 "Now, we go fast." Oide-san spiked his poles in to the snow, and leapt down the small mountain. A few seconds, and he was at the bottom, waiting for me. He was 71. Myself, I barely avoided the hospital that day. For the last three years, I have been living in a country where 60,000 people were incinerated instantly. Twice. And then an equal number died slowly in the long years afterward. Kids perform a lot in Japan. Parents come with video cameras and sit through three-hour performances, an amalgamation of acts by each grade. When they're portraying the elderly, the children invariably enact the same posture -- stooped, back bent forward to almost ninety degrees. And almost every morning Suzuki-san, who just turned one hundred, plods her slow walk in front of my apartment. Ninety degrees, cart to lean and occasionally sit on. The older people have no bone. ...Oide-san said he remembered not having enough to eat. Forty and a half degrees, my temperature (that's almost one hundred five, Fahrenheit). This was the season the world got the flu - hospitals were overcrowded across the globe, and I was another victim of the virus that usually incubates its new strains in Southeast Asia. I wore a coat to class, and when finished, was sent home by my office, after they drove me to the town clinic. All through the weekend my boss and her boss arrived and left, checking up on me and making sure I had taken the dreadly pills, powders, and cold packs the doctor had prescribed. They even had my dorm mom deliver hot noodles to my bed. I barely remember groaning when she left. Monday they called me first and said I could sleep in. When I left Japan, when I met my third and fourth graders for the last time, the kids swarmed me as I stepped in the door. Crown, rings, even angel wings they had made in their free time for me to wear. The crowns were too small (I think they used their own heads to model); the ring tore after a day as things paper do. "Hello…?" A big voice on my answering machine. I knew who it was at once, but she said, "Adaaam?" Kunie-kun poured over the decrepit history book. The Japanese Zero-fighters, he said, were made of wood because resources were scarce. This caused their gunfire to spray about instead of shoot in a focused stream, like guns on the American aircraft. He shook my hand when we were finished with his lunch hour. And he shook it again when I left Japan. "Excuse me? Is there a hotel about?" I had come to the only bus stop in this town on the side of the mountain, and I knew that if the answer was no, I'd be walking all night to keep from dying in the arctic weather. "Hotel? Don't worry." I didn't understand more than that because of their dialect, and so sat down and waited as they laughed together. Together we rode a taxi to a restaurant, had New Year's party with a drove of inebriated priests. One of them (sober) drove me home to his temple where I was the only guest in this twenty-foot-snow winter. They fed me; I was allowed to take my bath first (icicles hung from the sink); and in the morning showed me the enshrinement of the temple saint and then chanted my good fortune at the altar. And in that morning the old woman with the long gray hair I'd met at the bus stop came and said goodbye. As I was driven back to my starting point, the priest handed me an envelope -- from her, he said. For the last three years I lived in a country where Americans killed instantly 60,000 instantly and the same number over the long days and years afterward. Twice. I was the only Western foreigner in my town; in most situations I was completely at the mercy of this enemy. What they did to start the war was incontrovertible. What is incontrovertible is the kindness and friendship they showed me as young man, patient, teacher, friend, and son. Would that we knew the things that make for peace.
Adam B. Smith |