Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Yosh Nakayama stood up on a table to translate for Hirabayashi. The gardener’s face was impassive as he turned the major’s excited Japanese into far more stolid-seeming English. “The Japanese Empire announces that the island of Corregidor has surrendered to imperial forces under General Homma. The Empire also announces the fall of Port Moresby in New Guinea.” He had to go back and forth with Hirabayashi several times before he got that one straight.

Jane knew where New Guinea was, but couldn’t have said where on the island Port Moresby lay to save herself from Hirabayashi’s sword. She knew New Guinea wasn’t far from Australia. If the Japs were taking towns there, were they looking to go after the Land Down Under next?

Could anybody stop them? Up until the day she threw Fletch out, he’d insisted that the USA could kick Japan around the block. She’d thought he knew what he was talking about. On the evidence so far, he’d been as misguided a soldier as he had been a husband.

“ Banzai! for the Japanese Empire!” Nakayama said.

“ Banzai! ” the people of Wahiawa said. Jane hated herself for joining the cheer. You couldn’t get out of it, though. Bad things happened to people who tried. It wasn’t even safe to mouth the word without saying it out loud. Somebody would be watching you. Somebody would be listening to you. You couldn’t show your thoughts anywhere, not if they weren’t the sort of thoughts the Japs wanted you to have.

She looked around the crowd. More than a few people in Wahiawa had cheered when the American bombers flew over the town on their way to plaster the Japanese planes at Wheeler Field. There were missing faces these days. What had happened to the men and women who’d disappeared? The people who knew weren’t talking. Not knowing only made their fate more frightening to everyone else.

And who had betrayed them? Obviously, you were a fool to trust any of the local Japanese. That didn’t mean none of them was trustworthy. Some of the younger ones really were patriotic Americans. But others pretended, and were good at pretending. Finding out who belonged to which group could cost you your neck. Much less dangerous to think of all of them as menaces.

Much as Jane wished it did, that didn’t mean all whites were reliable. Some of them didn’t even bother to hide their collaboration. They, at least, were honestly disgusting. The snakes hiding in the grass were the ones that killed when they bit, though.

As for Chinese and Filipinos, they barely entered into Jane’s calculations. She’d had little to do with them before the war started, and she still had little to do with them. To her, they were more nearly part of the landscape than people in their own right.

Major Hirabayashi spoke in Japanese once more. “You can go now,” Yosh Nakayama said laconically. The local commandant had probably said something like, You are dismissed. That was how people who ran things talked. The only thing Nakayama had ever run was his nursery. He didn’t talk fancy.

Jane despised him less than she had when he first became Hirabayashi’s right-hand man. He did what he could for Wahiawa. He passed on the Jap’s orders without glorying in them and without seeming to imagine they came from him. She would have thought more of him if he’d chosen to have nothing to do with the major, but he could have been worse.

She wanted to go back to her apartment, put her feet up, and do nothing for a while. What she wanted to do and what she had to do were two different things. It was back to the potato plot to weed and to pick bugs off the plants and to smash them once she had picked them off.

Every time she looked at her hands, she wanted to cry. Those calluses, those short, ragged, black-rimmed nails… Things would have been even worse if everybody else’s hands weren’t about the same. As Jane worked, she watched tendons jut and muscles surge under her skin. She’d lost weight; she didn’t think she had an ounce of fat anywhere on her body. But she was stronger than she’d ever been in her life.

Of course, she was also working harder than she ever had in her life. Teaching third grade was nothing next to keeping a garden plot going. Somewhere not far down her family tree were farmers. That was true of almost everyone. Now she understood why they’d gone to town and found other lines of work. What she didn’t understand was why anybody who didn’t have to grow crops did. You had to be starving or nuts to break your back like this every day… didn’t you?

On her way to the plot, two Japanese soldiers came up the sidewalk toward her. She stepped aside and bowed as they tramped past. They walked by as if she didn’t exist. That was better than when they leered. When they leered, she had all she could do not to run away. There hadn’t been a lot of rapes in Wahiawa, but there had been some. One of the women had had the courage to protest to Major Hirabayashi afterwards. It hadn’t done her any good. Nobody was going to punish the Japs for anything they did to locals.

Once Jane was weeding with her head down, she felt a little safer. Not only was she less visible, but other locals were around her. They would squawk if Japanese soldiers tried to drag her away. How much those squawks would help… She tried not to think about that.

In fact, she tried not to think about anything. If she didn’t think, she could get through a minute at a time, an hour at a time, a day at a time. Whatever happened, it would simply be… gone. And with most of what happened these days, it was better that way.

AS USUAL, JIRO TAKAHASHI was by himself when he took fish up to the Japanese consulate. He wished Hiroshi or Kenzo would come with him, but he didn’t try to talk them into it. He’d given up on trying to talk them into anything that had anything to do with politics or with the war. Their ideas were as fixed as his. (That wasn’t precisely how he looked at it, of course. To him, they were a pair of stubborn young fools.)

He bowed to the guards outside the building. They returned the courtesy. “It’s the Fisherman!” one of them said. “What have you got today, Fisherman? Anything especially good?” He licked his lips.

Laughing, Jiro shook his head. “Just some ahi. It was a pretty slow run, out there on the ocean.”

“ Ahi is good,” the guard said. “Not that we ever get more than a mouthful-and not even that very often. Eh, boys?” The other Japanese soldiers mournfully nodded agreement.

“Ah, too bad.” Jiro sounded sympathetic, but he wasn’t much surprised. No doubt Consul Kita and Chancellor Morimura kept what they wanted from the presents he brought. Only when they were satisfied would any go to the people who made them safer and more comfortable. That wasn’t very nice, but it was the way the world worked. It always had been, and it probably always would be.

“Well, it’s not your fault,” the guard said, and bowed again. “Go on in.” He stepped aside. One of the other soldiers opened the door for Takahashi.

Inside the consulate, a secretary smiled to see him. “Good day, Takahashi- san,” the man said. “Would you like to say hello to the consul?”

“Yes, please, if he’s not too busy,” Jiro answered. “If he is, I can leave the fish with the chancellor.” He wouldn’t entrust them to an underling like this fellow. With food in Hawaii so tight these days, that was asking to have some of his gift disappear before the people for whom it was intended ever saw it.

“Well, he’s talking with a reporter from the Nippon jiji,” the secretary answered. “Let me ask him what he wants to do. Please excuse me for a moment.” He got up and went into a back room. When he returned, he was smiling. “Kita- san says please join him. Come with me.”