When we asked if Seiji had acted on an order from the Japanese army, the ward chief reiterated that Seiji had acted alone. He explained that since all the Japanese soldiers had been taken prisoner, they couldn’t possibly have issued an order. Sweat dripped down his face, and he sounded nervous, so the lieutenant began to get suspicious. His piercing gaze seemed to make the ward chief even more nervous. As he wiped the sweat from his face, he glanced over at the crowd of villagers and smiled awkwardly.
The villagers had started gathering as soon as we arrived. By the time we started our questioning, about thirty of them were at the wall on the edge of the ward chief’s property. Our military escorts stood alert at the gate, but they didn’t really try to control the villagers. It was hot and humid, but the ward chief’s excessive sweating made us suspicious.
“You say he acted alone, but what was his motive?” asked the lieutenant. “Do you have any idea?”
When I relayed what the lieutenant had said, the ward chief wiped his brow, started to say something, and stopped. Then he looked at me and twisted his face into an unpleasant, obsequious smile. For me, who was from Okinawa, seeing that expression was heartbreaking. It was one of those servile smiles that attempt to hide both fear and resentment. Being disarmed in this way irritated me, and my anger toward him intensified.
“Just tell the truth!” I shouted at him.
The ward chief looked down at the ground. I loathed myself for scolding a man old enough to be my father. His knees were quivering.
Seeing this, the lieutenant snorted and said, “Tell him if he doesn’t talk, we’ll have to haul him in.”
When I translated this, the ward chief became flustered and said, “I’m telling you! He was acting on his own!” Then he bowed again and again in apology. The lieutenant spit on the ground and stood up.
“Just tell them the truth!” a young woman’s voice called out from the yard.
Standing just inside the front gate, a woman of about twenty was staring at us with a look of defiance. The ward chief started to turn red. The lieutenant asked what the woman had said, and when I told him, he beckoned her over. The small, dark-complexioned woman pursed her lips as if she might cry, but she walked over to us with confidence.
“Don’t say more than necessary,” said the ward chief in the local dialect.
I understood what he said.
“What’s more than necessary?” I asked him.
He looked over at me in surprise and then turned his eyes away.
“Tell us your name.”
“I’m Kana Matsuda,” the woman answered in a shaky voice. However, I could sense the determination in the black eyes staring straight at me.
“What is it that you know? What’s the truth you were referring to? Tell us everything.”
She took a deep breath and began speaking in an energetic tone of voice.
“Four American soldiers attacked Sayoko,” she said. “Seiji got angry and tried to get revenge. Those soldiers are the bad ones.”
Struggling to keep up with what she was saying, I cut her off and asked her to speak more slowly. Then I translated what she had said for the lieutenant.
It was a horrible story to hear from a woman. Her voice sometimes cracking, she told us that a girl named Sayoko was searching for shellfish along the shore when she was attacked and raped by four of our soldiers. Afterward, the soldiers often came to the village and attacked other women, too. Seiji got angry and struck back with his harpoon. Sayoko was his childhood friend.
“The Americans were the bad ones,” she concluded, “so please spare Seiji’s life.” Then she put her hands together and began to cry.
When I finished interpreting everything, the lieutenant and I didn’t know how to react. The woman certainly seemed to be telling the truth.
“Is what she said true?” the lieutenant asked the ward chief.
The ward chief stared at the ground and seemed to be mulling something over. Then he glanced over at the woman and answered, “It’s true.”
The lieutenant glared at the ward chief, thanked the woman, and looked around at the crowd of villagers. Other than some children, none of them looked the lieutenant in the eye. The woman who had told the story, however, stared straight at him.
“Where’s the victim now?”
When I passed this on, the ward chief answered in a quiet voice, “She’s confined to her house.”
“Where are the parents?”
“They’re probably at home, too.”
When I relayed this to the lieutenant, he told me to tell the ward chief to take us there, so we could hear directly from the victim and her parents. The ward chief stood up and said with a bow, “Sure, it’s right nearby.” He mumbled something to the woman who had testified, but she didn’t react. The lieutenant ordered our escorts to move the other villagers to under the banyan tree, and then he followed the ward chief and me to the girl’s house.
It didn’t even take a minute to get there. The thatched-roof house, surrounded by trees, was right next to Seiji’s house, which we had visited earlier as part of our investigation. In fact, the ward chief was the one who had guided us there. The lieutenant could barely suppress the anger he felt over the ward chief’s never having mentioned that the victim lived right next door. But when we asked about this, the ward chief only bowed and muttered an apology.
The ward chief entered the yard ahead of us and called out to the occupants. A woman of about forty came out.
“This is the victim’s mother,” said the ward chief, introducing her to us. As he explained the situation to her, she glanced over at the lieutenant and me with fear. Upon hearing that we wanted to question the girl, she stared at the ground in silence. The ward chief took off his shoes and entered the front room, a
