My father’s WWII Marine Corps cargo trunk was stored in the attic of my childhood home. This contained everything that followed him from Officer Training in Quantico, Virginia, to beach and mountain battles on Tarawa, Tinian and Saipan in the South Pacific, and three years later back home again. It had his name and rank stenciled on the side in dark black lettering. The buckles were stiff but could be opened with effort, and in the dark attic, there was always the thrill of unlatching the lid, and shining the flashlight across the contents. His Marine Corps dress uniform lay inside underneath his stiff brimmed cap. There were books about protocol, and a photo album which contained pictures of “his men” that he led in his battalion, and the collection of photos and letters my mother as she worked as a high school teacher back home.
Most puzzling to me as a kid was a folded Japanese flag inside a small drawstring bag, made of thin white silk with the bold red sun in the middle. Surrounding the red sun were the delicate inked characters of many Japanese hands as if painted by artists, each wishing a soldier well in his fight for the empire. Yet there it was, a symbol of that soldier’s demise, itself buried in an American attic, being gently and curiously held by an American daughter of a Marine Corps soldier.
It would occur to me in the 1960s that some of the people who wrote on this flag might still be living, and certainly members of the soldier’s family would still be living. I asked my father once about how he obtained the flag, and he, protecting both me and himself, waved me away, saying he couldn’t remember.
I know better now. He certainly knew, but could not possibly tell me the truth.
These flags, charms of good luck for the departing Japanese soldier as he left his neighborhood or village for war, are called Hinomaru Yosegaki (日の丸寄せ書き). Tens of thousands of these flags came home with American soldiers; it is clear they were not the talisman hoped for. Thanks to the efforts of descendants of American and Japanese soldiers, some of these flags have found their way back to their home country, to the original villages.
So has this flag.
Eighty-five years passed doesn’t seem that long, a mere drop in the river of time. There are more than mere physical mementos that have flowed from the broken dam of WWII, flooding subsequent generations of Americans, Japanese, Europeans with memories that are now lost as the surviving soldiers have died, taking their stories of pain and loss and heroism with them.
In the U.S., children held with their families in Japanese internment camps during those years are now in their eighties and nineties. They continue to bear witness to the scars of what war does to erode trust and humanity between peoples.
My father could never talk with a person of Asian descent, Japanese or not, without being visibly uneasy. As a child, I saw and felt this from him, but heard little from his mouth.
When he was twenty two years old, pressed flat against the rocks of Tarawa, trying to melt into the ground to become invisible to the bullets whizzing overhead and explosions around him, he could not have conceived that decades later, his twenty-two year old grandson would disembark from a jumbo jet at Narita in Tokyo, making his way to an international Christian school to teach Japanese children.
My father would have been shocked that his grandson would settle happily into a culture so foreign, so seemingly threatening, so apparently abhorrent. Yet this irony is the direct result of the horrors of that too-long bloody war of devastation: Americans and Japanese, despite so many differences, were to become the strongest of allies, happily exchanging the grandchildren of those bitterly warring soldiers back and forth across the Pacific.
It too was my privilege to care for Japanese exchange students daily in my University health clinic, peering intently into their open faces and never once seeing the enemy that my father so feared. And they trusted I would take care of them as one of my own.
My soldier-father’s grandson taught as a missionary for 13 years in Tokyo, endowed with deep admiration and appreciation for each of his students, some of whom were great-grandchildren of WWII Japanese soldiers.
He married a Japanese descendent of those my father fought. Their two children are the perfect amalgam of once warring, yet now peaceful, cultures; a symbol of blended and blending peoples overcoming the hatred and destruction of past generations, in the name of creating a new world, a new order.
Now having settled their family in the States, they are adapting to a different language, culture and flag. It is our great privilege as grandparents to live so close by, we are able to hug them every day.
I pray our son and his wife, and their children, redeem the horrors experienced by the soldier-warriors of the past century.
Perhaps all the loss and suffering was not in vain.
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