Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

She still had running water in her apartment. She didn’t have hot water, though, and she couldn’t even make any on the stove. Like the water heater, the stove ran on natural gas. There was no more natural gas for them to run on. A cold shower in January would have been an invitation to double pneumonia-to say nothing of frostbite-in Columbus. Here in Wahiawa, it was refreshing, as long as she didn’t linger under the water too long.

No more shampoo, either. Jane did still have a couple of bars of Ivory left after the one she was using. What she would do once the last suds gurgled down the drain, she didn’t know. Her mouth twisted as she brushed her hair in front of the mirror. Figuring out what she’d do then wasn’t very hard. One of her pupils could have done it with no trouble at all. She’d be filthy and she’d stink, that was what.

Other such worries were cropping up, too. She was almost out of Kotex pads. Like everything else, those came, or had come, from the mainland. What would she use without them? Rags, she supposed. What else was there? Her mouth twisted again, harder this time.

She put on a sun dress to go to the communal supper. It was fairly clean: she didn’t do farm work in it. Most people dressed a little nicer than usual for supper. Some didn’t bother.

A couple of Japanese soldiers with rifles on their shoulders strode up the street toward her. She got out of their way and bowed, holding the pose till they’d gone past. They mostly didn’t bother people who followed the rules they’d set. Mostly. But you never could tell. That was part of what made them so scary.

Supper was rice and noodles with a little tomato sauce and some canned mushrooms for flavor. Dessert was canned pineapple. That had been the only dessert for some time. Jane was sick of it, but ate it anyhow. Her body cried out for all the food it could get. Supper wasn’t really enough. When she finished, she didn’t feel she was starving any more, but she didn’t feel full, either.

Everybody else seemed as tired as she was. Nobody said much. Nobody said anything at all about the Japs. Early on, a woman had cursed them at a communal meal. A couple of days later, she abruptly stopped showing up. No one had seen her since. Somebody had listened to her. Somebody had betrayed her. Nobody knew who, or even whether the informer was Japanese, Chinese, or haole. Nobody was inclined to take a chance. The first lesson of tyranny: shut up and keep your head down, Jane thought.

Something with eyes that glowed in the dark startled her as she was walking home. After a moment, she realized it was only a cat. She relaxed and walked on. And then, all unbidden, a phrase she’d heard in an Italian restaurant in Columbus popped into her mind: roof rabbit. The fellow who’d said it had laughed. So had the girl with him. Maybe an occasional cat had gone into the pot back in the old country. People in America didn’t do things like that… did they?

What Jane thought was, A lot more meat on a cat than on one of those little zebra doves. Spit flooded into her mouth. It had been a while since she’d tasted meat. Then tears stung her eyes. Was this what hunger, and fear of hunger, did to people? She nodded to herself, there in the night. So it seemed.

CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU stood in a long line at a Japanese field post office in Honolulu. The package he carried was addressed to his parents. The line moved with the glacial pace of post-office lines everywhere. He didn’t care. He’d expected nothing different. Sooner or later, he’d get to the front of it. He didn’t have anything else going on in the meantime.

At last, he came up to a clerk. The man looked even more bored than Shimizu felt. “Contents of the package?” he asked. By his tone, he couldn’t have cared less.

“Souvenirs of war: an American flag and a bayonet I took from the rifle of a dead Yankee,” Shimizu answered. “I want my honorable parents to see that I have not been idle here.”

The postal clerk grunted. Had he seen any combat while the Japanese were overrunning Oahu? Shimizu wouldn’t have bet on it. Some people always managed to land soft jobs behind the lines. The clerk threw the package on a scale. “Postage is seventy-five sen,” he announced.

Shimizu gave him a one-yen coin and got his change. The clerk put stamps on the package. They were, Shimizu saw, American stamps. But they had a blue overprint that said Hawaii in Japanese characters. One was also overprinted 50, the other 25.

“Our islands now,” Shimizu said, not without a certain pride. He’d earned the right to be proud, as far as he was concerned. The Hawaiian Islands were Japanese now because of him and men like him.

“ Hai.” The clerk sounded indifferent. He didn’t quite yawn in Shimizu’s face, but he came close. What were you to do with such people? Yes, my friend, have you ever seen machine-gun fire? Shimizu wondered. How would you like it if you did? Would you still be bored? I doubt it.

He stepped away from the clerk. Another Japanese soldier walked up with a bigger, heavier package than the one he’d just mailed. What was in that one? Clothes, maybe, Shimizu thought. Shirts and trousers would make very good spoils of war to send home.

When Shimizu went outside, a white woman was walking up the street toward him. She hastily dipped her head-it wasn’t much of a bow, but it would do-and got out of his way. He walked past her as if she didn’t exist. He’d never seen a white woman before he landed on Oahu. He could count the times he’d seen white men on the fingers of one hand.

A local Japanese man about his own age who wore American-style clothes did a better job of bowing. With him, Shimizu felt he could unbend a little: “This is the prettiest country in the world. You’re lucky to live here all the time.”

“Please talk slow,” the local said. “Talk only little Japanese. So sorry.” He wasn’t kidding. He didn’t just have a peasant accent, either. He had the sort of accent an English-speaker would. He might look Japanese on the outside, but he was American where it counted.

Corporal Shimizu felt betrayed. “Why didn’t your parents teach you the way they should have?” he asked angrily.

The young man flinched as if Shimizu had threatened him with a bayonet. “So sorry,” he said again. He sounded tolerably Japanese when he brought out the stock phrase. But then he went on, fumbling for words and butchering his grammar: “Grandfather, grandmother come here. Father, mother born here. They speak Japanese with grandfather, grandmother, speak English with me. Speak Japanese when no want I to know what they meaning. I learn some, not much. English number one here.”

“Disgraceful,” Shimizu said. What was even more disgraceful was that the young local didn’t even understand the word. Shimizu tried again: “Bad.”

Yes, the local got that. He bowed again, repeating, “ Gomen nasai.” Shimizu didn’t care if he was sorry or not. He jerked his thumb down the street. The young man hurried away.

When Shimizu got back to his company’s encampment, he was still in a foul mood. “What’s the matter, Corporal- san?” Shiro Wakuzawa asked. “You look like you could bite nails in two.”

“I’ll tell you, that’s how I feel,” Shimizu said. The story of the young man who could hardly speak Japanese poured out of him. “And he was happy that way!” he raged. “Happy! English number one here, he said-‘English ichi-ban.” He mocked the way the local spoke. “And he couldn’t even understand when I told him what a disgrace he was.”

“So sorry, Corporal,” Wakuzawa said. That did nothing to make Shimizu feel better. It just reminded him of the Hawaiian Japanese stuttering apologies. Private Wakuzawa went on, “Everything is pretty crazy here, though. Some of the policemen in Honolulu are Koreans. Koreans, if you can believe it! And everybody, even the Japanese, even the whites, has to do what they say.”