Page 59 of Daikon

“Look at that,” said Noriko Kan, directing Keizo’s attention to the group of Americans seated a few rows farther down and over to the left.

They were on their feet cheering again, dumbfounding and delighting the Japanese fans all around them.

Why would Americans cheer for a Japanese team playing one of their own?

But there they were, yelling and clapping along with everyone else.

It made Noriko proud to see them. The things she had loved about America—it was restoring her faith.

“They live here,” Keizo rationalized as they sat back down and the tumult subsided. “They’re rooting for the home team.”

The age gap between them appeared wider now, four years after the war.

Noriko, at thirty-three, was still quite youthful and attractive in a flower print skirt and white blouse, her looks and figure almost fully restored.

Keizo looked much older, in his late fifties, although he was only forty-two.

He had a paunch and his hair had turned gray, and there was a slight shuffle in his step when he walked.

The boy in the row in front of them turned around to gape at Keizo’s maimed hand. It was missing the index and middle fingers and looked like a claw. Keizo regarded him as the lad sucked on his candy and stared.

“You have a crab hand,” the boy observed.

“My dad can snip off your nose with it,” said Keizo’s and Noriko’s son, Koji. He was three. He turned to Keizo. “Go on, Dad. Show him.”

Keizo did the trick, hiding his good hand in his claw, making the snip and a snick sound with his mouth and protruding his thumb.

“There,” he said, displaying the nose. “Now I have it.” A darting motion back at the boy’s face. “And now it’s back on.”

Everyone seated around them started laughing, but no one louder than Ryohei Yagi. He roared out a guffaw and slapped his knee and knocked over an empty beer bottle under his feet.

They had chanced on each other a month before, as Kan was on his way from the Tokyo College of Science, where he was a professor of physics, to the new home he and Noriko had built in Asakusa.

He was mounting the steps at Iidabashi Station when a familiar voice called out behind him, “Sensei! You’re alive!

” He had turned to see Ryohei Yagi transformed—dapper suit, snappy fedora, radiating energy and visibly prosperous.

They went to the first bar they came to and began to catch up, starting with the day after they parted, when the Emperor made his speech announcing Japan’s surrender and the end of the war.

Kan had been lying in a crowded hospital ward, expecting to die, when he heard it.

But he hadn’t died. Instead, after losing all his hair and two amputated fingers, the Americans found him.

He was taken to a U.S. Army hospital and interrogated for nearly three months while he slowly recovered from what was being called radiation sickness.

When he was finally released in December 1945, it was with the threat that he would be sent to prison for the rest of his life if he ever revealed the existence of the atomic bomb the Japanese had recovered from the crashed B-29.

He had been required to sign a sheaf of papers pledging to keep what he knew a secret. Forever.

“Did the Americans…” Kan looked searchingly into Yagi’s face, unable to say the rest.

“Arrest me?” said Yagi. “Oh sure, they got me. Picked me up in early October.”

Kan hung his head in shame. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I gave them your name.”

Yagi laughed. “No need to be sorry, Sensei. I should thank you.”

Kan looked at him, confused. “But didn’t they lock you up?”

“Sure they did. But I didn’t mind. Gave me three meals a day and a bed while they asked me their questions. I told them my memory would work better if a little payment was made. So I walked out of there with a nice wad of cash.”

Kan’s eyes grew wide. “You asked the Americans for money?”

“Why not? I gave them valuable information, information they wanted. Wasn’t that worth something? And it set me up. Give-and-take, right?”

They stayed together drinking for two hours, Yagi shockingly forthcoming about how he made his living and asking Kan what he knew about pachinko game machines.

The former navy man had used the money from the Americans as seed capital to start a thriving black-market business, forging connections with supply clerks at U.S.

military bases all across the Tokyo region.

Kan also gleaned that Yagi was an important figure in some sort of ethnic Korean organization.

He would later learn that it was a yakuza syndicate called the Tosei-kai, the Voice of the East Gang.

When they finally parted, both fairly drunk, it was with a vow to meet again soon.

Ninth inning. The Seals were up, the score still 0–0. Yagi, throwing himself into the spirit of intercultural cheering, was roaring encouragement in English to the American coming to bat, outfielder Dick Steinhauer with eleven hits in the series. “Come on, Dik-ku Su-ta-in-hau-wa!”

Crack! A home run into the right-field bleachers. Seals win 1–0. Another loss for Japan. A murmur of disappointment rose from the stadium, but only for a moment, and certainly not from Yagi. He was smiling.

“But we lost,” said young Koji, looking up at his face.

“We came for a good time,” said Yagi. “And we had a good time, right? So we won!”

Hearing those words, Noriko felt the last of her reserve fall away. She decided she liked this man.

They joined the throngs making for the exits. The nearest station was sure to be crowded, so Keizo and Noriko decided to walk to Harajuku Station instead. They said their farewells to Yagi and set off, Noriko holding Koji’s hand. The little boy was already a strong walker.

The tickets to the game had come from Noriko’s employer, the American Forces Radio Network, where she worked as an interpreter and hosted the morning show Let’s Speak Japanese .

She had suffered no repercussions for her propaganda broadcasts during the war.

Unlike her colleague Ikuko Toguri, facing a prison sentence after being famously labeled “Tokyo Rose,” Noriko had given up her U.S.

citizenship and therefore could not be accused of treason.

It made Noriko sad to see Ikuko singled out for punishment for what all the Nisei broadcasters at NHK had done, simply because she had kept her American passport.

Ikuko had never even used the name “Rose.” She had always referred to herself in her broadcasts as “Annie.” Noriko didn’t tell anyone at American Forces Radio that if there had been an actual Tokyo Rose, it was her.

Even her former NHK colleagues didn’t seem to remember that she had used that name early on.

And so Noriko, like Keizo, had secrets to keep.

They crossed the fetid culvert known as the Shibuya River and arrived at Harajuku Station.

The wooden structure had survived the war, spared by the flames that had consumed the buildings around it and blackened the trees on the other side of the tracks.

The trees were growing back now, flourishing in the ash-enriched soil.

They formed a wall of green tinged with fall colors all along this section of track, where the Yamanote Line skirted Meiji Shrine and Yoyogi Park.

They bought tickets and passed through to the platform and found a place to wait against the wall, under the clock. They were soon joined by two young Americans in uniform—Marines—talking loudly about baseball. Noriko overheard them mention the name of the Seals’ famous manager, Lefty O’Doul.

“Were you boys at the game?” she asked.

The Marines turned to her and brightened, surprised by her perfect English. “Yeah, we were. You too?”

Noriko began chatting with them. She had always had an easy way with strangers.

And her experience working at American Forces Radio had dissolved the bitterness she had felt toward her former country and its people.

The Marines were stationed at Yokosuka, she learned, and one of them knew San Francisco.

It pleased Noriko to talk about her old home.

Keizo listened for a while. Then his mind drifted to the drawings in his pocket, designs for currently available pachinko machines that Yagi had given him back at the stadium.

Yagi was planning to open a chain of gaming arcades that he was going to call Lucky Daikon Pachinko.

“Because everything I have I owe to the Daikon,” he said.

But he wanted better machines, machines that would make the game more unpredictable and dynamic, like gambling.

Could Kan come up with something? Kan had agreed to try.

Daikon.

Yagi’s mention of their code name for the bomb had brought the riddle again to his mind.

It was only after the war that Kan realized why the word had made him uneasy.

It was when he was in American custody and caught sight of his interrogator’s notes written in English, the word DAIKON spelled out in capital letters.

There, between the D and the N, was the name of his daughter.

Aiko. “Child of love.” What did it mean, the love that was his daughter inside the hate of the bomb?

It was like a paradox, a Zen koan to meditate on to achieve understanding.

Was it an insight into his own real nature, into the contradictions of what it meant to be human?

He pondered this for many days. Then he was released and carried on with his life.

The second Marine took out a cigarette and lit it with his fancy lighter. He tapped out another and offered it to Kan.

“Thank you,” said Kan in English. It was good American tobacco, a Camel. “I will save it for later.”

The train was arriving. It pulled into the station and squealed to a stop.

The two Americans stepped into the current of bodies and let themselves be carried along into the car.

Keizo held back for a moment, under the clock, tucking the cigarette into his pocket.

He would smoke it after dinner, sitting on the back veranda overlooking his garden.

He put his arm through Noriko’s and took Koji by the hand.

They followed the Americans onto the train.