© November 9, 2004 by Norman Stolpe
When Candy and I read Mitch Albom's Five People You Meet in Heaven, I couldn't escape thinking about Eddie's Japanese captors in World War II. Surely the themes Albom explores with the other people whose lives intersected with Eddie's also apply to those Japanese soldiers. As I thought about that, this story began to emerge. I myself found unsettling the realization that soldiers on both sides in a war may have similar motivations of duty and love of country, without understanding much less engaging in the political and ethical issues that bring countries into conflict. This story is not about judgments of nations in history or even about the morality of war. Rather, it is about how ordinary people's lives are radically changed by seemingly insignificant slips of fate and the imperatives of life's little decisions.
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always they feel they are supposed to.
It was like that for San. He had heard the older men talk about the humiliation Japan had experienced at the hands of the Russians, the Chinese and the Koreans. But he was less interested in recovered glory than the opportunities for prosperity in the expanding Japanese Empire. He didn’t try to figure out what it might mean that the Emperor Hirohito was divine; but the prospects of sharing a thriving future with his country as the hub of the Pacific inspired him.
San didn’t understand or ever care about the war in Europe, except that it might draw Japan’s newest rival in the Pacific, the United States, away and allow Japan a better chance to expand and flourish. So when the Japanese military began to push the United States out of the Pacific and back to North America, San believed he had to go. When he was called to military service, he wanted to go. When he saw the love that blended pride and anxiety in his parents’ eyes as he said good-bye and joined his two older brothers in the service of his country, he knew he was supposed to go.
San was assigned to a unit that went south to drive the invaders out of the jungles and off of the islands of the Philippines. Fighting in the jungle on desolate islands was not easy. Spotting the enemy before they spotted you was nearly impossible. When fighting was fierce, soldiers often lost communication and became separated from their units.
In one particularly chaotic firefight, San and three others from his unit became disoriented in the jungle. They tried to interpret the sounds of airplanes, bombs and gunfire to find their way back to their unit, all the while keeping a lookout for enemy soldiers who might be lurking among the dense foliage.
Exchanging glances and motioning each other to keep silent, they came up behind five soldiers from the United States dug into foxholes with their backs to them. “Shoot them or take prisoners?” they silently queried each other. “Prisoners,” they agreed. When San put the barrel of his rifle at the base of one soldier’s skull, the soldier in the foxhole cowered and began weeping loudly. An angry, scolding shout in a language San could not understand came from another foxhole. They were no longer four lost soldiers. They were the captors in charge of five enemy prisoners.
After tying their prisoners’ wrists and confiscating their weapons, they resumed their uncertain march to rejoin their unit, guided by the erratic sounds of war. Shortly before dark they arrived at the camp their unit had been using as a temporary base of operations. No one else was there. Whether for defensive or offensive purposes, their unit must have moved on, abandoning this site, but still leaving it intact with sufficient provisions for a brief stay.
One small bamboo barracks on stilts had only a single entrance and would be a secure place where they could take turns guarding their prisoners. Staying there for a while seemed the wisest option as the war seemed to have moved away from them. They heard no airplanes, no explosions, no gunfire. The jungle was empty, no soldiers of either side, no villagers, no one. After a couple of days, they began taking turns making ever more distant forays to seek some contact with some Japanese military, even if it wasn’t their unit. The food at the camp would run out. They were responsible to hand over their prisoners to the proper authorities and rejoin their unit, wherever it was now.
After a couple of weeks, as San was making one of these excursions, he heard what he thought was a truck motor. Moving cautiously, lest he be seen if it was an enemy vehicle, San crept closer and closer until he recognized not only the Japanese Rising Sun flag but also a friendly Japanese face. San ran out of the underbrush onto the rutted dirt road, wildly waving his arms. San embraced the driver and hurriedly tumbled out their story. The driver asked, “Can you get your prisoners back to this road?”
“I’m sure we can,” said San. “We’re less than half an hour walk from here.”
“Good then. Follow this road the same direction I am going. In two or three hours you’ll come to a coalmine where POWs are digging coal out for us. Officers are there who can tell you what to do next.”
Nine weary soldiers walked into the compound of the coal mine. Four relieved to find friendly faces and five more anxious than ever about what awaited them.
“We haven’t heard from your unit for weeks,” the officer in charge of the coalmine told San and his companions. “Our only communication comes when we send a truck load of coal to the coast every few days. We’re shorthanded, so I want you four to stay here and help us. Since you have already managed your prisoners, they will be your special charges.”
“We really don’t know anything about being guards or about coalmines,” San answered.
“Doesn’t matter much. We’re all pretty much figuring it out as we go here anyway. Besides, I don’t know where to send you and don’t have any way to get you there.”
San was troubled at the words of the officer. This was nothing like the order and efficiency he had come to expect in the Japanese Empire.
After a while one of the prisoners got sick. The one with hair the color of berries could hardly stand to work in the mine. But they didn’t have any secure place for sick prisoners or any way to care for them. One day he was so weak that no amount of prodding or shouting could get him on his feet to work. As they struggled with him, one of the other prisoners started shouting.
Ni began a desperate, sarcastic laugh. “I was the one who said we should have just shot them in their foxholes. War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it. No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you don’t think about who you’re shooting or killing or why. If you want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think. It’s the thinking that gets you killed. Now I have to shoot him anyway.”
Weeks at the coalmine began to stretch into months. Boredom plagued the guards even more than the prisoners, who had the physical labor of the mine to occupy them. An uneasy familiarity grew in the relationships between the prisoners and the guards. Neither trusted the other, but the routine of their established roles allowed a measure of relief from the tensions between them, even though neither made any effort to connect at a personal level. Ni said to the others, “We don’t want to know their names, and we don’t want them knowing ours.”
Absentmindedly San picked up a couple of fist-sized stones and tried to juggle them. The prisoners were relaxed and staying away from the gate San was guarding. After some time San noticed one of the prisoners watching him with obvious amusement. Slowly the prisoner walked over to San, gesturing, talking and laughing. Of course, San could not understand what the prisoner was saying, but from the gestures San could tell the prisoner wanted to show him how to juggle.
The two stones moved smoothly through the prisoner’s hands. He stopped and motioned for three more stones. What an entertaining diversion! First one, then two stones went high in the air as the other three circulated in increasingly intricate patterns. By this time the juggling prisoner was singing with a rhythm that matched the movements of the stones and the other prisoners had gathered around for the entertainment.
The stones were now going up so high that San and the three other guards, who had also come close to see what was going on, had to crane their necks to watch them. Then without warning, the juggling prisoner hurled a stone that struck Ni squarely in the face. Blood sprayed from Ni’s mashed nose and dribbled from his mouth and ears. Ni fell to the ground stunned.
“Treachery!” screamed San as the juggling prisoner’s next stone struck Ichi on the chin. From the loud, hard cracking sound, San knew that Ichi’s jaw was broken. He saw Ichi’s eyes role back in his head as the blow rendered him unconscious. In the quick moment it took for San to see what was happening, he drew his pistol and tried to shoot the prisoners, but two of them tackled him around the knees, and his shots were wildly useless. San was sure the first blow of one of those juggling rocks had fractured his skull. He thought, “Ni was right. We should have shot them in their foxholes when we had the chance. Now none of us will go home.” Then came the second blow and everything turned red, then black.
------------------------------------------------------
“So did all of you get back home?” San asked Eddie.
“No, just three of us. A landmine got our captain. He was checking around a bend in the road to be sure it was safe before we drove the truck there.” Eddie noticed that they could understand each other now. Did that mean San was speaking English? Or was he speaking Japanese and didn’t know it? Or maybe language just works differently here in heaven.
“The war must have been over quite a while before you got here.”
”Yea,” said Eddie. “It didn’t take long for Japan to surrender after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“Atomic bombs?”
“Yea. Instead of regular chemical explosives, these things are a nuclear reaction out of control. Besides the explosive power of thousands of regular bombs, lingering radiation burns and poisons for years. Just two bombs a few days apart did what thousands of guns, ships, airplanes couldn’t do in years. Ended the war.”
“These were dropped on cities? On civilians?”
“Yea. Thousands died in just a few moments. And thousands more kept dying for a long time. I don’t really understand how they work. Too complicated for me. I don’t understand how our countries decide to do war. I just tried to do a good job at what I’m supposed to do. But I was sure glad when the war was over.”
“Our countries must really hate each other after all of that.”
“Oh, there were bad feelings for a long time, but before long there was what they called a cold war with communism in Russia and China.”
“But they were you allies when our countries were at war.”
“Yes, but after the war was over the United States helped Japan recover, Germany too. Now our countries are very friendly. Old scars still hurt on the anniversaries of the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. But those pains also remind us how much better it is to share peace and prosperity.”
“So since Japan lost the war, the United States must really run the Pacific now.”
“Japan and the U.S. are big trading partners now. We still compete economically, and for quite a while Japan was doing a lot better than the U.S., but that’s kind of slowed down lately. Both countries are a lot more prosperous that they were before the war.”
“So what did you do when you got back home?”
“I married the best woman in the whole world. We could never have children, and she died many years ago.”
“I was married for a couple of years before I went to fight. We just had a baby girl, but I never saw her. My wife sent me a letter to tell me she was born. I got it just before we captured you and your friends. After we got separated from our unit we didn’t get any more mail. We were probably listed as missing in action while we were guarding you at the coalmine.”
“Since you got here, to heaven, you know, has anyone come to tell you what happened to your wife and daughter?”
“No. I assume my wife married someone else and had more children. My daughter is probably a grandmother by now. But I don’t know anything. Do you think I’ll find out?”
“Well, I met five people here who helped me understand my life. They told me things I didn’t know. And I got to tell my wife what had happened to me after she died. She didn’t seem to know those things, but it seemed to matter a lot more to me to tell them to her than it did for her to learn them. She seemed to already understand her life by the time I got here.”
“So do you suppose one of us has a lesson to teach the other one?”
“Maybe, but I don’t feel like I have a right to teach you anything. You were the kindest of our guards, and I took advantage of your kindness, so I could kill you and escape. We were both young men, confused but trying to serve our countries the way we were supposed to. But there in the jungle, we weren’t thinking about what our countries were fighting for. It was just kill or be killed.”
“We could have shot you in your foxholes instead of taking you prisoners. That’s what Ni said we should have done. If we had done that, then you would have been here waiting for me when I went home to my wife and daughter. I would have participated in the peace and prosperity you say our countries have shared since the war. That’s what I had hoped the war would bring to Japan. But somehow it didn’t seem right to shoot you when you weren’t shooting at us. Taking you as prisoners was the right thing to do.”
“Was it right for us to kill you so we could escape?”
“I can’t tell you that, but if I had been your prisoner, I think I would have tried. You couldn’t know it, but we had word that a major U.S. attack was coming, so prisoners and guards were being moved to the coast. We hoped to be taken back to Japan. We were just about the last ones left out at the mine when you escaped. We expected the truck to come to get us in a couple of days. Who knows what might have happened. We knew POWs were being executed if there were no facilities to care for them. They might have shot us as deserters, since we had stayed with you at the first camp so long and couldn’t fully account for ourselves. Maybe you were supposed to go home and live your life. Death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. You said you met five people here in heaven who taught you lessons so you could understand the meaning of your life.”
“I never did get on track after the war. I did get married, and my wife was wonderfully loving. But I was wounded. The first wound was a bullet that shattered my leg and left me with a limp that got worse and worse all my life. The second wound was to my spirit. I felt defeated and trapped. When my father had a heart attack, I took his job as a maintenance man at an amusement park. As a kid growing up, I liked helping him and getting to know the people there, but I never wanted to spend my whole life at Ruby Pier – that’s what it was called. I did what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t think it mattered. My lame leg and recurrent nightmares never let me leave the war behind. The five people I’ve met here have sorted that out for me. But I have no right to be teaching you one of your lessons or making sense out of your life. Neither do I have any right to think that your purpose in any way depends on passing something to me.”
“Perhaps we are sharing the discovery of a lesson together. Not only does war prompt people to do monstrous things, it causes people to see each other as monsters. It goes beyond the perceived threats and causes that drive nations to war, to seeing each other as individual monsters. Ni laughing in despair when he shot your sick friend because we had no way to care for him. You using your juggling skill, learned at the amusement park, to kill the guard you thought was more kind than the others. Now we meet in heaven to be friends, not just by some act of cosmic grace that transcends and transforms the distrust and hatred that defined our brief but formative relationship, but to share the realization that outside of heaven, in the temporal realities of economics and politics, our nations and our peoples are not monsters to each other but partners, friends. We share one story, just viewed from different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle seems to end happily, the other badly. Who is to say which is which?”
