The Phoenix Tree

The feeling of being alone, at first not recognized, had begun as soon as Ken Minato had been allowed to escape; from then on Okada had realized there was no turning back, at least if shame was to be avoided. He had been surprised to find that he had a shame complex; that was a Japanese trait.

He had been sent to Corpus Christi Naval Air Base in Texas for, as Commander Embury sardonically described it, a crash course in parachuting. The instructors there had not been told why a Jap should be instructed in jumping; some of them had questioned Okada, but he, acting inscrutable, had told them he didn’t know. They hadn’t been inscrutable in showing their annoyance at this smiling, uppity Jap. He had made three jumps and been passed as satisfactory, though he himself felt far from satisfied with the situation.

He drifted down through the darkness, the air whispering along the cords of the parachute. He had little idea of what lay below him other than that it was mountainous country; there was the danger that he might land on the edge of a cliff, but it had been decided (by Embury and the others; he had been given no vote) that the danger would be greater if he landed in flat country where there would be villages or even troop concentrations. He began to sweat, wondering if he would be dead in the next few seconds.

‘You’re going to need luck,’ Embury had said. ‘But if you land safely, it should be a good omen for the rest of the mission. Do you believe in omens?’

‘No,’ said Okada, lying; lately he had begun to see everything as an omen, even a passing cloud.

Embury and Lieutenant Irvine had accompanied him to Saipan. Irvine had been of considerable help in assisting him to take on the character of a Saipan Japanese civilian. Okada had had to adjust his accent once again; thoroughly exposed to it now amongst the prisoners still held on the island, he had found the Saipan civilians, the ones who had spent their life there, had a much coarser accent. Since he could not imitate it perfectly it was decided that, in the persona that was gradually being painted on him, he would have spent three years in Japan with his grandparents, folk who were now conveniently dead. He learned to say certain words and phrases the way the Saipanese did, the hint of local colour in the emerging portrait of Tamezo Okada, sawmill under-manager. It had been decided that he should keep his own name, the risk being taken that there were no records in Tokyo of all the civilians on Saipan. It comforted him to hold on to his name – an omen, if you liked.

‘The thing to remember,’ said Irvine, ‘is that in a country as battered as Japan there is more confusion than suspicion. America is at war, but it isn’t in the war – so forget all about how you felt at home. You’ll be more at home in Japan—’ He smiled as Okada looked at him quizzically. ‘Well, you’ll be less conspicuous, shall we say?’

But Okada had wondered if he would ever be at home in his father’s homeland; he had certainly not been when he had been taken there as a child to stay with his grandparents. As a boy he had not come to terms with the Japanese mentality and now as a man he still felt uncomfortable with it.

Okada had been attached to a Marine battalion that had landed with the first invasion wave on the island of Saipan in the Marianas eight months ago. Like everyone else in the battalion he had been surprised at how, since World War I, the Japanese had colonized and developed the island. Besides the 30,000 soldiers on the island there were 25,000 civilians working in the sawmills, the sugar-cane fields and other light industries. Few military prisoners had been taken, but civilians had been captured in their hundreds and Okada had been kept busy as an interpreter. Then his battalion had been moved on, to the north of the island, picking their way through the countless, stinking corpses of the soldiers who had died for the Emperor in suicide attacks or by their own hand. Then, on the very northernmost tip of the island, he and the Marines had stood sickened and powerless as they had watched over 10,000 Japanese civilians take their own lives and those of their children. Babies had been smashed against rocks, women and older children had been thrown from the high cliffs, men had hurled themselves, with long-drawn-out cries that would scar the aural memory of those who witnessed the scene; into the sea far below. The civilians had died because their Emperor had, at the last minute, promised them an equal place with soldiers in the after-life to which they all aspired. Hell was not for them, only for the Americans who saw them die.

‘Jesus!’ said the Marines and looked at Okada. ‘What gets into you guys?’

Two days later Okada had been called back to the prison camps where there were still civilians, sensible though damned, waiting to be interrogated. Still haunted by what he had seen his father’s countrymen do, he had tried for an explanation from those who had declined to die; but the survivors were struck dumb by shame, not at what the suicides had done but that they themselves had not followed the Emperor’s call. He found himself in no man’s land, shunned by the Japanese he was making fumbling attempts to help, suspected by the Americans as being sympathetic to the mass suicides.

In October he went with the first wave of the invasion force on to the island of Leyte, in the Philippines. A week after the landing, when a deep beachhead had been established, he was called back from a forward unit and told to report to headquarters.

‘I got no idea what it’s all about, corporal. All the order says is that you’re being transferred. Permanently.’

He hadn’t liked the sound of that. ‘Can I protest, sir?’

‘Corporal, I understand you’ve been protesting ever since Pearl Harbor. You must be the bitchingest soldier that’s ever served in the US forces and I’d go back as far as the Revolutionary Army.’

Okada had smiled through his sweat. ‘Just proving I’m an American, sir.’

Okada had been put on a plane and two days later, via Honolulu, he was put down in California, his home state which he hadn’t seen in two long years.

‘Welcome to San Diego,’ said the Navy officer who looked as if he might have been starched inside his uniform. He was a good six inches taller than Okada, who was five feet nine, and he had a long nose that he appeared to use as a range-finder when looking down at men on a lower level of height and rank. ‘I’m Lieutenant-Commander Reilly.’

Okada saluted, a sloppy effort due more to exhaustion than disrespect. ‘I hope you can tell me why I’m here, sir. The Navy?’ He looked around the base, as spick-and-span as an admiral’s ribbons. This was the clean end of the war, the best end. ‘Is there some son of services merger going on?’

‘God forbid,’ said Reilly. ‘Follow me.’

Okada, lugging his kitbag, followed the Navy officer across to a low building set aside from the main administration offices. He was conscious of being stared at by passing Navy personnel and he could read the question in their faces: who’s the Jap bum, some prisoner they’ve brought back from the SWPA? Serves me right for looking like a bum, he thought. But then he hadn’t expected to be dumped here in this naval base where even the lawns looked as if they were shaved daily.

Reilly led him into a room that, though spartan, was still far more comfortable than anything he had seen in the past two years. FDR smiled a toothy welcome to him from a photograph on the wall, but Okada ignored it. The President was not to know that he was no longer one of Okada’s heroes.

‘Sir, is this the usual accommodation for enlisted personnel in the Navy?’

‘No, corporal, it’s not. It’s usually reserved for visiting officers – certain officers, that is. You will not leave it at any time, unless accompanied by a guard.’ Reilly nodded at the mate second class of shore police who stood outside the door, all self-importance, muscle and gaiters. Okada hated police of any sort, service or civilian. ‘You hear that, mate? If he wants to go to the head or the showers, someone goes with him every time. And he is not to communicate with anyone. Anyone, you understand?’

‘Jesus!’ said Okada.

Reilly looked at him. ‘Are you a Christian?’

‘Would it help?’ Then he saw that Reilly had little sense of humour. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Reilly gave him a look that, two years ago, Okada would have considered racist; but he no longer cared about such things. Not today, anyway; he was too exhausted. Reilly went away and Okada, letting his clothes lie where they fell, a most unnaval custom, went to bed and slept for twelve hours. If the war was over for him, he could have cared less.

Next morning, fed, shaved, showered and dressed in new tan drill, he presented himself, escorted by the SP detail, to Lieutenant-Commander Reilly. With the latter were two other officers, one American, the other British.

‘Commander Embury. Lieutenant-Commander Irvine. You may sit down, corporal. For the moment there will be no formality.’ It seemed to hurt Reilly to say it; his starch creaked as he tried to relax. ‘Commander Embury will now take over.’

Embury was USN, but a reserve officer; the starch in him had never taken, or had been watered down. He had had a successful Oldsmobile dealership in Falmouth on Cape Cod; perhaps the Navy powers-that-be had decided that an auto salesman’s shrewdness would be an asset in Intelligence. Not that he had a slick salesman’s look, as if he’d only sold solid farm machinery. He was untidy, squat and ungainly, suggesting that he was shambling even when sitting down. He smoked a pipe that looked as if it might have been taken from one of the Indians who had greeted the Pilgrims and the tobacco he used smelled as if it were dried peat from the cranberry bogs on Cape Cod. Everything about him said he was a misfit, till one looked at his eyes. Okada had never seen such a coldly intelligent gaze.

Embury wasted no time: ‘You speak Japanese fluently?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Read and write it?’

‘Yes, sir. My father insisted that my sisters and I learn it. And I lived in Japan for two years with my grandparents.’

‘We know that, corporal.’

‘I thought you might, sir.’ Okada was suddenly wary. ‘Why am I here, sir?’

‘You’ve worked with Detachment 101, of the OSS?’

‘Just the once, sir, my first action. They were short of an interpreter and I was sent to Burma. I didn’t volunteer, sir.’

Embury’s gaze suddenly softened as he smiled. ‘You didn’t like it?’

‘We were behind the enemy’s lines for the whole of that month, just me and two other guys.’

‘I thought Merrill’s Marauders often worked behind Jap lines? Sorry, Japanese lines.’

Okada ignored the slip, wondering if it was deliberate. ‘They did, sir. But usually in platoon strength, at least. It was pretty goddam lonely, just with those two OSS guys.’

‘You may yet feel even more lonely.’ But Embury didn’t elaborate. Instead, he relit his pipe and went on: ‘You have been under observation for quite some time, corporal. Not by us, but by Army Intelligence and before them the FBI. It was not your own record that caused suspicion, but your father’s. As an anti-American Issei, he hasn’t been trusted.’

Okada well knew that many of the Japan-born, the Issei, were strongly pro-American; but his father had never been, not even in the comfortable days before Pearl Harbor. He could not, however, leave his father undefended; to that extent, at least, he himself was Japanese. ‘I don’t think he’d go in for sabotage or anything like that, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Well, he is still under surveillance. Knowing the respect you Japanese, even the Nisei, the American-born ones, have for your elders—’ Embury stopped for a moment to relight his pipe. The father of three bandit brats, he sighed inwardly for what the Orientals had achieved in family life. Then he went on: ‘We couldn’t be sure what influence he might have had on you. But your record with the Military Language School in Minnesota and then in the field with the Marauders and again with the Marines in the Pacific theatre – well, it showed you were prepared to prove you were at least one hundred per cent American.’

‘At least that, sir.’ Okada did not feel at ease, but he was not going to be humbly submissive to the Navy, USN or otherwise. He glanced at Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN, who surprised him by giving him a quiet smile. He wondered what the Englishman was doing here so far from any theatre where the British were operating, but he did his best to hide his curiosity. While these three men were going to play the game close to their chests, he’d do the same.

Embury stood up and lumbered across to a narrow window, the only one, in the side wall of the office. Okada had noticed when he had come in that the room looked more like an interrogation cell than an office; there were no filing cabinets, just bare walls and a table and four chairs. Neither Embury nor the other two officers had offered any explanation of the room.

‘This is a one-way window. We can see out, but those on the other side can only see a mirror. Take a look, corporal. Recognize anyone out there?’

Okada got up and moved to the window, curious and puzzled. All his life, being a Nisei, there had been times when he had felt off-balance; the supposed melting-pot that was America had thrown out Orientals like himself as non-absorbable. He was off-balance now, but not for racial reasons, and he felt cautious and, yes, a little afraid. He was being set up for something and he could only guess at what it might be. He fully expected to see his father sitting in the next room.

He looked through the window into a room as bare as the one in which he stood. One man, a Caucasian in Navy tans, sat at a table. The other, a Japanese in a checked shirt and grey flannel trousers, stood with his back against a wall, saying something to the Navy officer that was obviously defiant.

‘Do you recognize the Japanese?’ said Embury.

‘He looks familiar, sort of.’ Okada stared at the man in the next room; then he felt a stiffening of shock. ‘It’s Ken Minato!’

‘Exactly. How long is it since you’ve seen him?’

‘I don’t know – six or seven years, I guess.’ Okada looked in at the man who, when they were boys, had been his closest friend. But the friend was only dimly seen, as in a photograph that had been retouched and not for the better. A friendship soured does nothing for the objective view. ‘It was in Japan, when I last went home with my father. 1937. He was in the Japanese Navy then. What’s he doing here?’

‘We’ll come to that in a moment,’ said Embury, dropping back to his game plan. But he did come out from behind the smokescreen of his pipe, leaning his head almost comically to one side. ‘Corporal, we’d like to send you back to Japan with Lieutenant Minato.’

‘When?’ Okada retreated behind his own smokescreen; Americans were always joking about Oriental inscrutability.

‘Within the next three months.’

Okada forgot all about being inscrutable; he let out a cough of laughter. ‘Commander, what sort of crap am I being fed? Did you bring me all the way from Saipan for something crazy like this?’

Embury looked at Reilly, who said, ‘I told you he had a reputation for speaking his mind. It’s all in his file.’

‘No bad thing,’ said Embury, and Reilly looked pained: Annapolis had never taught such heresy. That, of course, was a major problem of a war; one had to draw on the amateurs.

‘Yes, corporal, we did bring you all this way for exactly that. We think the idea is worth exploring. All we have to do is convince you.’

‘Fat chance.’ Okada was openly rebellious now, American all the way. ‘I’d like to be sent back to my outfit, sir. As far away from here as possible.’

‘Sit down, corporal.’ Embury resumed his own seat and after a moment Okada dropped into his chair. He eyed all three men like a trapped animal and he had the feeling that they were looking at him as animal trainers might have done. Clyde Beatty and his Japanese performing wild dog … Embury puffed on his pipe, which had now begun to look like a stage prop. ‘Let me tell you about the man in the next room. You know some of it, but not all of it. He was born in Japan and brought here when he was a year old. He went back to Japan in 1929, the year of your first visit – he was men 13 years old. Unlike you, he stayed on – he liked the Japanese way of life. You didn’t, we understand.’

‘I hated it.’

‘Well, Minato stayed on. He went to Echijima, the Naval Academy, then was posted to Naval Intelligence. He became a junior protégé of Admiral Tajiri, who was a senior member of the Navy General Staff. Minato’s parents, his only relatives, were both killed in General Doolittle’s air raid on Tokyo in March 1942.’

‘My father would be upset to hear that. He was a close friend of Old Man Minato. Where did you take Ken prisoner?’

‘Right here in the United States, at the Military Language School where you went. He’s never been in action, except as a spy.’

Okada frowned. ‘I find that hard to believe …’

The three officers waited for him to explain himself. Reilly fidgetted, but Embury and Irvine showed Oriental patience.

At last Okada said, ‘Ken was a good guy, my best friend in junior high school. We fell out later, when I saw him on my second visit to Japan, that was in 1937, but it wasn’t really serious. He just sounded like a younger version of his father. And my father too, I guess,’ he added, and regretted at once that he had done so. He was still batting for his father, though the Old Man didn’t deserve it.

‘We understand the division between you and your father is very serious.’

‘That came later,’ said Okada abruptly. ‘What about Minato?’

‘He’s been here in this country since March 1938. He came back here under the name Suzuki and enrolled as a student at Gonzaga University at Spokane in Washington State. He said he was a Catholic convert and they accepted him as such.’

‘Why up there? Why didn’t he come back to California?’

‘We assume he didn’t want to be recognized by you or any of the other Japanese he had gone to school with. Anyhow, within three months he had disappeared. He took on another identity, several in fact, and he’s been here ever since. He’s told us that he sent back to Tokyo enough information for the Japanese General Staff to know exactly the lay-out of all our West Coast shipyards, from Seattle down to here, San Diego, their capacity and our state of preparedness. Like the rest of you Japanese he was picked up at the time of the relocation order in February 1942 and he spent twelve months in a camp in Arizona. Then he volunteered for the Language School and was accepted – his idea, he’s told us, was to get sent to the Pacific theatre as an interpreter. He’d pick up more information there and then at the first opportunity he’d sneak back through the Japanese lines. He made one mistake – he tried to tell his contacts here in the States what he intended doing and we intercepted the message. Or rather, Army Intelligence did. He’s now volunteered to be turned around, as we say – to be sent back to Japan and spy for us. But we don’t trust him, not entirely. In Intelligence we tend not to trust anyone. Though, of course, at me beginning of any game, that’s all we can go on – trust. Right, gentlemen?’

The two gentlemen nodded, though Okada noticed that the Englishman smiled slightly, as if he thought trust were some sort of mild joke.

‘You said you want me to go back to Japan. With Minato? Why would you trust me?’

‘Why, indeed?’ said Embury and relit his pipe once again. Okada was becoming irritated by the routine, then he wondered if it was some sort of punctuation to keep him off-balance. Neither Reilly nor Irvine seemed impatient with Embury’s stop-go approach. ‘We’ll have to learn more about you, corporal, about your mental attitude. If you don’t come up to scratch …’

Okada saw a small red light winking at him out of the future. ‘If I don’t come up to scratch, what happens to me? Am I going to be sent back to my outfit?’

Embury shook his head. ‘No, we probably wouldn’t let you go. We may have to keep you in protective custody for the rest of the war. In better conditions than those relocation camps you were sent to, of course.’

‘Of course.’ Okada sat up straighter. His athlete’s body felt bruised, but it was really only his mind that was so. But this was still preferable to standing on the cliffs of Saipan, where his mind had almost suffered a knock-out blow. ‘Go on, sir.’

‘You’re interested?’

‘I’m interested, but that doesn’t mean I’m volunteering for anything. If I’m going to be kept in protective custody for the rest of the war, you’ve got nothing to lose by telling me more. You’ll have to tell me, if you want me to cooperate.’

Embury looked at Irvine. ‘Do you have guys like this in the British services?’

‘Occasionally. We exile them to the colonies or we send them out on commando raids and they become dead heroes.’ Irvine smiled at Okada, like an angler who always landed something from troubled waters.

‘I’ve heard of the British sense of humour, sir.’

‘It helps us muddle through,’ said Irvine, using a phrase that had become a British battle cry. Then he stopped smiling. ‘I wish you would help us in this little venture, corporal. It could mean a great deal to both our countries, America and Britain.’

For some reason he couldn’t fathom at the moment, Okada was suddenly receptive. Perhaps it was the friendliness in Irvine’s manner; the Englishman, of course, had no authority to be as demanding as Embury or Reilly. But it was obvious that, for some reason or other, Irvine had a personal interest in the matter. He did not have the bored, indifferent look of a liaison officer.

Okada looked back at Embury. ‘Tell me more, sir.’

Embury studied him for a moment through the smoke of his pipe. ‘Okay, corporal. But the more I tell you, the more you’re committed to going along with us … Admiral Tajiri was a leading member of the Strike-South faction in pre-war Japan. There were two factions – the Strike-South, the minority one, which had its eye on Southeast Asia and the Dutch East Indies, and the Strike-North faction, which thought it should prepare for an all-out war against communist Russia. Eventually the Strike-South lot won out. Admiral Tajiri knew the chances were high that America would come into the war if Japan struck south. So he set about preparing a spy ring. Minato was one of the first sent over here.’

‘Have you picked up any of the others?’

‘Several. They’re all held in Federal prisons. None of them volunteered to be turned around. But Minato now loves our way of life, he’s all for Mom and American apple pie and he thinks American democracy is the greatest system ever invented.’

‘Really?’ said Lieutenant-Commander Irvine, RN. Democracy was like original sin, anyone could lay claim to it.

Embury grinned at him, exposing teeth that looked as if they had been worn down by his pipe. ‘I was quoting our friend next door, David. No offence … The trouble is, corporal, we think Minato’s new-found love of America is just a bit too convenient. But we do believe that if we can smuggle him back to Tokyo, the risk is worthwhile. He may turn out to be very useful.’

‘What if he feeds you false information? How will you know the difference?’

Embury nodded approvingly. ‘You’re sharp, corporal. You’re right in step all the way, aren’t you?’

‘Let me say something, commander. I grew up in this country as a virtual outsider, no matter how much I loved Mom and apple pie and the American flag. You might almost say I was like a Jew in Nazi Germany. I had to be sharp to stay in step. You got no idea the number of times I stumbled, especially as a kid, and fell out of line. It was a question of survival – being sharp, I mean.’

Embury, Irvine and even Reilly looked suddenly sympathetic; as if, up till now, they had looked only in Caucasian mirrors. Reilly also looked disconcerted, as if he had not realized there had been another, earlier war going on.