Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

After a while, he’d had enough. He walked up the beach to the Outrigger Club. He passed within about ten feet of the two Japs. He wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. But they both bowed to him. He’d heard things about how touchy Japs were, so he figured he’d better nod back. That seemed to satisfy them. He’d never been sorry to get a salute for what he did on a surfboard, but he was now.

The apartment was empty when he walked in. A note lay on the bed. He picked it up. Good luck, Susie had written. It isn’t fun any more. Nothing is much fun any more. He stared down at that, then slowly nodded. It wasn’t as if she were wrong.

Then he checked the place. She hadn’t cleaned him out. Maybe that meant that, in her own way, she had style. Maybe it just meant he didn’t own anything she thought worth stealing. He went back and looked at the note again. “Good luck, Susie,” he said.

JIRO TAKAHASHI CLIMBED out of the tent where he and his sons were living. They were lucky to have even a tent. Their apartment building was a burnt-out wreck. No one had found any trace of his wife. Officially, Reiko was listed as missing. Jiro clung to that. He knew what it meant, knew what it almost had to mean. The less he had to think about that, though, the better.

Escaping the tent felt good. If he stayed in there, he’d just quarrel with Hiroshi and Kenzo again. They blamed Japan for the bombs that had left them without a home and their mother missing or worse. He blamed the Americans for not surrendering once things were hopeless. He also scorned them for surrendering at all. He didn’t even notice the inconsistency.

Before the tent city sprang up, this had been a botanical garden. A lot of the trees here had come down for the sake of firewood. At first, the haole in charge of the place had fussed about that, but people had to cook food and heat water. What were they supposed to do, go without fire?

“Ha! Takahashi!” There was old man Okamoto. He’d lost his house in the bombing, too. “You going to watch the parade?”

“I don’t know,” Jiro answered. “It’s hard to care about anything any more, you know what I mean?”

“Life is all confused,” Okamoto said.

“ Hai. Honto,” Jiro agreed. Confused he was. When the fighting started, he’d wanted Japan to teach the United States a lesson. Haoles had the arrogance to treat Japanese like inferiors. They deserved a comeuppance.

And they’d got it. Oahu belonged to the Empire of Japan. All the Hawaiian islands did. But Jiro had never imagined victory would come at such a high price to him. He’d never imagined the war would come home to civilians at all. When you thought of war, you thought of soldiers shooting at soldiers, of airplanes shooting down airplanes, of ships sinking ships. You didn’t think of bombs and shells landing on your city, on your home. You didn’t think any of your loved ones would go missing, which was only a politer way of saying get killed.

You didn’t think about that, but you were only a civilian, so what did you know? The officers in the fancy uniforms figured that war involved making your life miserable. They were the ones who gave orders to the soldiers and the airplanes and the ships. What they said went. And if you happened to get in the way… well, too bad for you.

“Come on,” old man Okamoto said. “I mean, what else have we got to do?”

Takahashi had no answer for that. He could stay here and brood. Or he could stay here and quarrel with his sons, which was a loud, external kind of brooding over whose officers in fancy uniforms were to blame for the way things were in Honolulu.

“All right,” Jiro said, his mouth making up its mind before his brain did. “Let’s go.”

To get to King Street, down which the parade would run, they had to walk down Nuuanu Avenue through the bombed-out part of town. Scavengers picked through the ruins for whatever they could salvage. Jiro walked on, his face hard and set as a stone. He would not think of Reiko lying there lost in the wreckage. He would not think that her body added to the stench of death still lingering here.

He would not-but he did.

King Street wasn’t too badly damaged. Here and there, buildings had broken windows, or perhaps plywood where windows had been. Takahashi didn’t see any craters in the street itself. Rising Sun flags fluttered from lamp poles. Okamoto pointed to one of them and said, “The Japanese consulate had people putting those up yesterday.”

“Really?” Jiro said. “I know the consul a little. I’ve sold Kita- san tuna fairly often-whenever I had some that was particularly good. And Morimura, the chancellor at the consulate, knows a good piece of fish, too.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Okamoto said. “Morimura drives all over the place. Did you ever notice? I wonder how much spying he did for Japan.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Jiro said. “I was out on the ocean. I only paid attention to him when I had fish I thought he might like.”

“Well, he did. He bought gas from me plenty of times,” Okamoto said. “And Oahu’s not a big island. You can do a lot of driving here without using much gas. So if you’re filling up twice a week, or even three times, you’re doing a lot of driving.”

Before Takahashi could answer, a Japanese boy who couldn’t have been more than six handed him a small Japanese flag on a stick. “Here, mister,” the boy said in English. He gave Okamoto a flag, too, and then went on up the sidewalk passing them out.

Following the kid with his eyes, Jiro took in the other people who’d come to watch the Imperial Japanese Army’s victory parade. Almost all of them, unsurprisingly, were Japanese themselves. Most of them were of his generation, the generation that had been born in Japan. A few men and women in their twenties and thirties accompanied them, but only a few.

“Here they come!” People pointed west. Jiro craned his neck to see better. He’d watched U.S. military parades often enough, so he had some idea what to expect. This one didn’t seem too different, not at first. Standard-bearers carrying Japanese flags led the procession. Half a dozen tanks followed them.

The tanks were both more and less impressive than Jiro had expected. They weren’t very big. But they’d plainly seen combat. They were splashed with mud and other stains. Their yellow-green paint was chipped and scarred by American bullets. Still, the bullets hadn’t penetrated their armor. The tanks were here. They’d won.

Here and there, someone would clap or shout out, “ Banzai! ” Most of the crowd stayed quiet, though. That made Jiro notice the absence of a marching band. He’d never paid much attention to the ones in American parades. Now, to his surprise, he found himself missing them.

Japanese officers stood in open cars and waved to the crowd. Unlike the tanks, the cars hadn’t come from Japan. They were convertibles with Hawaii license plates. That didn’t bother Takahashi too much. If you won, you captured what you needed. Japan had won.

Behind the tanks and the officers came regiment after regiment of Japanese soldiers. More “ Banzai! ”s and applause rang out for them. They marched proudly, eyes straight ahead, faces expressionless, bayoneted rifles on their shoulders.

“They look brave. They look tough,” Jiro said to old man Okamoto. The other Japanese nodded.

And then sudden silence slammed down on the crowd. After the neat ranks of imperial soldiers, and plainly included as a contrast, shambled a swarm of American prisoners. The U.S. Army men went up the street in no particular order. They were skinny. They were dirty. They were unshaven. Their uniforms were torn and filthy. Most of them trudged along with their heads down, as if they didn’t want to meet the eyes of the people staring at them.