Family Secrets

I've been walking in my neighborhood a lot these days and I have Curves to thank for it. I've lived in an ultra-hip patch of Los Angeles for over a decade but since I started working out at this local circuit training place I've re-discovered the vibrant and ever-interesting four square blocks where our small city-bound community hangs out.

Take, for instance, the Japanese restaurant that has a lunch for under two dollars and dinner for less than five bucks. I'd tell you the name of it but you might overrun the place and it's my neighborhood joint and I'd prefer not to line up to eat there. Anyway, I was lunching there after working out today and got to thinking about Sweetpea's squeaky shoes from China that had everyone a goggle at the zoo earlier this week. Squeaky shoes for those who have travelled to China to adopt are a type of toddler footwear that squeak with every step and are very handy when you lose sight of your small, hurtling rocket in a crowded place, such as the zoo or behind the diaper displays at Toys R Us.....

Anyway, I was thinking about starting up a squeaky shoe business when my cell phone rang and it was my mother-in-law, whom we are visiting up north in a week.

"Trip no longer on." she said in her customary brusque way in heavily accented English.
My mother-in-law is Japanese, a Korean War bride who left everything to come to the U.S. with her exotic Latin husband. I knew exactly what trip she was talking about and it wasn't the hike up for a family visit. She and her husband (number two after Latin guy left her with three toddlers) were planning a visit to China later this year. Specifically, she wanted to spend time in Manchuria where she was born and spent the first eleven years of her life. Their trip has been postponed due to rising tensions and government sanctioned demonstrations in China because of revisions by Japanese educators to school textbooks downplaying the atrocities committed in Manchuria during WWII. Japanese tourists, especially those born in China during the occupation would not be particularly welcome at this time.

I remember having a frisson of anxiety when my husband told me that his mother's family had been billeted in Manchuria during the war. I knew something of the crimes committed by the Japanese military during their occupation and I was mostly concerned about having this information on our application for adoption in China.

I should never have started asking questions, but once the information flood gates were open, there was no turning back.

"Why was your mother there?" I'd asked while we pored over the paperwork. Seemed like a fairly simple question but judging by the blank look on my husband's face there was some missing pieces to the family puzzle. And even more puzzling was that he had never thought to ask himself.

Cut to a couple of weeks later at a routine family visit. We were having dinner with his mother and step-father when my husband, who had been raised to believe that the kindly old man he had met in Japan when he was a small child was his grandfather, broached the subject. It did seem to beg the question as to how a generational beet farmer who made a living in his retirement years carving little wooden figures to sell in local tourist shops could have had anything to do with the occupation of China.

"Because that man not your grandfather," came the calm reply, to which I fell quietly into spooning miso soup with my Big Ears on.
"Grandfather died during war," she continued, "and mother remarried after we were grown ."
"Did I know this?" came the plaintive question from my side of the table.
"I supposed so," his mother replied with some vagueness. "Father was very smart man who graduated from Imperial University in Tokyo with a law degree, which is like your Harvard." So much for the kindly old sharecropper guy with the stone toilet that emptied out over a cliff, or so my husband recalls. The revelation about the real family tree made sense to me because my husband didn't seem to have the genes of a farmer in his blood. Not that I'm knocking farmers, but you know when something doesn't add up to a dollar. There are a lot of smarts and no small bit of steel in my guy and I knew it hadn't come from the Latin side.

Anyway, the family matriarch then went on to tell her son the story of how his actual grandfather, her father, had come to live in Manchuria (he was an attorney with the civil arm of the occupying forces) and how he had died suddently at a young age while on military business in Tokyo, leaving his wife and small children stranded in China with no way to get home. They'd had to flee for their lives at the end of the war, but details on this are sketchy.

It was a long meal and as it turned out there was more to this story and now that mother-in-law was on a roll, she seemed to want to set the record straight.
"I thought I'd also tell you," she began as she offered around her scrumptious tempura vegetables and shrimp gyoza, "that great uncle Yoshijiro signed peace treaty on that Missouri ship with General McArthur". Huh? Okay, this was more information than I had bargained for.

Ah, no mom, I think I would have remembered that.
My husband was in shock and not contributing much at this point, so I eased in politely and asked for more details. She seemed quite talkative, perhaps the relief of having kept it inside for so long. Turned out General Yoshijiro Umezu had been the Vice Minister of War and was Chief of the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army when the war ended so he would have been the logical choice to sign the surrender documents. At this point we all felt silent. Probably to digest the meal, and the enormous (and enormity) of the information that had come with it.

I did a fair amount of research when we got home, partly because I wasn't quite sure if this was all really true or just exaggerated family lore. Not only did Umezu sign the treaty along with the Japanese Foreign Minister who was representing the Emperor, but it turns out that the connection to Manchuria was even more startling. The treaty between China and Japan to occupy northern China in 1933 has his name on it (The Ho-Umezu Agreement) so he was the General who led the military campaign. How my husband's grandfather came to serve in Manchuria raises more questions than answers right now, but no doubt there was some family connection that led to his position there.

Great uncle General Yoshijiro was tried and convicted of war crimes in 1948, but not sentenced to death as he was cleared of any direct connection with the greatest mass atrocities committed in China. Considered a career solider who had spent his life defending the honor and vision of Japan he was guilty of being a faithful yes-man to the bitter end and the stress finally killed him when he succumbed to cancer in prison in 1949 at the age of 61. Ironic, since many of his fellow military and political inmates, some with death sentences for their war crimes, managed to secure releases and were out and back in public service (or at least comfortable retirement) by the mid-1950's. But that's another story....

Last year my husband and I visited the U.S.S.Missouri, now a floating museum in Honolulu. We studied the photographs and the documents displayed there and I bought some postcards with the photos of the two stiff-backed men waiting to sign away their battered dignity and honor before the world press. Mamoru Shiegemitsu represented the Emperor and wore a top hat and tails, As Commander in Chief of the Japanese Armed Forces, General Umezu came in full military regalia, including his riding boots and whip. My husband and he share a physical resemblence about the mouth and eyes though I am happy to report that my guy's loyalty, generosity and kindess are committed to the far more palatable cause of family happiness and keeping a roof over our head in a 9-5 job.

Needless to say, we made no mention of any of this on our application to adopt our daughter.

Got Shade?

Note: My husband said I should post this letter written some time ago to Bob Dickenson, president of Carnival Cruise Lines. He found it recently and thinks you all should be suitably warned....

Dear Mr. Dickenson

Last week I took my first cruise. It was not a long cruise, just three nights and four days to Mexico. Aboard the Ecstasy. Help me, please because I am in need of post-traumatic stress therapy.

When we planned this trip our travel agent told us that Carnival had a bad rap when it came to being labeled as the 'fun ship' for party people. We are not party people. We are pooped people who at the time were desperately in need of some R&R. She assured us that your cruise line was the one for us.

Imagine our horror when we got on board and realized that we were trapped on a floating Camp Carnival nightmare, and the party people were actually hordes of frenzied children who had been cut loose by weary parents lulled into the sleep of the dead in their cabins or in their loungers under the sun. The main pool was drained when we left, but when filled at sea, with the water they came out like gremlins with their gnashing of little teeth, multiplying by the hundreds over every available surface of the ship. At any time of the night or day they could be found (always screaming, by the way), pounding down hallways, playing tag on the volleyball court, climbing walls, windows, railings, wandering the decks after midnight and either playing tag or french-kissing other pre-teens, delighted to be free of supervision perhaps for the very first time in their wee lives. And were the delightful children busy! Not content with their very own "Kid's Pool" and other organized Camp activities they comandeered the two adult guest pools and crammed all-a-tangle into their murky depths, peed and screamed, "Marco/Polo!" in them with furious enthusiasm from dawn 'till dusk. They particularly enjoyed packing into the hot tub like so many circus clowns in a Volkswagen (God knows what was left at the bottom) next to the stern but un-enforced warning sign "Adults Only!"

Desperately Seeking Shade
Red hair and freckles. 'Nuff said. Much as I like the sun, I cannot stay in it for very long. I am happiest in some form of shade to relax and read. Interestingly enough, there was not a lick of it to be had topside where rows of holidaying broilers were laid out under a brilliantly hot sun. True, there was shade if you wanted slink downstairs to sit in the artic chill of the enclosed mall floors alternately listening to the clang, clang, clang of the casino slots and gazing longingly out at the sea behind glass. Or in the Hawaiian Hour Bar where people happily chain-smoked and slurped Sea Breezes to music videos. No luck there. Oh for a place to romance the open sea, a square of it in my view, quiet to read, to contemplate, to relax, to drift off. Not to be had. I spent fruitless hours moving like a nomad with my beach towel and chair chasing small patches of temporary shade offered by (depending on the angle of the sun) smokestacks, barricades, half-walls, and even piles of unused lounge chairs. All this to the hourly blasting of your ship's theme song, "Hot, Hot, Hot!" from tinny speakers attached to fake palm trees.

Vampirella at the Spa
Seeking some rest and relaxation since the deck issue was out of my control, I booked appointments at the Spa. Yes, yes, I am now quite aware that Carnival does not want to take responsibility for what goes on there, but it is on your ship and we don't have any choice.

Let's see. Are you aware of the hard-sell that goes on in that place? I was there but five minutes when someone cornered me and tried to get me to buy $600.00 worth of foot creams. And during my actual facial ($150.00 plus tax) the woman slathering potions on my face spent a good amount of time thumbing through product catalogues droning on about stuff I should absolutely buy or look like a raisin in a year. To top it all off, and perhaps because I refused to buy any creams when we were finished, she informed me that because she'd used some marine collagen on my face I was to stay out of the sun for the next 12 hours. Hmmm, here were were on a very brief cruise to sunny Mexico and I was now consigned to the darkest corners of its bowels (after my face started to peel off I discovered smokestack shade was not sufficient protection ). When the ship docked in Mexico for a day trip to El Bufadora I watched them disembark from a window and then scuttled back into the depths like a cockroach. I would have been in my cabin but my travel companion had come down with a nasty viral illness, but that's another story. Not your fault, of course, unless you count the fact that the ship's doctor mis-diagnosed her viral meningitis, which could have meant curtians for a lot of us if she hadn't self-medicated and confined herself to quarters.

Just thought you would like to know how it all went - after all you are the Admiral of this fleet. Do yourself a favor and have your marketing people talk to my marketing people to pass along any and all travel advisories. You do not want our kind of vacationers on your Fun Ship. Believe me, it's not worth it.

Sincerely Yours, etc. etc.

P.S. I want my money back.

A few weeks later I received a reply from Mr. Dickenson with an apology and a voucher for 20% off my next Carnival Cruise, which was promptly filed in my garbage can.