23 March 2008

Kiko, 1951


It is Easter, the celebration of the Risen Christ superimposed on the old pagan holiday of rebirth. It is early this year, apparently a function of the lunar cycle that has nothing to do with the rules or laws of mankind.

It will take another day or so to vanquish the jet lag, and I watched the setting of the waning moon from the balcony as dawn rose around Big Pink.
I did not want to go into the office. I knew what was in there, and I did not like it. I made the coffee anyway, and wandered back to look at the wreckage.

A tall stack of snapshots from 1951 were still strewn across the desk. I remembered being lost in The Honch in the years of the Occupation of Japan, and the leads and blind trails to which the photos pointed.

An older colleague who was there is cleaning up files, and sent me along the bits and pieces from that year. I had identified ships and peered at earnest young faces, American and Japanese for hours. My notes about the world that existed in the Far East in the year of my birth were incomplete.

They were atop another set of notes and pictures from another country in the Far East, formerly highly confidential, and one of the last untold tales from a lost war. I sighed. That will have to come later.

I looked through the incoming new mail, and wound up typing a feverish anti-statist screed based on the tone of some of the Federalist papers. I won't inflict it on you. The argument comes down to whether you trust the system or you don't, and no amount of rhetoric will change the predisposition.

It will come as no surprise as to which side I incline, so I will let it rest. It isn't that funny anyway.

What did strike me was the way the past leaks out at you. The photos of the Occupation were a cautionary tale about the consequences of losing wars.

The images of the Grand Shima Dance Hall in Yokosuka were tantalizing. They were taken during the Korean War, when I was busy being born, and the man who took them was enforcing the law on an occupied people.

The Grand Shima was gone when I lived there. It had been located in The Honch, just a short stagger across the street from the Club Alliance and the main gate of the main gate to the Commander, Fleet Activities Yokosuka (CFAY). It was a popular haunt of American sailors, both those assigned to the base and those on ships in the harbor.

In its prime, the Honch encompassed parts of Honcho 1-chome, 2-chome and 3-chome and ran parallel to Route 16, the road that came down from Yokohama. Ch__-o-dori road was the main artery of the Honch, but the sailors called it "Blue Street" due to the color of the paint on the asphalt. The party district ran nearly all the way to Shiori-eki, basically the entire commercial area between Yokosuka Ch__ and Shioiri train stations.

The notes say that the Grand Shima had “Over 100 girls to keep the sailors happy!” Thee was a fuzzy picture of a bandstand and a man in a boxy suit swaying with a woman. Another was an underexposed shot of a group of men on a couch at the club. The notes on the back read: “Left to right, there were a couple intelligence agents, the Base Commander, and the son of “Memphis Bill” Terry of the New York Giants. I had to look it up, and discovered that the father of the man in the photo was a slugging first baseman who is remembered for hitting .401 in 1930.   

He was the last National Leaguer to hit over .400.

There is a pretty Japanese girl seated precariously on a lap at the far end of the couch.

The note says that her name Kiko. She is a woman with a story, and it is a pretty good one. It is about re-birth, since that is what she had to do in 1945, in the shadow of the atom clouds, and who she became in the year of my birth, in 1951.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com