WAR, REMEMBRANCE AND A FLAG : Among the Letters Her Father Sent Home From the War Was a Mysterious Japanese Flag, which Started a Daughter’s Quest

On Jan. 12, 1944, when my father crossed the Pacific for the first time, he did not know where he was going. I know his destination because of the letters he wrote to his wife, my mother, almost every day during the war. I know my father was on his way to New Caledonia, to New Zealand, to Guadalcanal, the Philippines--to 152 consecutive days of combat with the 25th Infantry Division in northern Luzon. I know that he mailed home a Japanese flag, and that his wife was horrified. I know my father deeply regretted mailing it to her. “I’m not a souvenir hunter--I don’t take things off dead Nips,” he wrote home.

Fifty years later, I’m crossing the Pacific for the first time, gazing from the windows of a wide-body jet en route to Japan. In my backpack on the seat beside me is a box containing that same Japanese flag my father acquired on a battlefield in northern Luzon. I am returnaing the flag to an old woman who lives in a town in the northwest of Japan, a woman the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare (war victims’ relief bureau) has identified as the younger sister of the Japanese soldier whose name is inked in black characters on the tattered white silk.

The Sunday before my departure, my husband and I visited the mausoleum in Hollywood where my parents are immured. We sat on stools in front of my parents’ crypt: “Norman Steinman: A Just Man” is engraved on the bronze plaque. I decided on the epitaph myself, at my mother’s request. “You’re the writer in the family,” she said. I stared at the silent wall, trying to guess what Norman would think of this mission, this obsession, of mine. I’d been trying for more than a year and a half to locate surviving family of the Japanese soldier. It had seemed so unlikely. Shimizu is a common name in Japan. Now that the soldier’s sister had been identified, I was going to fly halfway around the world to give her this flag. Would my dad be pleased? Would he think I was crazy?

I found the flag in an old metal ammo box in a storage locker while cleaning out my parents’ condo in 1990. The box was rusty, the hasp stiff. It probably hadn’t been opened since 1946. Inside, among hundreds of letters and photographs, was one large manila envelope marked “Japanese flag.” The slippery piece of white silk had been folded in eighths; I opened it up. Pinpricks of light showed through the fragile fabric--tiny holes where the fine strands had given way. The orange-red disc in the center was faded. Airily brushed over the surface were Japanese characters, and speckled among them, faint drops of red-brown. Possibly rust. Possibly blood. Like my mother 50 years ago, I felt instant revulsion.

Nevertheless, over the next four months or so, as I sorted through the letters, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the flag. I’d pull it out, run my hands over the shimmery surface, then fold it up and put it back in its envelope. It didn’t immediately occur to me that the Japanese characters actually meant anything. They were just mute forms, swirling across the surface of the silk.

One day, on a whim, I searched through my Rolodex at work and found the telephone number of a Japanese performance artist named Rika Ohara. For years she had been working on a large-scale outdoor performance piece about nuclear annihilation.

Rika agreed to come to my office. We sat outside on a bench on a hot afternoon. With some apprehension, I opened the envelope and drew out the flag. Rika’s face was impassive. She rolled a cigarette first, then took the flag in her small, fine hands. She looked at it for what seemed like a long time.

Finally, her fingertips still caressing the flag as if reading Braille, she said, “This is a good luck banner, given to a soldier when he went into battle. It says here: ‘To Yoshio Shimizu given to him in the great Pacific War to be fought to the end if you believe in it you win.’ That’s what it says. The other characters on the flag are names.” She handed the flag back to me gingerly, rolled another cigarette and lit up.

The situation felt suddenly felt strained. Perhaps I should defend my interest in this ghoulish artifact. I didn’t know how my father had come to have the flag. I refused to assume the obvious: that he’d taken it off a dead soldier. Yet I felt a rush of shame. The flag didn’t really belong to me. I wanted to ask my father about it, about Yoshio Shimizu, but I couldn’t. My father had been dead for a year. He didn’t know his enemy had a name, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have wanted to know.

My father, like so many men of his generation, buried his memories like the flag in the basement. His family was expected to honor his silence--and avoid anything that would remind him of that dark time. I remember my father coming home at night, exhausted from long hours in his pharmacy. His anger, rare but overwhelming, was explained to me as a function of fatigue. No Chinese takeout in our house. The mere smell of “Oriental” food was liable to send my father into an inexplicable depression. “Something to do with the Philippines.” The whistling teakettle was banned from our kitchen. The hissing sound unnerved him. We were not supposed to cry in front of my father, because that, too, reminded him of the war. “The war changed your father,” my grandmother used to say with a sigh. “He never had a temper before the war.”

A year after Rika Ohara translated the flag, I headed north to Fort Worden State Park on the Olympic Peninsula. My plan was to hole up for a month with all my dad’s letters--no telephone or other distractions. I wanted to try to comprehend some truth about my father, his experience in the war, his pain. I wanted to understand how I was connected to my father’s war.

I pinned up on the wall of my cabin a 1945 map of the Philippines that I’d found with my father’s letters. In a letter dated February, 1944, my father wrote about a young soldier named Melvin Smith who died in Umingam. Where was Umingam? A speck on the map. I marked in red the principal battles of the campaign: Balete Pass; Leyte Gulf; Corregidor. I hadn’t even known exactly where the Philippines were in the Pacific. Hell, I’d never known anything about the Pacific War. Over the next weeks, months, years, I learned.

I arranged all my father’s letters chronologically and began to transcribe them. I liked the daily ritual of pulling the crumbling rubber band off a clump of letters, opening those now-fragile, yellowing envelopes my mother had numbered from one to 474. It was as if by typing my father’s words, by passing them through my sight into my hand and onto my computer, I was digesting them. I began to absorb the transforming force of the war on his soul. “And in the middle of the night in Stygian darkness,” he wrote, “where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your eyes, I had to creep out of my hole in a downpour and sit behind a machine gun whose field of fire was a trail--and all I could do was sit and listen--and my body was shaking with cold due to the change of temperature of sleeping then sitting up. And the trees made sounds, and the birds jabbered, and the monkeys most of all sounded almost human.” I could feel my father’s fierce determination to stay alive and his terrible longing to return home. “I’ve had many a narrow escape--and I have two theories as to why. One is the old Russian adage of nichevo --what-the-hell attitude--the other is that someone is looking over me like an angel--I believe it is someone like my sister Ruth--and perhaps my little daughter or maybe it’s my wife who has so much faith in me.”

I recognized the man in the letters by his humor, his steadiness, his logical explanations. But now I encountered a side of my father he had never revealed to his four children: a side that was passionate, emotional, poetic. “Remember how I used to enjoy the beauties of nature especially the Heavens at night?” my father wrote to his young wife, “how we used to like a bright moon and a starry sky? Well it’s so hard for me to enjoy anything now. After months of dreading nighttime especially a night too bright or too dark--it is so hard to change. So you see that I need you to help me get over that type of fear and use the nights for what they were meant for.”

At the same time that I was moved by my father’s eloquent sentences, I was shocked by the soldier’s curt, monosyllabic descriptions of his foe: “Those Nips don’t give up, so we have to kill them all.” This was language alien to the vocabulary of the liberal, tolerant, postwar father I knew. John Dower writes in “War Without Mercy,” his invaluable study of race and power in the Pacific War: “As World War II recedes in time . . . it is easy to forget the visceral emotions and sheer race hate that gripped virtually all participants in the war . . . .” “Bestial apes” is what Admiral William F. Halsey called the Japanese. “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” he exhorted the troops. On the other side, Japanese soldiers were told by their government that American GIs were all monsters, devils and demons who rifled corpses for gold teeth and took no prisoners alive.

Though subject to Army censors, my father’s letters answered a question I had never asked: “What was it like?” I learned that my father dreamed about Dagwood sandwiches: corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef and salami with relish, cucumbers and pickles; that he went to see “I Married an Angel” in the company tent; that the damn dogs prowling around always caused shots during the night; that the honey cake my mother sent from Brooklyn arrived spoiled. He sent advice: what to say to tactless friends whose husbands weren’t away at war but were home making money. He wondered how soon he might come home, whether the baby had cut her first tooth. He was sure everything would be different when they moved from New York to Los Angeles, “The ideal place to raise our family.” I learned that sometimes an infantry soldier couldn’t take off his shoes for more than a month at a time, that there were “many Stars of David in the cemetery on Luzon.”

My father’s battalion landed with the Sixth Army at Lingayen Gulf, the Philippines, on Jan. 9, 1945. The 25th Division pushed inland over rugged terrain toward Balete Pass in the Caraballo Mountains. The fierce fighting lasted five months; “mopping up” took until June. In the Battle of Balete Pass, by final count, there were 7,403 Japanese dead; in the 25th Division, 2,365 killed and wounded.

The envelope that contained the flag was postmarked March 3, 1945. My father clearly regretted having mailed it home. Over the next several months, while the battle raged around him, he apologized to his wife on five separate occasions. “I still think one of the biggest boners I’ve pulled was sending you that Jap flag,” he said. “I can kick myself every time that I think of it. It must have caused you a lot of anxiety and tears.” In June, after the battle was over, he fretted, “Don’t put the flag on display. I should have sold it to some rear-echelon glory hunters.” Obviously, it weighed on his conscience.

“For the war to be prosecuted at all,” writes historian Paul Fussell, “the enemy of course had to be severely de-humanized . . . .” Conversely, knowing the name that was written on the Japanese flag made Yoshio Shimizu come alive for me. I wanted to know where he came from. I wanted to know if, like my father, Yoshio Shimizu had a young child he’d never seen. Had he possibly survived the war? I tried to imagine the meeting between my father and Yoshio Shimizu. My imagination balked at the image of my gentle father killing someone, so I constructed an alternative scenario.

My father wrote of leaving the battlefield during combat in a Jeep. He and two other Jewish GIs were headed for a Passover Seder at Clark Field. What if my father and his buddies encountered Yoshio Shimizu on the way to the Seder? What if the Japanese soldier was a straggler who wanted to surrender? What if the Americans took him prisoner and brought him to the Seder? What if the officers and enlisted men treated Yoshio Shimizu like the prophet Elijah, an honored guest? What if, at the conclusion of the service, Yoshio Shimizu bowed deeply and presented Norman Steinman with his good luck banner, a Japanese flag?

Or, had my father knelt over the cold body of a young Japanese soldier who had fallen in front of his eyes in the fierce fighting on Balete Pass? The 25th Division “yearbook” describes Japanese dead “littering a battle-torn hill.” Perhaps my father noticed a scrap of silk still clinging to the lining of a dead soldier’s helmet, and plucked it out. Perhaps, in the dizzying heat, he folded that banner carefully, like origami, and placed it in his pocket.

But my father’s letters never described how he actually acquired the flag, and I’ll probably never know just how it happened. He does describe a battlefield strewn with objects that the Japanese left behind. “The Nips must have cleared out in such a hurry that they didn’t wait to take anything with them. Last night I slept on a Jap blanket and used a real pillow. George even had a mattress. We were all envious.” Quite possibly, the flag was one of those abandoned objects. My father mentions his only souvenir quite simply: “I have a Japanese flag now.”

My anxiety about meeting the family of the soldier had been building for months, ever since the afternoon last fall when I received a long-awaited letter from Chitaru Satake at the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Tokyo. I ripped it open with trembling hands and stared blankly at the incomprehensible Japanese script, trying to will it into some meaning. I could not wait another day to find out what it said. I noticed a sushi shop (SPECIAL ON YELLOWTAIL) down the street and charged inside, clutching my precious letter. “Can I help you?” asked the restaurant manager. Could she read Japanese? No, but the sushi chef did, and after wiping his cleaver on his apron, he translated the letter on the spot. My emotions ratcheted up when I learned that the search for the family of the soldier looked “promising, but there is more research to be done,” and downward when the letter cautioned me, “Do not be disappointed. Sometimes, in cases such as these, the families do not wish to be contacted.”

A friend who had lived in Japan referred me to a young woman in Tokyo named Amy Morita, who had taken a personal interest in my project. She grew up in the Philippines after the war, when anti-Japanese sentiment was quite strong. Her grandmother, a Japanese-American, married a Japanese national and moved with him to Japan before the war. Her grandparents were arrested several times by the Japanese military government for being “American sympathizers.” On the other hand, across the Pacific, her grandmother’s Japanese-American family members were interned by the U.S. government. “I believe that war is full of tragic irony,” Amy Morita wrote to me, “and the stories I heard during my childhood have given me the opportunity to think about the war and many of the sad dramas created by it.” She would help me communicate with the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The weeks were passing, and there was still no definitive word about the family. I bought my ticket, requested leave from my job, made a stab at travel arrangements. But travel to where? I had no idea where in Japan the family lived.

One night, I jolted awake hours before dawn, wired with anxiety about the flag, the trip, the potential awkwardness of what I’d been pursuing for so long. “What is driving you to pursue this?” a friend asked. “Is it love for your father?” That night, unable to sleep, I tossed and turned until I summoned an answer: I was not being driven. The flag had taken on a life of its own--I was merely following its story. When I arrived at work the next morning, a fax from Amy Morita was on my desk. It had arrived during the hour of my fitful reverie. The ministry had located Hiroshi Shimizu, the younger sister of the soldier. She lived in the town of Suibara, near the city of Niigata, on the northwest coast of Japan. Throughout the day, I broke into little fits of crying, of release. The ministry had provided Amy with an address but no telephone number. Weeks passed without further word. Two weeks before my departure date, Amy called me near midnight. She had spoken to Hiroshi Shimizu. She had simply trawled through the telephone directory in Niigata Prefecture until she found the number. There was, however, another perplexing twist: “She sounds old and is rather confused about your visit. She thought you were coming next year.” I imagined my husband and I knocking on the door of a tiny house in the middle of a rice field. The two of us alone in a room with this old woman, and the box with the flag.

I have a week in Tokyo before my husband joins me, and we take the bullet train north to Niigata. The cherry trees are in blossom, the dollar is plummeting in relation to the yen to the lowest point since World War II and everyone is anxious about toxic nerve gas.

The night before I leave Tokyo for the north country, I meet Amy Morita for the first time. She is delightful--frank and warm-hearted. Even though we have only corresponded, it feels as if we’ve known each other a long time. After our curry supper, Amy tells me, “I received a call from an official in Suibara a week ago. He wanted to check with me about you, because a few years ago, someone from London wanted to return a sword to someone in the town and it turned out they wanted a lot of money for it.” I am shocked. “I told them your purpose was strictly personal,” Amy continues, “and then he asked my advice about what they should do. The Shimizu family is a little panicked, you see. I told them you don’t expect anything elaborate. I suggested they think of you like a long lost friend of their brother.”

My husband and I wake up early on April 15, the day of our planned meeting with the Shimizu family. The day looks promising, even though Shoko Asahara, the Aum Supreme Truth thug guru, has predicted a major earthquauke for this date. At 8:30 a.m., a woman named Masako Hayakawa, who is to serve as our translator and cultural guide, arrives to accompany us to the town of Suibara.

On our way to the bus station, we stop at a pharmacy to buy cough medicine for my husband. I’m a pharmacist’s daughter, and I always find it comforting to be in a drugstore]. As Masako discusses symptoms and remedies with the young pharmacist, I think about my father in his Rexall drug store in Culver City after the war. All those years of listening to stories about other people’s pain, counting out the remedies, dispensing advice. Did memories of the jungle seep through from time to time?

The bus winds through beautiful countryside--rice paddies and vegetable gardens and old tile-roofed houses. The cherry trees alongside the irrigation canals are all in first bloom, and Masako gasps with delight each time we pass a stand of them.

The morning is warm and the bus is slow. Perversely bubbling up from my half-dream state comes the thought, “Why are you giving up the flag? It belongs to your family.” Where did that come from? “We’re here!” Masako says excitedly. We throw our change in the box and hop off the bus with our backpacks. Two men are standing by the side of the road to greet us. They carry signs in Japanese that say “WELCOME TO SUIBARA.” The first gentleman, named Asama, is from the local Department of Welfare; the other man is Yasuo Shimizu, a cousin of the soldier. I can’t believe it. This is actually a relative of the soldier. We file behind the two men a short distance to the city hall of Suibara (population 20,000), where Mayor Ikarashi is waiting next to a shiny black limousine. Apparently, our visit to Suibara is a bigger deal here than I had anticipated.

More bows. We are introduced to Suezo Shimizu, a courtly man in his 60s with unruly white hair. He is the husband of Hiroshi, the brother-in-law of the soldier. Suezo’s eyes tear up immediately and so do mine. We bow deeply, I repeat my few words of Japanese. He bows to my husband who extends his hand. (Later that day when we say our goodbys, Suezo grasps my husband’s hand and kisses it.)

We climb into the limo with our backpacks. As we drive through the quiet town, I notice that people are standing on both sides of the street, waving small Japanese and American flags. “Is today some kind of a holiday?” I wonder aloud. Masako translates and the mayor chuckles. I then realize, we are the occasion. “We are all very touched that you have come from so far away to return the flag,” the mayor tells us. Suibara is a peaceful, quiet town; the mayor informs us that it “doesn’t yet have a sister city.” The biggest event in tiny Suibara is the yearly arrival of the Siberian swans. The town is like an extended family. We are returning the flag to the Shimizu family, but really we are returning the flag to the citizens of Suibara, so this is a public, not private, occasion.

The first thing I notice when I step into the house is a simple altar with a framed black-and-white photograph of a young soldier, his face plump and unlined. There he is: Yoshio Shimizu. We are ushered to places of honor at the long, low table in the center of the room; cups of green tea and sweets shaped like pink lotus already await us.

Fifty or so people from the neighborhood have crowded into the room. They sit cross-legged on the floor and face us expectantly, somberly. The mayor sits at the head of the table, and he begins by introducing the Shimizu family: the three sisters of Yoshio Shimizu--Hiroshi, Hanayo and Chiyono; Suezo, the brother-in-law; Yasuo, a first cousin, and Yoshinobu, the grandson of Yoshio Shimizu’s elder brother and the husband of this house. Yoshinobu is a robust young man with glossy black hair that stands straight up from his head like my own younger brother’s. His 2-year-old sits comfortably in Daddy’s lap, observing the event with great solemnity.

There is an air of electric emotion in the room. When I raise my cup of tea to take a sip, I notice that my hand is trembling. Introductions and speeches are made. Masako nods at me; it is the moment to hand over the flag. On the bus on the way to Suibara, I was gripped by an irrational fear that the box in my pack was empty--that somehow I had forgotten to take the flag. That I would open it and nothing would be there. I reach into the void of the backpack, feel the contours of the box and pull it out. I place it on the table in front of Hiroshi, the next-youngest sister to the missing soldier.

When Hiroshi opens the box with her gnarled hands and draws out the flag, a collective gasp escapes in the room. Then crying. Then applause. “Show it to everyone.” Hiroshi spreads the square of silk on the table. There it is; an incontrovertible fact. “I realize seeing this flag again may make you feel sad,” I say softly, “but I hope it will help you honor the memory of your brother.” We are presented with four large, wrapped boxes by the mayor, who explains that they are a gift of appreciation from the town. As I start to open the first one, the room begins to clatter and shudder. It’s an earthquake. Two weeks ago there had been a 6.0 tremor off the coast near Niigata. No one budges. We just smile at one another. There. We’ve been through something together.

Three of the men in the room stand and introduce themselves. Masako translates, “We are three boys the same age in the same neighborhood. Yuko was the oldest and Yoshio was the youngest of the three. But Yoshio was the tallest and was one of the nice-looking young men . . . and most popular with the girls. Yoshio was a very gentle and kind person.” Yoshio was 18 when he was drafted, 23 when his family received word he had died. “We didn’t know if he was killed on a ship or on the land. It was quite difficult to learn how he died, how he was killed. Because at that time it was difficult to get any kind of information.”

Masako has warned me that the family would probably want to know how my father got the flag. I explain that I do not know for sure. I explain that my father regretted sending the flag home. They do not press the issue.

The flag is fondled, caressed, examined. “Do you remember where you signed? Right beside Yoshio. Look here.” Several people find their names on the flag, where they signed 50 years ago, offering the young soldier good luck as he departed for a foreign land. The flag is called yosegaki , which means a collection. A collection of names. Hana, the eldest sister, has wet eyes the entire time. Masako translates one man’s thoughtful offering: “You must understand. For those of us who were in the war, when we see the flag before us, it makes our hearts ache.”

I look at these aging men. I wonder what horrors they endured or even perhaps, on the Emperor’s orders, may have inflicted. But I cannot ask. That terrible time, that “tragic irony of war” as Amy called it, resonates through the room.

After the speeches, the women working behind the scenes bring out an enormous banquet: platters of colorful sushi, tempura, crab’s legs and red bean rice made specially for auspicious occasions. Bottles of beer and carafes of sake appear. The tone in the room changes. There is laughter, joking. The men come over to slap my husband on the back.

I remind myself that today is indeed Passover, and we are the honored guests at the banquet, just as I imagined Yoshio Shimizu as the honored guest at my father’s Seder in the middle of a war. The Shimizu clan has embraced with great good will the advice that Amy gave them--to think of us as the long-lost friends of the missing soldier. Which, as I sip my never-empty glass of sake , I feel as though I am. “Dad,” I think, “you really wouldn’t believe this.” But I am sure, because Norman Steinman was “a just man,” he would be relieved that the flag of the Japanese soldier, whose name he never knew, is finally home where it belongs.