March 1946
THE RAIN WAS COMING DOWN HARD THAT DAY. Koichi hurried home as fast as he could, clutching his bag to his chest beneath his jacket to keep it safe from the torrential downpour as he scrambled through the door.
The place was looking a lot more like a home now than it was when Noriko first started living with him, though it still offered little protection from a heavy storm like this, and the sound of water dripping through the cracks echoed in the shanty. Every receptacle they owned—be it a bucket, a rice bowl, or an empty can—was currently being used to collect the rainwater.
“God, it’s like a monsoon out there…” Koichi said. “I’m soaked to my skin.”
Noriko deftly avoided the bowls on the floor as she walked out to greet him, handing him a dry hand towel to wipe himself off. Her clothing, too, was looking a fair shake better now than the ratty, vagrant-like rags she’d been wearing when they first met.
“Any luck finding work?” she asked.
“I guess you could say that, yeah…” Koichi said, somewhat evasively.
Noriko raised an eyebrow at this noncommittal answer. “What do you mean?”
“Well, see for yourself,” said Koichi, reaching into his bag to pull out an application form with the job description. “The pay’s pretty good actually. In fact, they even said they’d give me a three-thousand yen advance!”
“Oh my goodness! That’s amazing!”
Her elation lasted only a moment, however, before she furrowed her brow with suspicion. “How do you know this isn’t another scam?” she said. “Like that job you got delivering rice a while back, where it all got ‘stolen’ right at the end.”
“No, I’m pretty sure this one will be different,” said Koichi.
“Different in what way? How can you say that for sure?”
“This one’s government-sponsored—by the demobilization bureau specifically. So it’s definitely not a scam…but there is a catch.”
“And that is?”
“Well, even though the war is over, it just so happens that there are still hundreds and hundreds of active mines out there in the ocean—from both the U.S. and the Imperial side. So now they’re looking for people to help go out and disarm them. And the reason it pays so handsomely is, well…because there’s no guarantee I’ll make it back alive.”
Noriko’s face went pale. Koichi braced himself; this was exactly why he’d been reluctant to tell her about the opportunity.
“Have you lost your mind?” she shouted, her voice shaking the walls of the shack. “You just survived a war, and now you want to go out and risk your life all over again?”
“It needs to be done,” said Koichi. “We have to secure a stable income somehow, or all three of us are going to starve to death. And we both know Akiko isn’t going to last much longer in these conditions.”
Noriko looked over at Akiko, fast asleep on the floor. It was true—they’d barely been able to feed her at all for several days straight now. When Noriko looked at the growing dark circles that had developed under the child’s eyes, she could only bite her lip.
“I realize that,” she said. “But there must be some other way…”
“We can’t wait to find another way,” said Koichi, sensing that she was one solid argument away from caving. “Just think—with this advance money, we could even buy her some of that good powdered milk. The American kind! It’s worth the risk…”
“No, you can’t die on me… I won’t let you!”
Koichi genuinely appreciated the sentiment. That there was at least someone in this world who insisted on him being alive, when for so long he’d felt like a man whose only value to his country was in death. Yet even so, this was all the more reason he needed to make money to support her. Not to mention…
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Sure, it’s dangerous work, but it’s not like it’s a guarantee that I’ll die out there, like being a kamikaze pilot was. Plus, they’ve got this top-of-the-line boat that won’t detonate magnetic mines even if it runs into one by accident.”
He wasn’t lying about this, either; they’d explained during the information session today that this newfangled ship was nigh unsinkable. He was confident he’d be just fine.
“This…is ‘top-of-the-line’?”
A portion of the fishing harbor had been converted into a base for minesweeping operations. Koichi now stood on the pier in front of the newfangled ship he’d been assigned to—Shinsei Maru. But it was far from the “nigh unsinkable” vessel he’d been sold on. It was plain to see that this was just an old wooden fishing boat that had been hastily modified for its current mission.
As he stood there, mouth agape, a man emerged from the cabin of the ship. Koichi could tell from one look that he’d been a man of the sea his entire life.
“Oh, hey,” said the man. “You our new sharpshooter?”
“Yes, sir,” said Koichi. “Shikishima, sir.”
“Nice. Were you in the navy?”
“No, I was a fighter pilot.”
Upon hearing this, the man, likely the ship’s new captain, seemed to lose all enthusiasm for Koichi. He turned to the man behind him, a scholarly-looking sort who wore a pair of thin-framed round glasses, for a second opinion.
“The hell?” he said. “This guy’s useless to us, isn’t he? What gives?”
Just then, a third, much-younger man emerged from behind the spectacled scholar, his eyes almost shimmering with elation. “Wait, you were an airman?” he exclaimed. “Get outta town!”
The apparent captain shot the young man a remonstrative look. “Don’t get too excited, now,” he said. “These ex-military types ain’t good for diddly squat, I tell ya.”
Seeing how deflated Koichi was by this cold reception, the man in glasses hurriedly cut in as if trying to salvage the interaction somehow. “Ship’s not as glamorous as you were expecting, eh?” he said. “Well, let me explain. You see, between the U.S. and Imperial forces, our navies left something in the order of sixty thousand mines littered across the ocean surrounding Japan. All sorts of the darn things too—the most deadly of which being the magnetic mine the Americans came up with. Get close enough to one of those things in a metallic vessel, and it’ll detonate before you even have a chance to sweep it.”
“Oh, so that’s why we’re using a wooden boat,” he said.
“You’re quick on the uptake,” said the man. “Mind you, it’s still primarily moored mines we’ll be dealing with, but you can never be too careful.” The man smiled and reached out to shake Koichi’s hand. “The name’s Noda,” he said. “I was a naval technician working in weapons R&D during the war. This here’s Captain Akitsu, and behind me is Mizushima-kun.”
“We just call him ‘the kid,’ mostly,” said Akitsu, interjecting. “And this here’s Doc.”
“I’ll remind you that I’m not technically a doctor, Captain,” said Noda.
“And I’m not a kid either!” said Mizushima. “Even if I am the youngest one here!”
“Aw, put a sock in it,” said the captain. “You’re still wet behind the ears, so ‘kid’ suits you just fine.”
Mizushima turned his head away like a pouting child.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll probably never be a ‘real man’ in your eyes since I never got the chance to go to war.”
Koichi was a bit put off by this phrasing, but didn’t have the chance to raise an objection before the captain dove straight into a brisk rundown of what the job entailed.
“This old girl here’s called Shinsei Maru,” he began. “It’s one of a pair of vessels that operates in tandem with her partner, the Kaishin Maru over there. You can think of these mines we’ll be dealing with like big metal balloons that are connected to the ocean floor—and our job is to cut their ‘strings’ using a long, deep cable that runs between our two ships. Once we do that, they’ll come floating up to the surface of the water, where we can detonate ’em safely with our machine gun from afar. That’s the long and short of it.”
It sounded simple enough—but once they actually set out to sea, Koichi quickly learned that it was far more tedious work than the captain made it sound. Having to trawl the same stretch of ocean over and over with their wire-cutting cable, never knowing if or where exactly the mines would be hiding, took a fair bit of patience. And even once they came upon one and successfully severed it from its anchor, there was still the matter of detonating it—which one might think would be a simple matter, but hitting the tiny Hertz horns that triggered the mines’ explosion mechanisms from a safe distance of at least three hundred meters away turned out to be the most difficult part of the job. Especially when the small boat that the crew were taking aim from was constantly being rocked by the rolling waves beneath them. Even the captain seemed to struggle with it, despite his experience, as he emptied an entire magazine of bullets on the very first mine they found, trying, to no avail, to show Koichi how it was done.