Payback

fastidiously neat, the rice the very best, the teriyaki beef devoid of the fatty gristle of less conscientious entrepreneurs, and for U.S. servicemen on a sailor’s meager pay, many of them coming out of a depression-battered America, it was the cheapest off-base meal around.

Except for every second Sunday, Omura, his wife, and his grandson worked what eighty years later would be called “24-7” as they served up the steaming hot rice and teriyaki. They listened to the sailors carefully, noting their shoulder-patch ship’s insignia. On his biweekly day off, Grandfather Omura would take his long bamboo rod and go fishing around the harbor — not, of course, in any restricted area, but it wasn’t difficult to identify a U.S. aircraft carrier or a battleship, the leviathans of the world’s navies. And, like any fisherman, he’d try different spots. A good caster for his age, Omura always used a heavy sinker so as to get his line well beyond the rocks. Allowing for the angle of his cast line, he could estimate the depth — always vital information for Admiral Yamamoto’s G2 intelligence staff whenever they planned a submarine- or air-launched attack. The Kempei Tai had also provided Grandfather Omura with a German-made wide-angle Voigtlander Vito B camera set into the false bottom of his bait-and-tackle bag, the camera activated by merely reaching down for bait and pressing the shutter button.

The undeveloped film was left under one of the many black, honeycombed volcanic rocks that Tayama passed by on his nightly walk through the park across from Waikiki beach, up toward Diamond Head. Tayama and Grandfather Omura knew that if they did not continue spying for the Kempei Tai, who had “kindly” facilitated their emigration to Hawaii, then Tayama’s two eighteen-year-old brothers, one conscripted and serving in Manchuria, the other in Korea as part of the Japanese occupational force, which had been there since 1910, and both his teenaged sisters — all effectively kept as hostages by the Kempei Tai — would suffer the consequences under the hands of the Imperial Army’s Unit 736. This secret group of Japanese “scientists” specialized in tying Chinese and, later, Allied POWs to wooden stakes and subjecting them to a plethora of chemical and biological prototype weapons. The unit’s doctors, like Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, who also subjected human beings to unspeakable tortures, kept meticulous records of how long it took the subjects to die when exposed to anthrax, bubonic plague, et cetera, so as to better manufacture the prototype weapons the Imperial Japanese Army were building for use against their potential enemies, the Chinese, Koreans, British, and Americans.

The strain on Arturo Omura proved too much, and a combination of hypertension, fatigue, and guilt at what he was doing against America killed him in the summer of 1940. His wife, heartbroken, fell gravely ill less than six months later, in early January of 1941, with pneumonia. Their grandson Tayama, now eighteen, had to take over the burden from his grandfather, spying full-time for the Kempei Tai, lest his brothers and sisters back in Japan be imprisoned or executed for any refusal on Tayama’s part to continue spying.

Once able to share the burden of his grandparents’ circumstances, of their American dream gone sour because of the neighbor in Japan who had informed on them, of having to assure the safety of their loved ones back in Japan, Manchuria, and Korea — wherever the Imperial Japanese Army had sent them — Tayama now had to carry the added responsibility of running the rice and teriyaki cart by himself. The Kempei Tai, using the most popular and therefore the most widely distributed American novel of 1939 as the reference for their number-for- letter code, informed Tayama, via the dead-drop stone in the park across from Waikiki, that he would receive money to help pay off his grandmother’s bill for what had turned out to be a month’s hospitalization at Queen’s Hospital before she died. “Big deal,” Tayama told himself, using one of the quintessential American expressions he’d learned since being in Hawaii. Was this monetary assistance supposed to be received as an act of Japanese generosity after they had blackmailed him to assure the safety of his family? He also began receiving monthly postcards from his two sisters and two brothers, his sisters’ postcards bearing the postmark of Nagasaki. The handwriting was certainly theirs, but the content was bland: visits to shrines, flower shows, et cetera. Nothing that was even remotely political unless, Tayama suspected, the endless postcards of shrines were meant to remind him of one’s expected and sacred duty of sacrifice to the motherland. But beyond this, there was no hint of the rapidly growing tension between the United States and Japan as reported almost daily in the Honolulu Advertiser over Japan’s continuing invasion of and atrocities in Chinese territory and Japan’s ongoing brutal occupation of Korea, where thousands of Korean women were viewed by the Japanese Army as nothing more than sex slaves to be used in the service of the Japanese troops of occupation. In an attempt to counter any Western criticism of the army’s treatment of these women, they were referred to as “prostitutes” by Japanese diplomats, a complete misnomer, as the women received no reward for providing the Japanese soldiers with sex. Indeed, they were shot if they resisted any son of Nippon, the pugilistic Nippon that the Omuras had sought, unsuccessfully, to escape.

Tayama received money and an assistant, Yoko, a good-looking Nisei, a Japanese-American of immigrant Japanese parentage. In her early twenties, she had been told to assist Tayama Omura in running the food stall. They hardly spoke for the first three days, he confining his remarks to instructions on the need for cleanliness — the thousands of sailors from Pearl Harbor were used to very high standards of hygiene aboard their ships. A food poisoning aboard a ship, some of them had told Tayama, could spread like a “prairie fire.” Despite her being born in Oahu, Yoko was not familiar with the phrase “prairie fire” and felt embarrassed that she didn’t understand. Tayama’s explanation was given kindly, devoid of any of the pomposity she’d had to endure from other male Nisei bosses. She and Tayama worked well together, neither getting flustered by the rush of noonday and dinner customers, most of the crowd being sailors from the big American carriers Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga, which were tied up in Pearl, each of the three big aircraft carriers housing more than four thousand men and many fighters and torpedo bomber planes.

Soon Yoko was smiling and joking with the sailors, which, while it pleased Tayama from a business point of view, annoyed him intensely as a man who was sliding helplessly in love, despite the fact that he thought she must surely be a Kempei Tai operative.

She was.

July 4 was not a big celebration in Hawaii, which, as the Kempei Tai controllers never tired of reminding their agents, was not a state of the U.S. but still a territory, “stolen” from the Hawaiian Islanders by an act of Congress four years after an armed group of businessmen, led by a missionary’s son, Sandford Dole, declared itself the provisional government of Hawaii, following which the islanders’ beloved Queen Liliuokalani was arrested, tried, and humiliated in her own palace, deliberately referred to as “Mrs. Dominic,” her American husband’s last name. Sentenced at first to five years hard labor, this later commuted to a year’s house arrest, Queen Liliuokalani died twenty-two years later in a house ironically called “Washington Place,” situated one block away from the palace. But if July 4, 1941 was yet another American holiday despised by the Kempei Tai, it was not so for the 39 percent of the Hawaiian population who were Japanese. For them it was a holiday, a day off from hard labor in the rice and pineapple plantations. And for Tayama Omura, it was one of the most memorable days in his life, and Yoko’s, as he finally told her he loved her and she confirmed her love for him — and her “blackmail” status as a Kempei Tai spy. It was an enormous relief for both of them. At least they could live together, as long as the Kempei Tai allowed them, free at least in each other’s arms, unwilling spies, their horrible secret shared. Occasionally, one of the Kempei Tai’s blackmailed Nisei agents couldn’t take the pressure any longer, squeezed into an unbelievable psychological space between loyalty to family and loyalty to America, the country that had given them so much, a land of freedom impossible in Japan, from which their parents had fled through emigration. One such agent, a fisherman, had decided he could no longer take the strain and, knowing it was too dangerous to go directly to the Oahu police, wrote a letter to the Honolulu police chief.

Soon gruesome pictures of the man’s headless corpse were found by Tayama, Yoko, and Kempei Tai agents at their individual drop-off points.

It was this agent’s execution, his body having been dumped in shark-infested waters off Molokini’s atoll near Maui, that was responsible for a sudden increase in American counterespionage surveillance of the large Hawaiian- Japanese population. For Yoko, her American citizenship exacerbated her guilt at times to almost unbearable proportions, despite her public face, especially as the Kempei Tai increased pressure on them to spend more time on their days off collecting as much intelligence as possible about the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. It was becoming too dangerous for Tayama to use his grandfather’s Voigtlander camera.

On December 6, 1941, watching dancers already practicing for next summer’s Prince Lot Hula Festival, Tayama and Yoko were stopped by a Japanese-Hawaiian man in his late twenties. Dressed in a colorful hibiscus- patterned shirt and matching shorts, and carrying a tightly rolled-up copy of the Honolulu Advertiser, he showed them a badge — police, FBI, Naval Intelligence, they didn’t know which — and motioned them away from the edge of a noisy crowd nearby who were watching a hula competition. He led them toward the carp ponds and golden-stemmed bamboo in front of the Gardens’ Chinese hall, where a blush of yellow-