The Obliterated Island

They ordered the tunnels to be built underneath a hill, towards the south end of the island, across the river from the little city that had once served as the capital a hundred years before, back when this was an independent kingdom. The admiral noted the quality of the sandstone – fine-grained, easy to quarry, but also remarkably resilient. The locals had a special name for it, in their dialect. They hid in caves hollowed out of the same stone.

It wasn’t much, but it would do in a pinch. The navy, once the terror of the sea, had been pushed back, forced into increasingly desperate action in a bid to keep the enemy away from the homeland. An invasion of the island itself seemed imminent, and they needed someplace safe, in the hope against hope that they might make it through. These men had been told they were going to unite a continent. Now they struggled under the tropical sun, quarrying out sandstone.

When the bombing raids began, the admiral and his men were trapped down there. He sat in the heart of his labyrinth, a simple bed, a simple desk, some radio equipment. Not much. He was did his best to try to convince the men that it was going to be alright, that reinforcements were on their way.

And yet the situation grew worse and worse. Thousands were down here, stranded. As the bombing raids increased, they couldn’t go outside. They slept huddled together, standing up, in the little alcoves in the soft sandstone. They shat in the corners where they could, the reek inescapable. And they waited, even as bomber after bomber flew above, shaking little bits of sandstone gravel from the roofs.

Until the admiral realized it wouldn’t happen. The enemy had already taken the northern half of the island, leaving the few infantry remaining stranded on the hills to the south. He had to make his decision. He pulled out his pistol, unable to salute the rising sun from deep within his underground maze.

Some finally sallied forth, a suicidal charge to the bright light outside, carrying out a dictum under two martial codes – one modern, brought back by the intrepid young men of the previous century who had carried the most contemporary ideas and philosophies of France and Germany and England back to their little nation, one far more ancient, derived from a time when a handful of feudal lords fought over what little arable land they had between their rocky, forested mountains and the endless sea.

And other men stayed in the tunnels. Weeping, desperate, they pulled the pins from their grenades, bodies still crammed in, device after device exploding, as young men who just a few years before had been tending to their fields and delivering letters and teaching in rural schools chose death over capture.

The few survivors out of the thousands who were down there came up to an obliterated island, fields destroyed, towns leveled, nearly every tree felled, many of the residents evacuated some months earlier, but a full 25 percent of the island’s civilians dead – either killed by the enemy, or goaded into suicide by commandants who could not bear the thought of their people living without the guidance of the imperial standard.

I stare out of the tunnel, into the light and emerge onto that high hill above the city, a light rain falling, halfway between Tokyo and Manila.

I knew the American military had been there for years, on the island of hacksaws and jawbones, hell, I’d known guys who had been stationed there in the USMC, but I didn’t know that we had administered the island as late as 1972. We left American-style plugs (two blades, unlike the two rounds used elsewhere), an affection for Spam and “taco rice” (made from the taco meat of scrounged MREs, and as disgusting as it sounds), and an inferior public transportation system.

“Keystone of the Pacific” read the old American license plates still hung up in bars and restaurants around the island.

Now blurred by the scratching processes of history. That mediocre Mel Gibson movie where Andrew Garfield played a real simple feller who just wants to love him some Jesus and save some folks. That’s what about the limit of what most Americans know. That and it’s where Mr. Miyagi is from.

And I had remembered, from news stories in my childhood, the 1995 incident in which three American servicemen, having been put off by the high prices of local hookers, had instead gang-raped and murdered a local girl. And indeed, I remember seeing the press conference where the then-head of the Pacific Command, America’s top military officer in the entire Indo-Pacific region, responded as follows:

“I think it was absolutely stupid… for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl.” – Adm. Richard C. Macke

Then I stand under the two bishop wood trees, Bischofia javanica, that had survived the bombardment of the Shuri Castle, on a hill that had been thick with them.

But all of that history – 1945, 1972, 1995 – was remote from me. I was there, but I was not there. I was on the same hill, but in the here and now, the battlefields now covered in little houses and sun-bleached apartment complexes with rusted fences that would be just as familiar in Honolulu or Los Angeles, palm fronds and guava leaves fluttering in the Pacific breeze.

The tourist gazes on history. He, in turn, takes his photos and is gazed upon. And thus we form our place in the world. 

And then when I came back to my adopted city, and gave out my gifts – sweet potato candy and sea grapes, pickled scallions and preserved pork belly and dried beef tongue and spirits made from jasmine blossoms and the local shikuwasa citrus – that I sat at my local jazz venue and saw a woman in white, her eyes closed and hairline sharp like a Shinto shrine maiden, playing hypnotic, soft guitar, her voice a precise, almost impossibly mellifluous soprano.

She says to me in broken, slow, deliberate English, “I can tell. You were listening to. My music. Seriously.” Aww, that’s probably what you tell all the girls.

She smiles. “Your hometown. Is where you are.” She had said earlier in the evening.

And I look down at the page of my notebook where I had written about the tunnels. I look back at her. “My hometown is Okinawa,” she says.