About Born Backwards
- Born Backwards has been a long time in the making. Back in the 'nineties my father and I spent some weeks putting his life on tape while he could. It has gone through varying stages between edits and attempts to find a publisher. With a family and career of my own and now my own use by date approaching I have had to bite the belated bullet and make it happen. The many edits were spread out over thirty years and the last two chapters by myself are recent.
Military personnel need to know how to beat the system and all America needs men like this more than ever.
George Smiley
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George Smiley
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- By coincidence I have arrived in Okinawa on the day of their funereal celebration to mark the end of the battle of Okinawa. So the flight from Haneda Airport (Tokyo) was crowded and my wife and I had the misfortune to be seated by the proud parents of twins, a boy and a girl on the cusp of two years old who took turns convulsing and screaming in their parents arms for the full two hours. Unmoved by incessant bribes of glossy sweets and toys, they were lucky to have been born 80 years later than their predecessors who were dying of hunger or shrapnel wounds in the open or crowding into caves with families and implacable Japanese soldiers who would have strangled them if their parents didn't have the balls lest they betray all to the enemy. I could relate to that.
- Another coincidence is that it is my 76th birthday and I have been unable to access my new driver's license before the flight so my wife is doing the chauffeuring around the island (which is quite small considering the scale of mortality they are commemorating). With the suicide of General Ushijima the final toll was approximately 150,000 civilians by starvation, murder or suicide either voluntarily or forced by the Japanese army followed by shellfire etc. Add another 80,000 or so Japanese military personnel and horrifying casualties on the American side the final count here is probably a quarter of a million dead. My father's platoon turned over three times in the 3 month campaign with 127 serious casualties including 12 dead.
- So I have a week to walk my father's battlefields and it is not an easy task. Firstly the names of the sites are different locally even when the US military used Japanese names for them. The battles and places took place on relatively small hills and valleys that may have been differentiated from the others when shellfire, napalm and machinery had swept them bare but the strategic hills have now been reclaimed by low jungle. Tangles of feral sugar cane and similar kunai grass cover road verges and encroach on marginal farms. Homes, apartments, industries, roadworks, quarries and suburbs have all blossomed, more affluent than ever. Princely new tomb developments replace the traditional little tortoise shell family crypts, for death is an industry here now like everywhere else. Beside affordable housing this is the only upside to the demographic illness sweeping Japan - of a low birthrate and consequently a deflating memory bank and economy. So there is a generally unkempt appearance over much of the island. There are around 146 thousand people here, about the same as the postwar population which isn't enough manpower in this day and age to pick up the garbage, maintain infrastructure or polish the memorials and generally maintain a modern society .
- June 23. It took some doing but today's visit was to Tanabaru. It is a ridge with a low escarpment around the top, probably 70 meters high in total and the suburb by that name once backed onto it but now encroaches up to the top with several homes, small sugar cane farms and most of all regrowth jungle. It is hot here, humid and sticky. Stumbling along without a machete is slow going thanks to a very tough little a vine which has no leaves down near ground level but there are some harmless thorns which point backwards and probably help to hold it up in the trees. Spaces have been filled by orb spiders and larger spaces by occasional tombs. Think of a large garden shed, with swooping roof lines and crenelated fencing in an oriental style, all in concrete; usually set into the hill with a full width concrete dooryard in front and an access panel about the right size to slip in a body.
- No-one can direct you if you ask for help finding 'Tanabaru', even with accompanying gestures and facial expressions pertaining to the war. After driving all around a couple suburbs I was directed to the Nishihara City Hall where the ever-polite staff organised an interested historical couple with some English to come and speak to me. I had simply not been specific enough; 'Tanabaru Goruku' is a memorial site where 300 or 400 Japanese died in a suicide mission behind American lines and with that intelligence SatNav can get you there through the maze of narrow and twisting unmarked streets without any help from the locals.
- The Japanese had simply marched unchallenged through the US lines in the night and in the morning they opened up on the US forces down below -the motor pool, the troops in reserve and pinned down the first platoon to be sent up there, badly wounding their commanding officer and others all unable to be taken off. So my father was detailed to take his platoon up and provide a diversion to enable the first lot of American casualties to be pulled off. Of course they were the second lot to be decimated. My father was hit by shrapnel from a bursting knee mortar bomb and dragged himself down from the ridge stopping to put his head down whenever he went into shock and then walked or crawled another half mile to a field hospital losing blood all the way. He had left his platoon still under fire, including his best man, a little asthmatic who had lied to get into the army; now left lying with both his legs broken by another mortar round but still firing his BAR out across the ridge top. My father never knew if he lived or died and there was no way of finding out. When they patched him up he came back to a mostly new platoon. When we made the tapes he couldn't even remember the boy's name if he ever could; they were coming and going that fast.
- The enemy was obliterated by 81 mm. mortars from below. The tall coral formations that comprised my father's position are gone for fill or retaining walls of the adjacent suburb, and the ridge top is pockmarked with shell holes from the 81's, about 1.2 meters across and 150 mm deep in the coral stone; most of these pockmarks merging with the next. No-one still up there survived. Otherwise the lushness of the low jungle is the only trace of so much TNT, angst,desperation, blood and bone.
- The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum is a unique concept; everybody gets included who died on Okinawa during World War II or shortly thereafter. Names are engraved on a zigzag black marble memorial wall in alphabetic order, segregated by nationality for convenience. Otherwise it is completely democratic with no regard for age or rank. There are about a quarter of a million names. Only 12500 are Americans, a couple Turks, Brits and the rest are Japanese solders and Okinawan civilians in pretty much equal numbers. Across the lawn is Marubeni Hill which host the memorials. Every prefecture has contributed a memorial consisting of a Japanese garden, paving, support decorations and a very large stone or column of some sort.
- I am here on account of my father's involvement in these last actions and it is just about impossible to find exactly what and where so many of his stories took place. Spellings of Japanese names are quite phonetic and vowels vary considerably in contexts of similar names on similar features. After eighty more years of human occupation and a similarly aggressive post-war impact on the botany and geology following the 'iron storm'- it's either camouflaged by brush and feral regrowth like sugar cane, lost under new buildings, roads or industry or quarried away by the latter.
- With an old large scale army map of the southern island (kind of a thumbnail from Google) I have been able to reconcile the names with Google Maps and found an exact fit for the Yaeju Dake hill mass. Here my father, under machine gun fire used the cover of stone fences to lead his men through the failing Japanese lines to the top of the ridge, set up and held a position overnight prompting a Japanese retreat from below and collapse as other American units would be able to move up and hold the flanks. Their line collapsed, General Ushijima suicided further along the ridge; the battle and with that the land war in the Pacific was over. It was the 21st of June 1945.
- My wife and I drove along the ridge top where they had hunkered down in Japanese trenches and foxholes, behind coral heads, spending the night without rations. Some had been wounded on the way up and one more was lost on the top; Private Salmon who was jumped from behind in pitch blackness and badly beaten with a sheathed bayonet. In the morning they moved along the ridge top through the jumbles of coral boulders, cleaning out Japanese pillboxes from behind with napalm.
- At the western end of the ridge line is a cliff which is featured in histories of the battle festooned with fire hoses that were fastened to flame throwing tanks for napalm pumped up into the supposed Japanese positions which suggests there was no-one in there but they did it anyway. Now there is a wide parking lookout by a large cave at the bottom that served as a Japanese field hospital during the battle. It is now occupied by a lady tourist guide, paid for by the prefecture. In lieu of good English she carries a folder of pictures - a time lapse in colour of the 'iron storm'- massed lines of tracers above a couple aircraft on a runway; a drawing of a pretty almost manga-style Japanese nurse with a large and hairy human leg carried nonchalantly over her shoulder.
- And all over the ridge are hedges, a hospital, two Japanese Self-Defense Force bases including an anti-aircraft unit, a hospital, a piggery and beef feedlot, a steel yard and most of all the Naha Country Club. The golf course occupies most of his particular battleground, on which I was not allowed to go, being a non-member and in light of flying golf balls. Eighty years ago then the hill was barely accessible to tanks and halftracks; now it's smooth, manicured, strategically treed with sand traps where there were caves, mines and natural tank traps. The fields of huge coral boulders are now smooth, green and manicured. We had lunch at the beautiful black marble Naha Country clubhouse. The food was excellent, the service was inordinately polite and the guide app on my wife's mobile timely informed us that they are too proud to take tips. It might have been different had it still been cane farms and natural features but this is too much to take. Outside the humid heat is oppressive and thankfully the menu comes with a wet face cloth in a wrap so I was mostly able to avoid the embarrassment of my tears.
- "No birds were flying overhead/ There were no birds to fly" -Lewis Carroll.
There were two flying south past the little boat basin below the flat this morning. A purposeful black cormorant, low over the water heading south followed shortly by the white egret that lives here at the basin. Yesterday a pair of ravens were mooching around in the clefts amongst huge broken coral boulders lying on the beach at an ecological site a kilometer south of here. It was along this coast after the battle that he took command of all E Company for the enviable task of clearing out all the stragglers and survivors from several miles of cliffs and beachside caves . With the help of the navy and Japanese speakers using loudhailers they took around 600 prisoners of a total close to 6000 who were saved. That many again had refused to surrender and had chosen death by whatever means. There was also a dark little turtle dove tripping randomly about the flotsam.
- Regarding the birds there may be a rational explanation. It is the end of the rainy season here however that influences mating and nesting seasons. In the towns cats can be seen lounging everywhere and a great many will be feral. In the wet tropics, intense agricultural production inclines farmers towards reliance on chemicals and towards the end of the battle the Americans had installed equipment in aircraft to carry tanks of DDT. Billions of flies were blowing egg masses in the blankets of the troops as if there was a shortage of bodies. My father claimed they had sprayed the whole island but all the fighting by then was in the south.
- My mother blamed it for some of my father's later health problems to do with his liver - after the battle he had come down with hepatitis and was evacuated to Saipan. Whether she was correct or not, a subsequent series of scandals from Agent Orange in Vietnam and the subsequent use of the surplus by unprotected road workers in Australia and elsewhere; the chemical contamination of personnel as in Camp Lejeune with jet fuel and dry cleaning chemicals in the ground water, the general use of PFOA foam in fire-fighting exercises at air bases etc. bespeaks a general contempt in the services for the health of their own personnel and others at home and abroad.
- Looking at Google Earth most of the southern half of the island is highly urbanized and one imagines things might be different further north for the bird population. Most of the central part of the island is forested; covered by a massive US army base in which identical bunkers are placed almost in random directions but always a set distance from each other, connected with orange roads curving through the forest like some wiring arrangement of identical electronic components. Each bunker is surrounded by earth berms of the same colour. There must be enough ordinance cached here to blow North Korea all to hell or maybe half of China. And beside the base there is even wilder territory which is a national park. At the Southwestern Botanic Garden the only uncaged avian inmates are some Muscovy ducks in the huge lotus pond who regard it as home.
- But up in the sky there is only thunder. On the day F-22s are screaming in low overhead every couple of minutes, sometimes in pairs, practicing touchdowns at Kadena Air Force Base. Occasionally there is even a whiff of jet fuel. In the absence of birds even a pigeon or seagull would be notable but these are magnificent. They are twin-tailed delta- winged jobs, nose and cockpit sitting well above the wings and weapons pods in the going style these days. On the ground they are probably huge but in the air they are smaller - there is a sense of speed and agility about them you might associate with a racing car. In an attack you couldn't even hear them coming until they were already gone. Do not screw around with America.
- There wouldn't be a square inch on the island that hasn't seen conflict and oppression. Islanders have always had a tough time of it; there is that old adage 'divided we fall' and what could be more divisive than an ocean? The island was independent under the kings of Ryukyu until Japan and China somehow settled their disagreement as to who would oppress and collect tribute from the helpless islanders. More contemporary castle ruins stand on 'dominating positions', like you read about in the real estate ads and it is the same old for modern warfare.
- The first major Japanese line of defense stretched from Conical Hill to Shuri Castle. Somewhere near that line of ridges sits Sugar Loaf Hill, famous as a battle site where huge American casualties were sustained( a couple of thousand). My father believed it was another SNAFU by the U.S. Marine Corps and it is their shrine. The hill is perfectly rectangular now to match the streets of its urban environment; steep ivy-covered retaining walls are bordered by streets with sidewalks. The stairs to the top are each about 150 mm.high, all 95 of them and a vehicle ramp up the back reaches the top in a quarter turn. The top is paved over, about the size of a tennis court and most of it is out of sight, a Holy of Holies hidden from prying eyes by a tall white scalloped wall which itself is surrounded by a tall light gauge chain link fence, locked to visitors when I was there. A homeless old man had set up his shelter on the road access with collections of his scroungings along and on both sides of the guardrail, out of sight around the curve from the street.
- So the footprint of this hill matches that of the middling little apartment or office building across the street and is almost as high as a fourth floor window next door. You ask yourself how the hell....a couple of flame-throwing tanks should have been able to sterilize this thing in a matter of minutes. Which gives a lot of credence to my father's belief that it had no strategic value but had been a registration point for the Japanese artillery. So anyone who stuck their heads over the parapet got killed. The army had pulled their troops away but Marines don't retreat and they kept sending men up to 'establish a position.' At the time the area looked like a forestry clear-cut, nothing but churned soil and debris so it could be seen from a long way off. Now it is invisible from just down the block but your SatNav can still get you there anyway.
- Conical Hill is not far away; a 160 meter peak that is the climax of a long ridge comprising much of the Shuri Line as it rises up towards the ocean. From the peak (God knows how many stairs above the end of the road) overlooking the Pacific Ocean it dominates the port and the South China Sea is visible over on the west side of the island along with most of the interior. The US Army had to have it.
- Whether the past is forgotten purposely or generational demands need take precedence in every society, most of us know in our heart of hearts you have to seize the day or someone else will take your place in the sun. It's the story of life itself and so the forests, oceans, the skyline and the very stones are plundered, the weak driven to the wall, and lives of the poor, stupid or otherwise expendable enlisted in the service of sociopaths. The progression looks like progress for a time and an island context compresses the time scale of these things often within a few lifetimes. The Polynesians worshiped their great Tiki who had scattered these tiny dots across the Pacific on their behalf; filled them and their surrounds with naïve prey and the means of both shelter and transport of the discontented to the next new world according to the inevitable dictates of necessity.
- Other island archipelagos with neighboring continents have more lengthy successions of animal life and human occupation extending even to evolutionary time scales. Like Okinawa, the long human occupation means no easy prey here outside themselves; a necessarily small and materially deprived human population. But they have endured. In the Okinawa museum there are bones - the tiny Ryukyu deer, a wild boar, and a tiny skeleton of an ancient Ryukyu man. There is only one of him. He was dated to be 18 thousand years old and he is mounted (short a great many ribs and lower jaw) leaning forward insect-like, as if he is walking slowly forward clutching a couple of supporting canes as might be expected at his age. The skull is a little larger than a coconut. It is febrile and featureless, no brow ridges or cheekbones, just a weak upper jaw and two empty, gormless eye sockets. Maybe this one was the village idiot but evolution doesn't treat a limited gene pool kindly. Today the Okinawans are still tiny and you can see it in the older folks bending in their market gardens or toiling on roads and and construction sites. With new blood and better nutrition their kids are mostly average sized.
- In 1945 half or two thirds of the population of around 200 thousand was dead and everything destroyed in the ordered sacrifice of everyone; giving their all to buy 3 months more time for the home islands to prepare the final defense of a feudal autocracy. According to heart-rending accounts of personal tragedy at the Peace Memorial, most of the civilian mortality was engineered by the Japanese colonizers themselves. Food was to be conserved for the military. Starvation, forced labour and death was accordingly visited on an expendable people who had simply come a little earlier into the Co-prosperity Sphere than the Malays, Indonesians, Burmese, Chinese and so many others.
- But in the march of democracy, affluence, security and general well-being spread around by inclusion in the 'first world', the island is definitely Japanese now in spite of the huge American bases that linger on. Despite a nationalist downside they are in many ways just another heavy industry; appreciated as employment opportunity, ignored or at least tolerated.
- Between tourism, service industries, farming and the US military, people look busy enough. On the east coast reconstruction may have already overshot demand – there is a large, potentially luxurious and obviously empty apartment building sporting a broken window or two only a hundred yards from our Air B&B. It only needs a million dollar plus upgrade and a supply of holiday makers. There is an empty beach campground development right next door on the other side with tsunami signs to run 90 meters uphill if the siren sounds. They say it comes alive during school holidays. But the shops are full as are the short, winding and narrow roads; with boxy little Japanese and Korean vehicles too small for the export market, moving slow and deferentially.
- Have we or they learned anything here? Even the little tortoise shell family tombs have come into line with modernity. Mostly obliterated by the war they had dotted the hillsides, filled with jars of bones representing family lines stretching way back in time and are slowly being replaced with brutalist modern suburbs of shiny granite. The stone is quarried elsewhere; sawn, polished and installed by three man crews with a crane. Every family can apparently afford or aspire to an indulgence only a prince could expect in the past. On Conical Hill some entrepreneur has fastened a plasticised ad for his services on a wall beside the endless stairs. The dead have a choice of three standard models and no doubt custom options guaranteed to satisfy. Demand is slack but comfortably predictable.
- And on the coast the dead coral of the inter-tidal zones stretches out from the land and surrounding keys towards deeper waters. This is planet wide. Occasional dilapidated little fishing vessels moor for the day's meager harvest, protected from the swells and well within the lines of breakers that vary with the tides. A few small and brilliant fish still persist, pecking at the algae-covered bones of what once-was or follow curiously beneath you while offhandedly avoiding your touch. But on the beaches and below there are occasional pieces of clean, fresh coral stone, fixed from an ocean's worth of dissolved lime and carbon dioxide and broken off in storms from farther out or deeper down. So there are still seeds to regenerate the massive reef systems of the past. Infinitely slowly, marked by the endless slow rise and falls of tectonic plates, ice ages and oceans, tiny coral animals will rebuild this one island and thousands more; crushed in our moment beneath our marching feet. G.S.
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