19 April 2008
Kiko’s Grand-daughter
It has been a pretty good run for the United States Navy in the big harbor south of Yokohama. Commodore Perry arrived there in 1853 in his flagship USS Powhattan, and was fairly abrupt with the Takugawa Shogun’s people, insisting on presenting gifts to the irrelevant Emperor. Perry’s visit, under the cannons that bristled from his Black Ship Squadron helped to spur the modernization of a then-closed society.
If I am inclined to give credit to a rude and intrusive visit for ushering in the sweeping changes of the Meiji restoration, then forgive me. It is a convenient simplification of a complex and highly nuanced process.
The Tokugawa Shogunate actually limped on after Perry’s visit for more than another decade. The Americans became preoccupied with their Civil War, and the Shogun continued to rule until 1867 in the Emperor’s name from his seat in Edo Castle. The major ideological factions of the transition period were split between pro-imperialist forces known as theIshin Shishi, or nationalist patriots and Tokugawan partisans. The nationalists included a broad coalition of feudal factions expelled from power in the struggle with the Shogun that had culminated in their downfall two hundred years before.
Anti-western sentiment was one thing everyone could agree on, and expressed by the phrase sonno joi, which loosely translated means “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians.”
The short blunt triangular fighting blade that came to me from former Army CID agent Al Shimisaki came from that period of turmoil, when the swordsmen ruled the streets.
Certainly I would not be the only one who prefers to make things simpler than it really was.
The selection of the US Navy flagship that would be the venue for the surrender was a no-brainer. Some would have liked the humiliating capitulation to be on the deck of one of the battlewagons that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor. Instead, USS Missouri was selected, since she bore the name of the new President’s home state.
One of the two flags prominently displayed on the bulkhead was the same ensign that had flown on Powhatten, dispatched from its home at the Naval Academy in Annapolis for the occasion.
My friend Mac was there a couple days after the surrender. He is back from the hospital and doing fine, by the way, and God bless him. He didn’t make it to Red Tie, but I expect to start walking with his thing week. I did talk to a pal about his time in the Korean War, and the long cold hike from the Chosan Reservoir to Wonsan in the big Chinese offensive, and shared a quick aside with a colleague who is still on active duty, and shipping out to the Far East soon.
Mac was there as the new conquerors were trying to sort things out as they stepped off their ships and onto the soil of dai Nippon. The wreckage, material and human, was all around. A sobering time, for all concerned.
Starvation was abroad in the land, and the Japanese people did what they could to accommodate the new reality. The Tokugawa dynasty was reborn in the form of an aristocratic American who smoked a corncob pipe, and ruled by fiat in the Emperor’s name from the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo.
The Americans who strode the streets were more benevolent than any occupying force could be expected to be, but still there were outrages, which were swept away by the necessity of keeping the conquerors happy.
My associate Tom arrived in Yokosuka in 1949. Things had changed dramatically from the early days of the Occupation, though military law was still in place. Tom saw the change during his tour there, as the Korean War transformed the nature of the occupation.
When the Japanese dock-workers presented him a petition to enlist in the Service of Shogun MacArthur, they were not joking. In fact, you may not know that the last great strategic triumph of the American Shogun at Inchon was enabled by ex-Imperial Navy captains who knew the treacherous shallow approaches to the harbor.
John’s evacuation from Wonsan harbor, under the Chinese guns, was enabled by Japanese who could sweep mines after US Navy ships were sunk in the attempt.
Like I say, it is far easier to simplify the whole thing.
I met Kiko’s daughter at the Crossroads Bar in the Honcho-ku in 1978. Sumiko was a pretty woman with a full figure that suggested she might have been mixed blood. She had dark eyes you could fall into over a glass of Suntori Whiskey. She continued to put up with us, even as the signs were going up on doors in the old Geisha district that said “Japanese Only.”
The US presence at Yokosuka waxed and waned with the wars. In 1973 the US pulled out of Vietnam, undefeated in the field, though it was cold comfort with the Communists in the Presidential Palace in the former Saigon. To bolster a forward presence, my ship USS Midway (CV-41) and her pilot fish was ordered to shift homeports to Yokosuka, and a continuous presence of a carrier strike group has been there ever since.
Naturally, there were complications. Relations with our host nationals were often marred by the rash acts of the young men who came off the ships looking for what they considered a good time in a very different cultural context.
My active duty pal just got back from a quick orientation trip to Yoko. The USS George Washington (CVN-73), a nuclear-powered carrier is on its way to Japan to take up the presence mission. It is a matter of some sensitivity, since the issue of nuclear weapons can never be fully separated from that of nuclear power. Put aside the fact that the lights of the Home Islands are lit largely by the force of the atom.
It is a matter of whose atoms they are, after all.
The Navy had deferred to the sensitivities of the Japanese all these years by only assigning conventionally-powered ships to Yokosuka, and refusing to discuss at all what manner of weaponry might be in the magazines.
My pal had a Diet Coke while I indulged in a glass of white wine. We talked a little about the latest unpleasantness. A 22-year-old Seaman named Olatunbosun Ogbogu had gone missing from the USS Cowpens, one of the strike force ships in the harbor. He is a Nigerian national, for what it is worth, though that is an extraneous fact in particular for what happened next.
Ogbogu had been near the Japanese Rail station in Shinagawa in Tokyo late last month. I don’t know why he didn’t just take the train, but he decided to hail a cab back to Yoko. That is a long way, if you do not know, and taxis are not cheap transportation.
He had been staying with Sumiko’s daughter, Kiko’s granddaughter, or at least a woman who could very well have been. He had appropriated a knife from her place. Not a fighting knife like mine, mind you, or a proud samurai blade. A kitchen knife.
Masaaki Takahashi was the taxi driver. Ogbogu tried to pay the $190 dollar fair with a credit card, which was declined. In the ensuring altercation, the sailor stabbed Takahashi to death. He fled the scene, leaving his credit card behind.
The crime was solved in short order on that piece of evidence, with the Navy Crminal Investigative Service picking him up in the Gotanda neighborhood of Tokyo. The Navy had jurisdiction over the crime under the Status of Forces agreement, but the matter is being resolved with remarkable alacrity.
The Navy imposed limits Wednesday on travel by base personnel, and alcohol consumption was prohibited. Ogbogu was turned over to Japanese authorities and is facing trial this week. His Japanese lawyer said he had voices in his head.
These are not the only incidents that have fanned the flames of public discontent. A 14-year-old girl was allegedly assaulted in February down in Okinawa, although the complaint was dropped, and two dependent sons of military personnel have been detained for robbery. Last week, a Japanese court sentenced a sailor to life in prison for beating a 56-year-old Japanese woman to death. She could have been Sumiko.
In a remarkable and unprecedented ceremony, United States Ambassador Thomas Schieffer, Seventh Fleet Commander VADM Doug Crowder, and NAVFOR-Japan Commander RADM James Kelly met with Yokosuka Mayor Ryoichi Kabaya to express their regrets, which in Japanese is “gomen asai.” A thousand gomens, is how we used to say it, after doing something inappropriate.
George Washington is advancing around South America, and is expected to arrive in Yokosuka in August. An advance party of ship’s company is already there in preparation.
The Far East is an interesting place these days. Two American aircraft carriers, Kitty Hawk and Nimitz, are deployed in waters near Taiwan to ensure a smooth transition of government in Taipei. Regional tensions are high, and significant level of naval presence is likely to stay in the region until President-elect Ma Ying-jeou is inaugurated in late May.
Ma ran on a pledge of reducing cross-strait tensions with Big China. American power is considered useful in that regard, at least for now, though the calculus of things is changing swiftly.
It has been a pretty good run, but I have a feeling that Kiko’s great-grand-daughter is not going to have America’s sailors as one of the things she worries about, when her time comes.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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