Tokyo Layover
Reminders of ghosts of WWII past, torture, and epigenetics.
Tokyo is a common layover for flights going in and out of the Marianas (Guam and the CNMI). My last visit through Tokyo Narita Airport, after a family visit in Saipan, I found myself wondering about the relationship of Japan and the Marianas stemming back to WWII and through the present.
After going through the usual checkpoints on the way to the next gate heading for Houston, I stopped by a café and bought over-priced sushi in a made-for-airports plastic bento box.
Walking back to find a seat to relax before the next long flight, I passed a bookstore with a book stating that Pearl Harbor was a hoax, Japan never attacked, it never happened. Oh, brother. If you haven’t heard about what horrors Japan inflicted on the Pacific and East Asia in WWII, have a seat while I finish my nigiri.
Imperialism and ethnocentrism has never been exclusive to the West, and Japan was a great example of how much damage can be done by another region with seemingly different values. Imperial values see not only color, but opportunities to pump vitriol into the masses via nationalism and political extremism.
The last time I was in Saipan before this Tokyo layover was in 1998 to see my dying grandfather Enrique, “Tata” as we called him. I didn’t pay any heed to another uncle’s warning not to join the military as my mind was made up and I would enlist in the US Army a few days after my 17th birthday. I just focused on getting to Saipan.
Being a large family, we all either slept in the available beds or woven mats laid out on the floors of other rooms. My mother and I slept in my grandparent’s room.
My grandfather, still a tall man at eighty-six years had withered away from leukemia to barely ninety pounds. A survivor of the Japanese occupation and brutality on the Native Chamorro people in WWII, he was in line to be beheaded after he had been accused by the Japanese for concealing the whereabouts of his family as well as American troops.
Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), USA
The Japanese had so mercilessly slaughtered the Chamorros and put them into internment camps. As Shinto shrines were erected, Indigenous Chamorro Animist and Catholic sites burned and a list of dead Chamorros and Refaluwasch rose like chimney smoke as Imperial Japan was succeeding in modeling their occupation and ethnic cleansing methods after Nazi Germany.
“Ethnic Cleansing:
the mass expulsion or killing of members of one ethnic or religious group in an area by those of another.”
Before Japanese troops got started, Tata caught wind of their plans to drive out Natives and have Japanese military and their families take over family homes and farms. He then rushed the women and children of our family to a cave in the mountains, what we call the Kalabera, where they hid for nine months. You can read about the accounts of the survivors - and illustrations by their grandchildren - in a book entitled, We Drank Our Tears.
As I sat up writing and keeping an eye on Tata throughout the day, I remembered him looking right at me, and perhaps right through me, for hours.
Occasionally I’d look up, smile and nod, ask if he was okay, and other times I’d just quickly return to my writing. My mother, curious as to what he was thinking about, asked why he stared at me as he did and he replied in a labored breath, “Suette.” Lucky.
In Chamorro culture, there is a belief that before we die, we can see the fate of our loved ones, who they really are and what they’ll become and what lies before them. When Tata called me lucky, I had no idea what he meant.
Lucky to be alive after spending a year in Ramadi, Iraq? Lucky that I didn’t get court martialed for mutiny because I had a penchant for keeping a travel journal in my cargo pocket that documented my unit’s corruption and money laundering? I walked around with a rucksack of guilt for being alive, for not being able to do enough to stop all the horrific things happening in Iraq.
While I knew that I should be grateful to be alive, I wouldn’t exactly call what I was feeling during this Tokyo layover in 2007 lucky.
In the US, schools barely touch upon WWII in the Pacific, and in the end, we feel sorry for the Japanese. But no one in American schools talks about what the Japanese did outside of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and how they were wiping out Indigenous people of Oceania and torturing the rest of East Asia. Imperial Japan was brutal, inhumane, and their alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was evident in everything they did and everywhere they went. They were serious soldiers who were excellent at genocide.
“Genocide:
the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.”
Matansa. It means massacre in the Chamorro language, and is a nickname for the village of San Roque in the northern part of the island of Saipan that endured the most brutal slaughtering as a punishment for Chamorro resistance by Imperial Japan in WWII, which was part of an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign that almost completely wiped out the Chamorro population from the face of the earth. San Roque is my family’s village.
They hacked relatives and non-relatives with machetes and threw people into pits, doused them in kerosene and lit them on fire. My grandfather, who was previously working as a machinist and farmer when the Japanese arrived, was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and was a typical unarmed Native.
Tata had witnessed heads rolling on the ground in the execution line in front of him in Marpi, Saipan, being ordered to dig their own graves in between interrogations and torture, all the way until Japanese troops were scrambling as American troops landed to capture and liberate the island.
Like many other Chamorros who were put into concentration camps, they were tortured and interrogated over the whereabouts of American troops who were hiding during reconnaissance of the island. Marine Navajo Code Talkers along with their fellow troops with 2nd Marine Division invaded on the day that my grandfather was scheduled to be executed, June 15, 1944.
If it weren't for the Navajo language (Diné), Chamorro people would have been wiped out by the Japanese through their use of torture and concentration camps modeled after the Nazi design. Considering the population size of Chamorros and Refaluwasch in the Marianas, it wouldn’t have been difficult if there wasn’t an intervention.
Unfortunately, the film Windtalkers entirely dismissed and overlooked what happened to Chamorros and deleted us out of the picture all together. Windtalkers was handled, quite ignorantly, by Hong Kong film director John Woo.
The film did, in fact, lightly touch upon the racial persecution Native American code talkers endured during WWII and how they played a crucial role in US military victory in a hard-won Pacific campaign, which is barely discussed in the realm of US history in grade school or at the University level for that matter. Anyone who's attended public high school in the US can attest to the European theater of WWII dominating the discussion, and quite disproportionately.
The film featured fierce combat between Imperial Japan and the United States, and showed exemplary courage and humility among Native code talkers. However, Chamorros – who endured ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Japanese on the island of Saipan, where the battle took place – were completely absent from the film.
It was as though the entire indigenous population of the island that almost disappeared due to Imperial Japan's Nazi-esque ethnic cleansing agenda, well, didn't even exist at all. The film practically called Saipan a "Japanese Island" which of course erases roughly seven thousand years of Indigenous, Micronesian Chamorro history in the Marianas in one thoughtless, inhumane sentence for billions to see. WWII may not have rendered us exterminated as an ethnic group, but John Woo sure made Chamorros feel that way via film.
Before Tata passed away from Leukemia, my uncle Danny, a typically stoic and silent Army Ranger who had deployed around the world like many of us in the family, asked if Tata could ever forgive the Japanese for what they did. It was an important question, one in which involves the deepest hurts and trauma. It was the first time I had heard anyone ask how he felt outside of requests for recounting old stories for my cousins’ school projects.
Mind you, there are no Chamorro holocaust museums or lobbyist groups to counter Japan’s narrative, or lack thereof, when it comes to war crimes; we are in a very similar boat with Native Americans, preferably silenced.
Tata said he had forgiven the Japanese. He was at peace before passing, even though there was no apology for anything the Japanese did, no reparations, not a thing. He forgave them. It wasn’t worth his time to hold onto the anger.
Yet in that valiant forgiveness comes a vacuum of accountability on the part of imperial invaders like Japan and Spain. Like rapists, they forced themselves onto the indigenous, fucked them violently and mercilessly, and then denied any accountability. It must be nice to do as you please with minimal to no consequence – free of remorse. Tata still forgave them.
If you attended high school in the U.S., Manzanar, the California-based internment camp for Japanese-Americans, was usually discussed from a position of compassion, along with Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivor stories. On the other hand, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the world - let alone the U.S. - who's heard of Matansa. In fact, you would be lucky to find anyone who believes there is any Pacific Island not located in the South Pacific instead of the North Pacific, which is anything north of the Equator.
South Pacific. You know, that musical that apparently ruined Oceania's geography for millions of Americans. Essentially, whether you’re familiar with Julie Andrews fuckery or not, we’ve had little control about how our history, culture, identity is handled and communicated throughout the world. Hell, few people know we exist.
When you’re persistently deleted from history, media, and any other channel to access information – or that information is distorted – it’s far worse than physically killing someone. It, instead, induces a form of psychological death. How can you truly be alive, how can you genuinely breathe, when everyone around you believes that you either don’t exist or are dead?
A simple explanation of Epigenetics & Trauma
However, as a Chamorro, it’s important to acknowledge generational trauma from multiple attempts at ethnic cleansing by Spain from the 1500s to the late 1800s, Imperial Japan during WWII, and having faced racial persecution via corrupt US Army leaders in Iraq, I can only hope that putting the pieces of lives shattered by trauma back together can result in a stronger American-made fabric. If we don’t commit to finding our resilience, and fighting against the dying of our inner light, we risk losing everything.
“On the simplest level, the concept of intergenerational trauma acknowledges that exposure to extremely adverse events impacts individuals to such a great extent that their offspring find themselves grappling with their parents’ post‐traumatic state. A more recent and provocative claim is that the experience of trauma – or more accurately the effect of that experience – is “passed” somehow from one generation to the next through non‐genomic, possibly epigenetic mechanisms affecting DNA function or gene transcription.”
Rolling my eyes at some of those revisionist titles in Tokyo Narita Airport’s bookshop that downplayed Imperial Japan’s horrific campaigns was truly an exercise in self-control. After finishing the bento box, I made my way to board the flight from Tokyo to Houston. I also felt an inescapable, simmering rage.
Around the world, people can identify the horrors Germany and Italy committed during WWII and European Fascism. But Japan’s flavor of Fascism is largely downplayed by the West. You witness a generous amount of articles filled with sympathy over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Imperial Japan’s WWII barbarism is currently downplayed and excluded - and what happened in US Territories remains completely absent from post-WWII reflection and conversations.
That simmering rage has never left me.
As the WWII-era survivors are dying off, it’s even more gut-wrenching to see quite a few residents of the Marianas are forgetting this brutal history in favor of QAnon conspiracy theories. I get to see an ongoing historical omission play out on social media as we hurl toward the US Presidential Election like a clown car speeding toward a Fascist brick wall. I’m not feeling fantastic about the future of the United States and its Territories - who can’t vote in the Election anyway.
On this evening in Tokyo in 2007, my heart felt heavy. My nerves still shattered from Iraq. My heart and mind still searching for meaning as an invisible woman in the world, having to wearily explain my existence to every new person I meet. Telling Marianas history over and over again to people who were hearing it for the first time.
As a Chamorro combat veteran, I felt like a modern-day Cassandra, telling warning stories of Fascist conquest and feeling like no one was listening.
Another long 12-hour flight across the Pacific loaded with the extra baggage of generational trauma, Depression, and Complex PTSD. Farewell, Japan. And as we near Election Day 2020, let’s hope it’s not Farewell, Democracy, too.
