Harry Turtledove: Days of Infamy

Genda could hardly hide his jubilation. He’d been far from sure he could persuade the older man that this was a needful course. Rear Admiral Onishi hadn’t been able to see it. But Yamamoto, as his mutilated hand showed, was of the generation that had fought the Russo-Japanese War, the war that had begun with a surprise Japanese attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur. He was alive to the advantages of getting in the first punch and making it count.

Yamamoto was. Were others? Anxiously, Commander Genda asked, “Are you sure you can persuade the Army to play its part in this plan?” Without Army cooperation, it wouldn’t work. Yamamoto had rubbed Genda’s nose in that. He hated the knowledge. That those Army blockheads might hold Japan back from its best-its only, he was convinced-chance to fight the USA and have some hope of winning was intolerable.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto leaned forward a few inches. He was not a big man, and it was not a large motion. Nevertheless, it made him seem to take up the entire room and to look down on Genda from a considerable height when in fact their eyes were level. “You may leave that to me, Commander,” Yamamoto said in a voice that might have come from a kami ’s throat rather than a man’s. Genda hastened to salute. When Yamamoto spoke like that, who could doubt him? No one. No one at all.

COAL SMOKE BELCHING from its stack, the locomotive pulled into the railroad yard at Esashi, in northernmost Hokkaido. Behind it, the troop train rattled and clattered to a halt. Corporal Takeo Shimizu looked out the window and shook his head. “It’s not much like home, is it?”

All the privates in his squad hastened to shake their heads. “Oh, no,” they chorused. Shimizu had every right to thump them if they gave him any trouble. He took less advantage of the privilege than some underofficers did. A round-faced farmer’s son, he hadn’t been promoted to corporal as soon as he might have because his superiors wondered if he was too easygoing for his own good.

One of the soldiers, a skinny little fellow named Shiro Wakuzawa, said, “I’d sure rather be back in Hiroshima right now. It’s hundreds of kilometers south of here, and we wouldn’t be shivering in our seats.” The rest of the squad nodded again. A coal-fired stove at the front of the passenger car did next to nothing to hold the chill outside at bay.

“No grumbling,” Shimizu said. “We will uphold the honor of the Fifth Division.” His squad was only a tiny part of the division, but he did not want to let the larger unit down in any way. That was especially true because he didn’t want to lose face before friends, neighbors, and relatives. The whole division came from the Hiroshima region.

Wakuzawa, who had an aisle seat, leaned forward so he could look out the window, too. He stared this way and that, then shook his head in obvious disappointment.

“What were you looking for?” Shimizu asked, curious in spite of himself.

“Hairy Ainu,” Wakuzawa answered. “They’re supposed to live on Hokkaido, aren’t they? They have beards up to here”-he touched his face just below his eyes-“and down to here.” He tapped himself in the middle of the chest.

Corporal Shimizu rolled his eyes. “And you expect to find them in the middle of a railroad yard? What do you use for brains? If they work here, they’ve got to shave so they look like everybody else. I’m hairy, too”-he was proud of his thick beard-“but I shave.”

The other soldiers jeered at Wakuzawa. The corporal had, so they joined in. He looked properly abashed. That was smart of him. He was just a first-year conscript, with no rights and no privileges. If he got out of line, they’d give him lumps. They might give him lumps anyhow, on general principles.

Lieutenant Osami Yonehara, who commanded the platoon of which Corporal Shimizu’s squad was a part, got up and called, “Everybody out! Get your gear! Form column of fours by the car. Move, move, move!” He was shouting by the time he was done. His officer’s sword banged against his hip. He was an educated man as well as an officer, which made the gulf between him and the men he led twice as wide. Shimizu didn’t worry about it. Officers gave orders and men obeyed. That was how things worked.

A nasty cold breeze blew down from the north. It felt as if it hadn’t touched a thing since it started up in Siberia. Corporal Shimizu’s teeth started to chatter. Somebody behind him said, “Why didn’t they give us winter uniforms? My balls are crawling up into my belly.”

“Silence in the ranks!” Shimizu shouted, to show he was on the job in case one of his superiors heard the grumbler.

“Forward-march!” The command came from Lieutenant Colonel Mitsuo Fujikawa, the regimental commander. March the soldiers did. Shimizu hadn’t the faintest idea where he was going. He didn’t worry about it. Somebody set above him would know. All he had to do was follow the man in front of him.

Through the streets of Esashi they tramped. Women on their way to shops and workmen gaped at them as they strode past. Some of the workmen had on Western-style overalls and cloth caps. Most of the women wore kimonos, not dresses. Shimizu thought more people back home used Western clothes than was true up here. His slung rifle thumped his shoulderblade at every step. That always annoyed him, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

Around the railroad yard, the buildings were Western style: square, boring structures of brick and concrete. Then the Eleventh Regiment went through an older part of town. Roofs curved and arched. Wood and paper replaced brick. To Shimizu, that made pretty good sense. In an earthquake, brickwork came down on your head. And the purely Japanese buildings looked a lot more interesting than the ones built on Western lines.

When they got to the harbor, Western buildings predominated again. They went with machinery, as they did in the railroad yards. They seemed more solid and sturdy than their Japanese equivalents. And the machinery, or the ideas behind the machinery, came from the West, too. Perhaps it was more at home in familiar structures.

Gulls wheeled and mewed overhead. They descended on fishing boats in vast skrawking clouds, hoping for a handout or a theft. The salt tang of the sea-slightly sullied by sewage-filled Shimizu’s nostrils.

He trudged up a pier toward a big merchant ship. Her name- Nagata Maru — was painted in hiragana and in Roman letters on her stern. Up the gangplank he went. His boots clanged on the iron plates of the deck. Sailors stared at him as if he were nothing but a monkey. He glared back, but only to show he wasn’t intimidated. On land, he knew what he was doing. But this was the sailors’ world. Maybe he wasn’t a monkey to them. Maybe he was just… cargo.

“This way,” Lieutenant Yonehara called, and led them down a hatch into the hold. The Nagata Maru had been a freight hauler. Now the freight she would haul was men. Double racks of rough, unsanded wood had been run up in the hold. Each one held a straw mat. They had numbers painted on them. Yonehara checked them. “My platoon goes here.” He raised his voice to make himself heard over the clatter of more soldiers marching with their hobnailed boots on the steel deck not far enough overhead.

Two of his squads got upper racks, two lowers. Corporal Shimizu and his men were assigned to uppers. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. They were right under the deck and could bang their heads if they sat up carelessly, but nobody was spilling anything on them from above.

The hold filled and filled and filled. The mats on the racks were very close together. If a man rolled over, he was liable to bump into the fellow next to him. “Packing us in like sardines,” Corporal Shimizu said.