a Buddhist, was involved in the sex industry there, but she is now dead,” he tells us. Born in 1946, he says that he and his childhood friends assumed exe­cutions occurred in the stockade every time smoke rose from its chimneys­—­cremations!­—­and that sirens were common, signaling escapes. Although the prisoners were usually found

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