One Man's Justice Read online

  Each time Takuya sensed the policeman’s eyes turning on him, fear surged up inside him. He was trying to avoid the gaze of his questioner without being too obvious, but he could see nothing but goodwill in the policeman’s expression.

  Terasawa sauntered over. ‘Good job to have dropped this fellow with one blow. These army men are terrific, aren’t they?’ he said with a hint of triumph in his voice.

  The policeman nodded and smiled at Takuya as he put away his notebook. Terasawa told Kameya to take the police back to the station, and the handcuffed thief was pushed up into the back of the truck. As the engine revved, the senior policeman saluted Terasawa and stepped up into the truck himself. The truck pulled out of the yard and off down the road.

  Watching the vehicle move away, Takuya thought that he didn’t seem to have attracted any undue suspicion during the questioning.

  The scene was now bathed in morning sunlight and a plume of smoke rose into the air from the chimney above the kitchen.

  Before long Kameya returned, and they all went inside to have the morning meal of rice gruel with thin slices of seaweed.

  Obviously in fine spirits, Terasawa excitedly described how his heart had raced as he dashed outside to answer Takuya’s call for assistance. Terasawa’s wife and Kameya gave enthusiastic accounts of their own parts in the episode, Kameya explaining that the man hadn’t said a word during the trip into town, and that he’d walked passively into the police station, his head hanging.

  After finishing his meal, Terasawa got to his feet and went over to a cabinet in the corner of the room, where he opened the lid of a small wooden box and took out two packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes. ‘Well done,’ he said, handing each of the men a packet.

  Kameya looked curiously at the packaging before breaking the seal.

  ‘Try one,’ said Terasawa. Takuya opened his packet and pulled out a cigarette. The paper was of good quality and the pleasant smell of tobacco wafted out of the box. Holding it between his fingers, Takuya noticed how much thicker it was than the Japanese ration cigarettes, and that the tobacco was packed much more evenly. To Takuya, these cigarettes symbolised all he had heard about the material wealth and affluence of America.

  He lit it and inhaled. It certainly smelt nice, and tasted as though it had been made from good-quality tobacco, but it was far too pungent for his uninitiated palate and he coughed as soon as he inhaled the smoke. Terasawa laughed happily at the scene in front of him.

  They completed the ‘workshop’ that evening. At least, it was called a workshop, but in actual fact it was only a square structure with sheets of roofing-iron nailed on to the top and sides. Most of the floor was just bare ground, with only a small section covered with recycled wooden boards.

  The next morning, the carpenter turned his attention to the construction of the warehouse. Terasawa and Kameya went out in the morning in the truck and returned in the afternoon loaded with a jumble of machines, motors, belts and shafts, which the men hauled straight away into the workshop. Takuya played his part in assembling the machinery, but as he worked he stood in such a way as to keep a clear line of sight down the road in the direction of the police station. He still couldn’t shake his lingering uneasy feeling that the police might have recognised his face from wanted posters and at that very moment might be on their way back to arrest him.

  In the evening of the fifth day after the thief ’s capture, Terasawa returned from town saying he had stopped at the police station and found out some details about the man. Evidently he was a known criminal, a specialist in the theft of metal goods, which he then sold through a broker. When the broker was arrested, he in turn had spilled the beans about the full extent of his betrayer’s activities. The man was a demobilised soldier, as Takuya had guessed, and had moved to Himeji by himself to start his life of crime after losing his family in the fire raids on Osaka.

  ‘The police were really pleased about this one. They think he’ll probably admit to still more crimes,’ said Terasawa, cutting a cigarette in half and stuffing the tobacco into a clay pipe he held in his hand. Putting the pipe in the corner of his mouth, he turned to Takuya and said, ‘I didn’t think of this till after I left the police station, but I think I’ll get them to give you some sort of award for this. I know all the top brass down there, so if I say something they’ll take notice. That was quite a criminal you nabbed here, and you should get something for it.’

  Takuya was flabbergasted. Getting an award would require him to go to the police station and give more details of his personal history. He would have to meet all sorts of police officials, and in the process they would more than likely work out his real identity.

  ‘I can’t have you doing that,’ said Takuya in a strained, high-pitched voice.

  The faintest of smiles appeared on Terasawa’s face before he replied. ‘I won’t have to stand up and shout about it. You really caught a big one here. The police will be more than happy to give you an award for your efforts,’ he said as he picked out the last bits of tobacco from his pipe.

  Takuya’s mind raced as he tried to think of a way to get out of this predicament.

  ‘He’s a demobilised soldier just like me. I couldn’t accept an award for putting a fellow soldier behind bars. And remember, he lost his whole family in the war, so he must have been beside himself. I couldn’t accept an award for capturing someone like that,’ he said, raising his voice.

  ‘I see,’ said Terasawa, obviously recognising that there was no point in pressing the matter further. His wife smiled warmly across the table at Takuya.

  After that there was no more mention of awards, and no policemen turned up to discuss Takuya’s capture of the thief.

  The machinery had all been installed in the workshop and test runs had gone without a hitch. Terasawa obviously still had considerable funds left, because he purchased a large handcart and had a telephone put into his house.

  One day the owner of the match factory turned up on his bicycle and had a long talk with Terasawa. By all accounts the quantity of matches being produced was steadily increasing and with it the demand for matchboxes.

  Even into September, the late summer heat showed no signs of abating.

  Takuya spent his days pulling the cart to fetch materials from a timber-processing yard at a little town down near the coast. There was a press there which cut out the shapes for large and small matchboxes from pine boards.

  He was uneasy about walking around on the streets, but with the construction of the warehouse complete the only job left for him was pulling the handcart. Using a splitter machine, the men in Terasawa’s workshop cut the boxes out. Two recently hired middle-aged women then stuck the striking-paper on to the outside of the boxes. They were obviously experienced, and kept up a steady pace with no problem at all.

  With Kameya now also working on the striking-paper, Takuya found himself in charge of carrying all goods and materials in and out of the factory. He wrapped a hand towel round his head and wore his mountaineering hat on top of that to avoid being burnt by the late summer sun as he traipsed through the ruins to pick up materials at the timber-processing yard or the paper wholesalers. He always made a point of choosing the less crowded paths.

  On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September, Takuya opened the newspaper and found the article he had been fearing all along. The name of the commander at the regional headquarters was printed boldly under the headline ‘Jailed in Sugamo Prison’.

  ‘The Judiciary Division of SCAP has announced that the following seven high-ranking officers of the Japanese Imperial Army have been arrested and are being held in Sugamo prison in relation to the unlawful killing in Fukuoka of thirty-three crew members from B-29 bombers,’ it read. Those arrested were the lieutenant-generals in command of the Western Regional Forces and the Sixteenth Army, and of the southern Kyushu-based Fifty-seventh Army; the chief of staff of the Sixteenth Army; a major-general who had been second in command in the Western Region; a colonel in charge of the
Western Region Air Defence Tactical Operations Centre; a major; and finally Lieutenant Howa Kotaro, listed as a company officer attached to headquarters.

  Although this was the first article about the POWs since the coverage of Professor Iwase’s suicide, Takuya knew instantly that this meant the SCAP authorities now knew every last detail about what happened to the airmen. Like Professor Iwase, these officers would have undergone relentless interrogation in Fukuoka prison, and only after they had told all they knew would they have been transported to Sugamo prison in Tokyo, where Class A war criminals were incarcerated.

  Most of those listed were elite, high-ranking officers bearing ultimate responsibility for what happened under their command, but seeing Howa Kotaro’s name unnerved Takuya. Distraught and incensed by his mother’s death in the fire raids on Fukuoka the previous night, Howa had volunteered to take part in that day’s execution and had decapitated two of the airmen. Of the seven men imprisoned at Sugamo, only Howa had actually been involved in carrying out the executions rather than giving the orders to do so. His arrest must mean that by now Takuya had also been designated a war criminal. He stared fixedly at the name Howa Kotaro in the last line of the article.

  In a column further down the page, in fine print, he read that ninety-three war criminals had been put to death in Rabaul, and another hundred and twenty-three in Australia. Many more were probably meeting the same fate all over the Pacific, thought Takuya.

  The mornings and nights grew cooler as autumn approached. The trial of the Class A war criminals was approaching a climax, and articles covering each day’s developments in court filled the newspapers.

  One afternoon, on a day one of the regular power cuts occurred, a local government officer came and sprayed DDT round Terasawa’s house, sprinkling some of the white powder in the hair of all the workers, and even shoving the funnel down into their jacket sleeves and trousers. The officer explained that lice had been identified as the cause of the spread of typhus through the country, and that three thousand people had died. He went on to say that there had already been outbreaks of the disease in the Himeji area.

  ‘This spraying is ordered by the occupation forces, who have supplied us with the DDT and the spraying equipment,’ the man reported in an official tone before climbing back into the truck and driving away.

  Takuya and the other men followed the orders and left the white powder on their bodies for the rest of the day. The effect of the pesticide was startling. The itchiness and the sensation of tiny creatures crawling over his skin disappeared in no time, and the number of flies and mosquitoes in the house dropped dramatically.

  ‘The Americans certainly don’t do anything by halves,’ muttered Terasawa as he ran his fingers through his powder-covered hair.

  Takuya hauled ever-increasing loads of materials into the workshop, and matchbox production was soon in full swing. The men and the machines seemed to be in almost perpetual motion, and on the wooden floor of the workshop the women, sitting on old, worn-out cushions, toiled away tirelessly, sticking paper covers on to the completed boxes. Terasawa racked his brain thinking of ways to keep a supply of glue ready for his workers, and when flour, a key ingredient, wasn’t available he bought scraps of cheap wheat-gluten bread, which was boiled to produce a substitute. It worked just as well as flour and water, so from that point on Terasawa’s wife got up early every morning and boiled up the day’s supply of glue.

  Before long, the system changed so that Kameya used the lorry to bring in the materials while Takuya devoted his energies solely to delivering the completed boxes to the match factory.

  He loaded the handcart as high as he could and trudged out along the street to the match factory. It was a real struggle to get the cart up the slope to the bridge, and when he made it up on to the long wooden structure he always paused to get his breath. The bridge was showing signs of age and disrepair, with long sections of the handrail rotted away and gaping holes visible in the upright supports, where ornamental iron fittings had been removed to be melted down during the war.

  There was a magnificent view of Himeji castle from up on top of the bridge. The whiteness of the walls of the donjons and turrets was truly spectacular. One of the workers at Terasawa’s factory said that many people believed the castle had survived the inferno only because the Americans had recognised its historical value, and had therefore ordered the B-29s to leave it standing. But Takuya gave this theory little credence. He thought the suggestion that an air force which had incinerated cities and towns all over Japan, and then dropped two atomic bombs, would be concerned with sparing historic buildings was nothing but propaganda.

  After crossing the bridge he came out in front of a row of old houses which had somehow escaped the conflagration. There was a gradual incline off to the left, and a line of hills on the right. The road threaded its way through the little valley in a way that reminded him of his own village back in Shikoku.

  At this point Takuya always stopped to rest and cast his eyes over the gentle slopes on both sides. Every time he paused there, the line of the road and the low hills to the east and west caused memories of home to come flooding back. Often he stood there gazing at the hills and thinking of his father. With SCAP ordering all assets of war crimes suspects frozen or confiscated, there was a very real chance that his father would have lost his job in the public service. Each time Takuya stopped, he visualised his father standing by the back door to the family house, ready to hand over the packet of cigarettes.

  The match factory was in a place called Shirahama, amid a cluster of several dozen factories. It was a good five-kilometre haul from Terasawa’s workshop. A large operation, it bustled with more than a hundred workers.

  Takuya announced his arrival to a young man in the office, who led him round to the warehouse beside the rear entrance of the factory, where he unloaded his cargo. In the warehouse there were stacks of small and large matchboxes and men were busy loading them on to horse-drawn carts.

  While he waited for his receipt to be stamped, he peered into the factory. It was the first time he had seen how matches were actually made, and he watched the workers and machines with interest. The young office worker explained the names of the machines, the manufacturing process and the materials used.

  Sometimes while he was waiting, horse-drawn carts delivered bales of matchsticks. The workers arranged them on trays, where they were painted with paraffin before the head was dipped in potassium chlorate mixed with fish glue. The matches were then dried and taken out to the area where the women workers packed them into boxes. They sat on both sides of a long table grabbing the matches and putting them neatly into boxes at a dizzying pace. From years of experience, each one of these women could virtually guarantee that any box would contain the required eighty-five matchsticks. Red phosphorus striking-paper was attached and stamped with the company’s trademark, and finally the boxes were wrapped, ready to be dispatched.

  Restrictions of everyday commodities had been lifted when the war came to an end, but the unregulated sale of daily essentials such as matches and food was prohibited. The ‘Match Supply Regulations’ of 1940 were still in place, so the government bought up all the matches produced and distributed them to organisations running the disbursement of rations. Every match manufacturer was plagued with a shortage of materials, and as matchbox supply could not keep up with demand, matches were often shipped loose in bags rather than in boxes.

  No wonder the match manufacturer was happy that Terasawa had started making boxes for them. Every time Takuya arrived with a load of boxes they brought him out a steamed potato or a little bowl of potato starch soup.

  The best wood for making matches was white willow from Hokkaido, but as this was almost entirely unavailable they had to make do with local pine. The problem with pine was its lack of strength when cut to match size, which led to waste during the manufacturing process. Apart from this, the paraffin, red phosphorus and fish glue were all of inferior quality, and the supply was
inadequate, forcing manufacturers to thin their materials to get by, resulting in a much less effective product.

  Takuya delivered matchboxes to the factory day after day. The leaves of the trees on the surrounding hills took on autumn colours, and before long Takuya was hauling his load through swirling eddies of yellow and brown leaves.

  Terasawa, Kameya and the others went to a barber’s in an enclave of town which had more or less survived the bombing, but because he was wary of being recognised, Takuya got Kameya to cut his hair with some electric shears.

  Occasionally Takuya would look into the long, narrow mirror hanging on a post in the house and see a completely different face from that of his days as an army officer. The outline of his face had completely changed. He was gaunt, and his skin was deeply tanned from hours of labour under the sun. The change in his eyes was particularly striking. The piercing look had disappeared, replaced by an unsettled look of apprehension. When he tried to force an angry glare, he could produce no more than a weak and unconvincing grimace.

  But that was all right, he thought. The transformation was certainly dramatic, considering that only six months had passed since he had begun his life as a fugitive, but for someone in his position the change was hardly undesirable. If the photographs being used now by the authorities were from his days in the army, there was a good chance, he thought, that even if he was stopped no one would be able to make the connection. The glasses were now part of his normal appearance, and it was almost as though the months of hard work had sculpted the features of his face anew.

  The temperature dropped, and there was frost in the morning. The food shortages worsened. Although the government had announced that staple rations of rice were to be increased, more often than not only potatoes and the like were available, and even they were increasingly slow coming through. The newspapers reported an increase in the number of unemployed every day, and there were often stories about people dying of starvation in the big cities.