Suntory Special Reserve directly answered Owen’s question. “You’re asking me about Unit 731 in Harbin? That’s rich. I translated maybe half of reports coming out from that place, right after the war. In Tokyo, for Ambassador Atcheson. On a top secret basis since a lot of the doctors involved in the Unit were going to the U.S. to help bio-warfare there, and the other half were escaping judgment in Tokyo. They were held long enough to determine their accurate status, and then eventually tossed back into Japanese life, where most of them found good work, good pay, and local status as having passed through the toughest container offered by the Occupation—jail until D.C. decided what to do with them. I went home, and, bingo, the great change of ‘47 suddenly made all those sadists and butchers, a pretty pathetic and very, very silent lot indeed, made all of them wonderful Japanese citizens again, and dispersed them back into Japanese life. Some of them run hospitals and med schools in every major Japanese city, especially Kanazawa. It turned out perfectly for them. We forgot to bomb Kanazawa and so, the old Japan was wonderfully preserved and who should return to the old Japan, but the cream of the old Japanese medical profession. Not jail terms, not execution for savagery or atrocity or whatever you want to call it. No. Just reclaimed status. Healers of the sick, keepers of the flame of Japaneseness. Talk about tatemae/honne. Jesus! Can you hold bifurcated views in your same brain? These people sure can. Some of the best were taken to the good old U.S.A. for ‘extended debriefing,’ but most just reabsorbed, as if they had never been gone. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Well, let’s see for a good while in Manchuria I dissected living human beings without anesthesia, so their blood and organs would not be fouled by anything to make the suffering less. And then on the weekends I got to freeze and hack children to death. I got to saw off arms and soak kids in salt water and watch them freeze outside and monitor how their breathing eventually stopped. That’s what I did in the war. And now of course I took all that knowledge, after I shared it with the Americans in their heavy smelly boots, and now I put it to use to ease the suffering of my fellow citizens.’ ‘Oh Daddy, you were so brave in the war. How we love you.’”
Hesseltine poured another four ounces of Suntory Special Reserve and nodded at Owen who thought the sunlight off the varnished table was glitzy-dizzying for a moment.
“They put me in a room near the makeshift initial embassy and I reported directly and solely to Ambassador Atcheson, who seemed to get more and more agitated as we brought him more and more details of the Unit’s wonderful work.”
“We?” Owen asked.
“Sumi and me. They sent me a fellow from Waseda’s law school, Taro Sumi He teaches at Keio now. There’s an irony, the Waseda boy is now a Keio boy—only the Occupation could have arranged that. We had a bitch of time translating terms from medical Japanese to English. Even Sumi, who knew just about everything, couldn’t crack some of the writing. Who had knowledge of the Japanese terms for ‘Lycophilization’ for example, ‘excision of phelgmon ascites?’ We used to go to Roppongi bars at night after all day reading through atrocity after atrocity. We’d sit in some creepy nomiya, some crappy sake bar and we’d recite the Japanese phrases we’d struggled with all day. We’d ask the distinguished parties on the other bar stools for their best translations, and they’d look at us as henna gaijin henna Japanese fruitcakes. God, that was the best part the fun of playing those word games in the bars around Tokyo. I think we’d gone nuts, if we hadn’t done it. Even now when I go to Tokyo we go back to Roppongi—although it’s nothing but posh bars and young people, but still we find some bar somewhere—probably playing Samba music and after enough Suntory, old Taro will start reciting the phrases and he’ll ask the patrons nearby to help with the translation. He’ll get warmed up to it, and he’ll say to anyone nearby who’ll listen: ‘Here’s what we did to the children of Jiln, the Children of Jiln and out will come the litany of mutilation. Induced disease, induced deprivation, denial of nourishment. How long can a ten year old boy live without water? How are his arms different on the seventh, tenth, and twelveth day? If you are six years old, a girl in a barrel of saltwater, and someone comes by and hacks off your right arm, say precisely ten centimeters below the shoulder, and the barrel is outside in Harbin in winter, will you freeze to death before you bleed to death? Those were important questions. Troops lives could be saved by them, couldn’t they?”
Owen was aware that Hesseltine’s energy, conviction, passion seemed to escalate as he recited statistics, questions, issues from 731 Unit’s functioning. Owen wondered if Archie was reflecting Sumi’s tension or his own, or indeed if there was any way to separate the two.
“He’d asked these questions and toss out terms in Japanese that no Japanese could understand, explaining that killing children requires a special, acquired vocabulary, but that the all encompassing Japanese language could provide that vocabulary and none of it need be written in katakana, all of it would be native to these magnificent little islands. These magnificent little people.” Hesseltine stopped as if to draw himself up for another burst, but decided instead to sip his drink in silence.
Owen said to cover the sudden stoppage, “Recitation of atrocities?”
“Here’s the thing,” Archie answered, “it was the beginning of thinking about God differently. . . . The litany of butcheries gave me wonderful ammunition to taunt my old man. He was the veteran Japanese speaker, the cream of the translators, who refused to help in the occupation. He stayed up in Niigata and said he’d have nothing to do with a regime that could incinerate 200,000 people in a tenth of second. But he took the money I sent back up to him, used it to keep my brother and sister, my mother in food supplies and water through the worst of the postwar stuff. Oh, he even was grateful for it, but always claimed he’s seen too much of what the Americans did to Japan to throw in his lot with MacArthur. So I could tell him about the Japanese regime and its nasty little history of slaughter and dissection. And since having listened to his innumerable intoning sermons I had decided that God was a silly concept and an unhelpful one at that. And the notion of omnipotent goodness presiding over the hacking freezing death of children Well, that was a wonderful thing to toss in the great believer’s face.
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