Seize the Day. A M (Jack) Harris
that and other matters, I outlined some of my problems with Harold. He listened carefully and advised me to ‘cut, and get out’, as he put it. I thought he was offering good advice for, although I had gone along with my mother’s wish over the apprentice deal, I had wanted, like Clarrie, to get away to the war. But believing that my name might be indexed in the files of the fighting services, I decided to join the Merchant Navy, a civilian outfit receiving glowing reports for its service to the war effort.
I hurried back to Buronga. As I had earlier suggested following Clarrie’s death, Minnie had moved in with Mary, for I believed that Clarrie’s father would most probably start beating her again now that Clarrie could no longer protect her from his bullying. I found her to be the same sort of silly, sweet woman with such an amplitude of good cheer that she could disgorge without effort huge peals of jolly laughter. Mary had found her good company and liked having her in the house. Luke had also moved into a spare room and out of his bough shed. I explained to him that the purpose of my visit was to ask for his war-time ration cards so that I could use them and enter the Merchant Navy, but under his name. He instantly agreed and Mary also approved of my scheme to get away.
I entered the Merchant Navy as a trimmer, had a tattoo cut into my right forearm, and went to sea. I found that being a trimmer, a man equipped with a large shovel and wheelbarrow used to push coal from various parts of the deck to the firemen, was a fearsome job, especially in rough seas. But there is comradeship working in a vessel, often in bad weather with the men below decks often sweating, filthy and foul-mouthed, a closeness of workers that is mutually binding and keeps them, as long as they can curse and labour, in its embrace. I believe I would have stayed at sea until I could no longer stand; curiously one day when I could metaphorically no longer stand, I was thrown down a long flight of steel stairs and hurt my shoulder so badly that I returned to Buronga, looking for recovery.
It was now early 1946, I was twenty years of age and the army was advertising for men to join up, and serve in Japan with an occupation force. Believing that my shoulder would pass inspection, I enlisted and sailed for Japan. I joined the 67th Australian Battalion in Kaitaichi, a suburb not far from Hiroshima. Within eight months I was a sergeant in that battalion’s intelligence section and I requested leave to attend a nine month’s course in the Japanese language to qualify as an interpreter.
I was helped in my study of Japanese by Midori Suimoto, the sister of my language teacher. She was a lovely slim girl and when I was introduced to her she was wearing a classical Japanese gown of gold and silver thread with chrysanthemums and egrets etched into the fabric. Her obi, the wide sash worn by Japanese women was a soft purple shade. Her head, I thought, would nicely fit under my chin. Her face was delicate, her skin smooth and clear, her nose small in the tradition of Japanese beauty. Her eyes were black and brilliant under her well developed brows. She glowed with health and vitality while her body emitted a husky fragrance which tantalised me.
The Suimoto home had miraculously escaped the fire-bombing campaigns; it was a small place with a dull, but spotlessly clean tatami covering the wooden floors and stretching to the paper-coated walls on all sides. Midori showed me over the place. At one point she gestured to a table on delicately carved legs which sat in one corner and on which a bonsai, an artificially dwarfed pine tree, sat in a small bowl. Midori explained that her husband, an officer in a Japanese engineering battalion, had cared for the tree since he was a boy. As a soldier he had been captured when the Russians took Manchuria, and had been sent with hundreds of thousands of other prisoners to labour in the Siberian slave camps. Some of the world leaders had protested to Stalin, demanding that the captured men be sent home but, needing workers in those frozen wastes, he simply refused. Midori did not know if her husband had survived the surrender. She had never heard from him, she told me, as we went to walk outside and to a small hill nearby. It was shrouded in pine, cedar and maple, all so close planted that the Suimoto home peeped out as though through a shield of green. We returned to her garden, a designed landscape, with a stone pool crossed by a slender bridge where tiny bells tinkled in a breeze. Everything was compressed into a miniature world, all complete and enthralling, so different to anything I had ever encountered.
I understood that the invitation to meet Midori and study Japanese had economic reasons behind it. Japan was mostly in ruins with Hiroshima, only a few miles distant, a frightful wasteland. All the major cities had been flattened. Hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings had been destroyed, over a million Japanese soldiers had died in the war and as many civilians, if not more, had perished at home. Japan had become a nation of people living overwhelmed in a land of devastation, and those who had once believed their emperor to be a god, were now forced to understand that a hundred generation of emperors had not been gods at all, but merely men. That acceptance meant the collapse of their faith, and all they had inwardly cherished. It was an appalling and transforming, as well as a hungry time for many Japanese, and I was able, as Midori’s brother had guessed, to buy food from the mess sergeant and give it to them: butter and cheese, hampers of ham and other meats, along with milk and cream and good rice, which was scarce in most markets.
I did not feel I was doing anything wrong. These people were hungry, the food was available, and my language studies were progressing far better than any of the other students. There was something else of course. I was very attached to Midori and when she finally invited me into her bedroom, I found it to be a place with a floor of tatami matting, with dwarf pines set along one wall, all creating a spare, controlled beauty. The bathroom nearby where she took me and ritualistically bathed my body prepared me fully for her sexual abandonment and my sense of completeness when finally, we lay still, our naked bodies locked together. It filled me with a sense of wonder, and I could not but hark back to Doris of my working days, and how she had said she really liked good fucking. But I knew, after making love to Midori, that Doris had been happy if someone just wanted her body, so she simply let the man have his way, as it was quaintly called. With Midori I came to understand that Japanese boys and girls, when in their teens, have sex fully explained by their parents who give them woodblock art works of Japan which are very specific, and the books they are given to read stress patience for the man, an understanding of her body by the woman. Sex to the Japanese is supposed to be a pleasure to both people. Midori and I certainly found a mutual enjoyment, and thinking about it, I knew the Japanese had the right approach to an essential part of married life. It may be apocryphal, but I recall reading that some Europeans dislike the thought of their women screaming at the moment of climax, and they prefer going to a brothel and paying a prostitute to pretend having one.
I was confused about Japan and what I was encountering: here was Midori, sensual and sensible with a sparkling sense of humour, a prudent temperament and delightfully kind. Yet many Japanese soldiers had been sadistic brutes whose cruelty to the people and to China generally, was well documented. In the war with the Allies they had been merciless to prisoners of war. Starving, torturing, working to death and killing without pity. The war crimes trials, then taking place in Tokyo, had produced much sickening evidence of exactly how barbarous Japanese soldiers had been to the people they had vanquished. Stories were also circulating about how ‘comfort women’ were rounded up in the countries Japan had occupied. Women and very young girls had been taken under guard and sent to live in barracks where Japanese soldiers were stationed. Once in place, the girls and women spent days and months, even years, serving Japanese soldiers in whichever way the soldier desired his sex. Some of these comfort women were said to have obliged as many as eighty men in a single day. One of the main countries for recruitment of these helpless women was Korea. A story coming out told how concerned Korean fathers were about their daughter’s virginity. A Korean girl returned home after years of being trapped in this dreadful situation, she told her father, and asked to be allowed back home. The father immediately slapped her face, denied her entry and thereafter ignored her. Many of the girls, though, never returned home because towards the end of the war thousands of them were loaded onto ships which were taken out to sea and scuttled, destroying the evidence of their years of sickening existence.
Japanese soldiers had been brave men with their code of honour making them fight almost to the last men. In some of the islands in the Pacific many hundred of thousands died, refusing to surrender. Some senior officers, including many generals, committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, by first drinking a glass of saki, plunging a knife deep into their stomach and having their head severed from