Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Kiyoshi Aiso nodded. “ Hai. Bananas. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. They may look like us, but they think like Americans.”

“ Ah, so desu! Now I understand. Bananas!” Shimizu wondered who’d come up with that. It was pretty funny.

Aiso might have been reading his mind. “You may laugh now, but you won’t if you run into trouble. And don’t go wandering off by yourself or let your men do anything dumb like that. Somebody knocked a soldier over the head and stole his rifle the other day.”

“My men and I will be careful,” Shimizu promised. “Why did the Americans want a Japanese rifle? Even after all the sweeps we’ve done, I think this little island has more small arms on it than all of Japan put together.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aiso said. “Whoever slugged the soldier was probably after him first and took the rifle as an afterthought.”

Shimizu nodded. That made sense. He warned his squad the same way the older corporal had warned him. The men all looked attentive. He looked like that whenever a superior addressed him, too. He knew it didn’t necessarily mean anything. Half the time he’d been thinking about something else, no matter what his face said. Half the squad was likely to be thinking about something else now.

“Let’s go,” Shimizu barked, and off they went.

They made a fine martial spectacle, backs straight, helmets all just so, bayonets gleaming in the sun. Locals scrambled to get out of their way and bowed as they tramped past. People of Japanese blood did it right. The others? They obeyed the requirement, but they still didn’t really understand what they were doing.

Back and forth went Shimizu’s gaze. Trouble might come from anywhere, Aiso had said. If somebody’d been brave-or foolhardy-enough to take on a fully armed Japanese soldier, the other noncom was right, too. Shimizu wondered whether the attacker had killed the soldier. Shimizu hoped so, as much for the man’s sake as for any other reason. Anyone who suffered a disgrace like that was better off dead.

A policeman escorted a fisherman with a string of silvery fish along the street. Otherwise, he would have been a real candidate for getting clobbered. The policeman was white, the fisherman Japanese. Because of his job, the policeman retained the pistol he’d worn before Honolulu changed hands. But, like anyone else here, he bowed when the Japanese soldiers marched by.

Senior Private Furusawa said, “I still don’t like seeing Americans walking around with guns.”

“Policemen don’t worry me too much,” Shimizu said. “They’re watchdogs, not wolves. They’ll do what the people in charge of them tell them to do-and we’re the people in charge of them now.”

“ Hai,” Furusawa said. That wasn’t agreement; it was only acknowledgment that he heard the corporal. Shimizu knew as much. He shrugged, ever so slightly. Furusawa didn’t have to agree with him. The senior private did have to stay polite, and he had.

Cars sat next to the curb, quite a few of them on flat tires. Hardly any rolled down the street these days; fuel was too short for that. Even seeing them immobilized, though, reminded Shimizu of how different Hawaii was from Japan. Honolulu wasn’t anywhere near as big as Hiroshima, but it boasted far more automobiles. They were perhaps the most prominent mark of American wealth.

The corporal shrugged again. Who cares how rich the Yankees were? We beat them anyway. They were easier to beat because they were rich. It made them soft. Men set above Shimizu had said that a great many times. They’d said it so often, they undoubtedly believed it. He wasn’t so sure. The Americans he’d fought hadn’t shown any signs of softness. They’d lost, but nobody could say they hadn’t fought hard.

Everything seemed quiet this morning. That was the idea behind patrolling. Marching through Honolulu, making the Japanese presence felt, was the best way to stop trouble before it started. Remind the locals that the Army was keeping an eye on them and they wouldn’t get gay. Leave them alone, and who could say what might happen?

A pretty woman with yellow hair bowed as the soldiers went by. The light cotton dress she wore covered much less of her than would have been proper back in Japan. Several of Shimizu’s men gave her a thorough inspection. He looked her over himself. If they decided to drag her into a building and enjoy her one after another, who could stop them? Nobody. The fright on her face as she bowed said she knew it, too.

“Keep going, you lugs,” Shimizu said. “Maybe another time.” A couple of the soldiers sighed, but they obeyed. Honolulu hadn’t been treated as roughly as Chinese towns were when they fell… and Shimizu, a good-natured man, preferred his women willing.

It was midafternoon when they headed back toward the barracks. Nothing much had happened on patrol, which didn’t break Shimizu’s heart. He approved of routine while he was prowling the streets. Anything that wasn’t routine was too likely to be messy and dangerous.

Getting back in the company of lots of Japanese soldiers felt good. It meant he didn’t have to look over his shoulder and wonder whether all hell would break loose when he rounded the next corner.

So he thought, anyway, till a freight-train noise in the air made him throw himself flat. His body recognized that sound before his mind did-and before the incoming shell burst less than a hundred meters away. Most of his men hit the dirt, too. Few who’d met artillery forgot it in a hurry.

Another shell crashed down by the barracks, and another, and another. Only after the third or fourth burst did Shimizu wonder where they were coming from. Out of the south, by the sound, but what lay south of Honolulu? The Pacific, nothing else.

“Submarine!” someone shouted, his voice half heard through the crashing impacts and the screams of wounded men.

Submarine! Shimizu swore. I should have thought of that myself. A sub could sneak close to shore, surface, use its deck gun against whatever it felt like shooting up, and then disappear under the sea again.

That had hardly crossed Shimizu’s mind before the shelling stopped. He cautiously raised his head, ready to flatten out again in a hurry if more rounds roared in. But the bombardment did seem to be over. He looked around. The men in his own squad were scrambling to their feet. None of them seemed more than scratched.

Not all the Japanese by the barracks were so lucky. Injured soldiers went on shrieking their pain up to the uncaring tropical sky. And others weren’t men at all any more, but disjointed chunks of meat. Someone’s foot lay only a couple of meters from Shimizu. The body from which the foot had come was nowhere to be seen. Men who hadn’t been hurt started bandaging their comrades and tying off bleeding wounds with tourniquets to try to keep people alive till doctors could see to them.

The barracks had taken a beating, too. Windows were shattered. Walls had holes in them. The building didn’t seem to be burning. Shimizu wondered why. Dumb luck was the only thing that occurred to him.

He looked out toward the ocean. He saw no submarine, but it wouldn’t have surfaced for a second longer than it had to. It was bound to be underwater now, crawling away after striking its blow.

A few minutes later, airplanes started buzzing over the ocean south of Honolulu. One of them dropped a stick of bombs-or would they be depth charges? Even distant explosions set Shimizu’s nerves on edge. He wondered whether that pilot had really seen something or was blowing things up just to be blowing them up. Either way, he’d never know.

Shiro Wakuzawa came up to him. Sounding surprisingly cheerful, the youngster said, “One good thing, Corporal- san.”