Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Now that she’d gone and made it, she wished she hadn’t. Part of the island remained free, but not her part. If she was wrong, if the Army could somehow stop the Japs…

She wondered how Fletch was doing. She hoped he was still alive and fighting, at least as much because an artilleryman could really hurt the Japs as because, up till fairly recently, she’d loved him. She hadn’t seen him in the American retreat through town. Who could say what that proved, though, or if it proved anything?

Time crawled by. The gunfire gradually sputtered into silence. And then a man shouting something broke the silence. As he got closer, Jane managed to make out what he was saying: “Everyone come to the corner of Makani and California at four o’clock. The Japanese commander will give the rules for the occupation. Makani and California! Four o’clock! Rules for the occupation! You have to be there!” Whoever he was, he spoke good English, with only a slight Japanese accent.

Was he an invader who’d learned the language in college on the mainland? Or was he a local Jap doing what the occupiers told him? Would the local Japs do what the occupiers told them? Were they cheering to see the Stars and Stripes come down and the Rising Sun go up? Some of them are, I bet, Jane thought furiously.

She wondered if she ought to go listen to the Jap commander, or if the order was a trick or a trap. Reluctantly, she decided she had to take the chance. If the Japs gave more orders at this gathering, she didn’t want to get shot for not knowing what the rules were. Makani and California was only a few blocks east of Kamehameha Highway, and only a few from her building. She locked the door behind her when she left, not that that would do much good against a rifle butt.

Other people were also coming out of hiding. Jane waved and nodded to the ones she recognized. They all tried to pretend the Japanese soldiers prowling the streets weren’t there. The Japs just eyed the haoles. They talked with the Japanese who’d lived in Wahiawa. Some of those Japanese answered, too. Tone of voice was plenty to tell Jane the shoe was on the other foot, all right.

One of the local Japanese, a man who ran a nursery, stood on a table with a Jap officer at Makani and California. The local man translated for the invader: “Major Hirabayashi says that from now on you must bow to all soldiers of the Empire of Japan. You must make way for them on the street. Soldiers may stay with people here. If they do, you will be responsible for their room and board.”

The locals muttered at that. They did no more than mutter, though, not with soldiers all around. Major Hirabayashi went on, “All guns must be turned in. Anyone found with a gun after three days’ time will be executed. Also, all food in Wahiawa will be shared. When ordered, you will deliver your supplies to a central distribution point. Anyone caught hoarding after that will also be executed.”

More mutters. A dull horror washed over Jane. So much for what she’d bought. If only she lived in a house with a yard. She could have buried some by dead of night. Not with only an apartment around her, and lots of nosy neighbors. Maybe I should have run away after all.

THE OSHIMA MARU ’S planking throbbed under Jiro Takahashi’s feet. Diesel growling at the sampan’s stern, it scooted out into the Pacific. Takahashi was happy. “Now we get to go work again,” he said. Staying at home without working had been harder on him than all the backbreaking labor he went through here on the ocean.

His sons seemed less delighted. “Merry Christmas,” Hiroshi said, in sarcastic English. Jiro had always bought the boys presents at Christmastime. Why not? Everybody else did. But for the presents, though, the day meant nothing to him. What difference did a haole holiday make?

In Japanese hardly less sardonic, Kenzo added, “You know why they’ve let us go out again, don’t you, Father?”

“I don’t care why,” Jiro said. “Isn’t it good to breathe clean air?” The tank farms at Pearl Harbor had mostly burned themselves out by now, but acrid, eye-stinging haze still filled the air in Honolulu. No sooner had Jiro praised the air away from the city than he lit a cigarette. “Have to be careful with these,” he remarked. “They’re starting to run low.”

“They’re starting to run low on everything,” Kenzo said. “That’s why they’ve let the sampans out. They really need the fish we bring back.”

“As long as there’s diesel fuel, we’ll do all right,” Jiro said. “Lots of things can happen to a fisherman, but he probably won’t starve.”

“How long will there be diesel fuel?” Hiroshi asked. “It comes from the mainland just like everything else. It came from the mainland, I mean. Nothing’s going in or out, not any more.”

“If Japan wins, she can send us diesel fuel,” Jiro said.

To his annoyance, Hiroshi and Kenzo both laughed at him. “Don’t you remember, Father?” his older son said. “One of the big reasons Japan got into a fight with the United States was that we wouldn’t sell them oil any more. They won’t have any to spare for Hawaii.” Kenzo nodded in agreement with his brother.

Jiro glared at his sons. He had forgotten about the oil embargo. Not only were they rude for laughing, they were right, which made it three times as bad. And, to Hiroshi and Kenzo, the United States was we and Japan was they. Jiro had already bumped into that, but he liked it no better now.

Hiroshi rubbed his nose in the point: “Everything except pineapple and sugar comes from the mainland, just about. If we need blue jeans or shoes or canned milk or canned corn or flour for bread or-or-anything, they have to ship it in.”

“Remember when they had the dock strike on the West Coast five years ago?” Kenzo added. “We were down to two weeks’ worth of food by the time it ended-and that was when things were coming in from the East Coast, and from Australia and Japan, too. Where will we get supplies now? We’ll start going hungry a lot faster.”

“All right. All right.” Jiro wanted to cuff both of them. He couldn’t. They were grown men, and both bigger than he was. And they were so very, very different from him. He wondered what he’d done wrong. If he’d been a better father, wouldn’t he have had sons who were more Japanese?

He busied himself on the sampan, not that there was much to do. The engine chugged away. It was noisy, but it was reliable. He almost wished it would have broken down. That would have given him the excuse to haul out the tool kit and tinker with it. Then he could have ignored his milkshake-guzzling, hamburger-munching boys. As things were, he just stared back toward the receding bulk of Oahu.

Hiroshi said something in English. Kenzo laughed. Neither of them bothered to translate for Jiro. They must be talking about me, he thought resentfully. They thought they knew everything and their old man didn’t know anything. Well, by the look of things, they’d backed the wrong horse in the war. Every day the rumble of artillery came closer to Honolulu. The Japanese advanced. The Americans retreated. They couldn’t retreat much farther, or they’d go into the Pacific.

He felt the way the Oshima Maru bumped over the waves. He watched terns and boobies and frigate birds. He remembered gulls raucous over the Inner Sea when he was young. They could guide a fisherman to schools of smelt or mackerel. But gulls, except for rare vagrants, didn’t come to Hawaii. A man had to use what other birds gave him.

There were boobies, plunging into the sea. Japanese dive bombers must have looked like that when they swooped down on the American ships at Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t gone into the sea, though; they’d pulled up and flown away to strike again and again. “ Banzai! ” Jiro said softly. “ Banzai! ” He didn’t think his sons heard him. That was just as well.