The Boy My Father Was

Bombs rained down out of the sky like shrieking messengers of doom. Life became a round of rice and tea and running for the bomb shelters. In the years of 1944-45, my father was a very little boy in Yokohama, on the verge of entering school and witnessing the end of World War II.

In 1944 the Japanese suffered losses in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and on Guam. The Battle of Leyte Gulf in October effectively destroyed the fighting capability of the Japanese navy. In 1945, the invasion of Okinawa led to horrendous death and destruction. The atom bombs would be dropped in August, and in the meantime, B-20 bombers continued to drop their destructive cargoes on Japanese cities.

As the bombs dropped, a little boy, whose father and brother were away at war, took for granted the events into which he had been born. Life had always been this way, since the first dawning of conscious thought and the first words uttered from an innocent mouth. Innocence leaves us all eventually, casting us from its protective shelter into a world which overwhelms us with contradictory images and ugly truths. In a world at war, these images are sharper, etched into our consciousness by brutal reality. As so often happens, children living in a war torn world cut their baby teeth on reality, never knowing innocence in its ideal form. I believe this loss formed the character of the man my father would become, and it is historical imagination which allows me to paint a picture of the boy I never knew and understand the man with whom I have a troubled relationship.

On a beautiful day during these less than beautiful years, this little boy played in the woods not far from home, doing what little boys do. As I watch my own six year old son, I see a boy throwing rocks, climbing trees and chasing birds. I do not have to listen for the sound of an air raid siren, and my son has no concept of the ear-splitting wails cutting through the air of a peaceful afternoon, but I hear it in my imagination. This boy knows what to do as easily as he knows how to run. He runs through the woods toward the family bomb shelter and the comfort of his mother and sisters. They are not there.

My father's story, told to two little girls around the dining room table, ends here. He told us that he later discovered the rest of the family had taken shelter with neighbors they had been visiting. He did not speak of the terror a six year old boy must have felt, huddled alone with the sounds of explosions ringing in his ears. He did not speak of a fear of abandonment or the terrible conviction that his family must be dead. The stories he told us were tiny, blurred photographs of the life he led. He spoke of climbing a tree to the very top and seeing in the distance the white speck of a parachute floating to the earth. He spoke of the years after the war, and made us smile with his word portraits of a group of little Japanese boys playing cowboys and Indians. I thought I understood when he said that everyone wanted to be an Indian and no one wanted to be a cowboy. We begged for more stories and were treated to vignettes of a life that two little, American suburban girls in ponytails and saddle shoes found completely foreign. We could not comprehend how a group of ten year old boys could travel by themselves on a cross country camping trip, when we were told never to talk to strangers.

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