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Chapter 9

Tokyo, Japan

December 1942

The first year of the war had not yet brought serious inconveniences for Tokyo residents.

To be sure, the Japanese living standard had always been low. Privation had grown throughout the 1930s as Japan’s imperialist war in China siphoned resources. In this last month of 1942, few Japanese could have dreamed what lay in store for them—and in the near future. The Doolittle air raid on Tokyo in April might have served as a wake-up for a few, but the harm done to the capital was a mosquito’s teardrop, as the Japanese would say, to what would befall them over the next two and a half years.

That morning, Helma Graf, now twenty-two, donned warmer clothing than usual. Although a clear day—Mount Fuji could be distantly seen from the second floor of the Macneil residence in Azabu—it was cold as chill winds from the Siberian landmass swept through the passes of the Japan Alps and over the Kanto Plain. The young Swiss woman had been sleeping in Bill Macneil’s old room. When she pulled the covers over her shoulders at night and composed herself for sleep—after her prayers for universal peace, of course—she never forgot she was comfortably snug in her true love’s bed. Blushing hotly in the dark, she wished he were there to comfort and guide her.

She wrote to Bill as often as she dared, but did not want to endanger her channel of communication through the Swiss Embassy. Without any letters from him in return, she could not know if he had received hers. She could only pray he had. She shuddered at the thought that he—having heard nothing from her—had assumed she had forsaken him.

She wished she were as pure as the snow the Tokyo Meteorological Bureau predicted would soon fall. Sadly, she was not. Her seduction of Bill Macneil aboard the City of Glasgow shamed her, but the memory of that brief embrace caused her to squeeze her legs together tightly as a mysterious dampness moistened her upper thighs. Nor was she above employing her fingers to encourage the vaginal dew. This embarrassed her even more, but she was powerless against the emotions that flooded through her like a sea-surge when a hurricane buffets a tropical coast.

Helma looked in on Umeko Macneil before leaving. Neil Macneil’s wife stayed in bed most of the time, although she had recovered from the uremic poisoning that prevented her from leaving Japan with her husband.

Shipton Macneil had already left for Hiro Senior High School.

Wrapping the band identifying her as a Swiss national around her left arm, Helma walked out of the house toward the nearby Arisugawa Park stop on the trolley line. With one transfer, it would carry her to Radio Tokyo in the Kudan district on the far side of the Imperial Palace. Her clothing was modest, nondescript in color. Her shoes had medium heels. Her blond hair was cut short and mostly hidden under a hat pulled far down on her head. Although obviously foreign, she did not stand out as painfully in a crowd as she might.

At the streetcar stop was a crowd of twenty or so commuters, most of whom Helma recognized. Several smiled hesitantly at her, but a few frowned. Most retained their bland countenances. They seemed complacent, if not content. There were no fat persons among them. In Japan, Helma had learned, the overweight usually rode in chauffeur-driven automobiles.

Her streetcar—Number 11—came and she climbed aboard, showing her commutation ticket. She found a seat, having competed successfully with a healthy-looking young man to reach it first. No Japanese man would relinquish his seat to a woman, even if she were crippled and gasping for breath. Helma recalled her school days at Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia. There, too, she had ridden streetcars to her classes. Perhaps, the Quaker ambience of brotherly love was why she never lacked for a seat.

Still, she did not allow the constant discourtesy of Japanese men to discourage her from her self-assigned mission. After all, she reminded herself, we are all God’s creatures. If we have direct access to God, as the Society of Friends held, then God must have direct access to us, and one day, He would enter into the souls of these benighted ones and open their eyes with a soul-shaking epiphany.

At the Hibiya intersection, Helma transferred to a car bound for Kudan. At Hibiya she was only two short blocks from her favorite place—aside from Bill Macneil’s bed—in all Tokyo: the Florida nightclub. How often she had longed to go there, to sway and turn to the magic of the Argentine tango.

In a mood of desperation, she had determined to teach Shipton Macneil how to tango. She had shoved aside chairs and a table and made enough space in the dining room. There was a phonograph in Sarah’s old room, and Helma commandeered it. Ship was willing. At sixteen he was taller than Helma and even shaved now and then. (He claimed to shave every other day, but she did not believe him.) Even Umeko managed to descend the stairs and watch and applaud as they twisted and glided back and forth.

The only problem was that the youngest Macneil had begun to press too close at inappropriate moments with a look in his eyes that unsettled Helma.

Another cause of concern about Ship was that he was becoming more outspoken in his support of the United States in the present conflict. He held an American passport and his brother was extremely anti-Japanese, so that was to be expected, but after all, they were living in Japan, and Ship—unlike his brother Bill—was half-Japanese.

Ship had waxed half-deliriously with rapture when the Doolittle planes flew low over Tokyo in April. He had rushed into the garden and, jumping about, had waved a small American flag at one of the bombers.

Later, Helma scolded him. “You mustn’t ever do anything like that again.”

He was sullen. “Why not? I’m an American, aren’t I? Why shouldn’t I cheer for them?”

Helma took his hand. “If word gets around, Ship dear, the Tokko Keisatsu will be on our doorstep the next day. You would cause serious trouble for your mother.” Helma knew Umeko’s welfare was always uppermost to Ship Macneil.

Helma looked out the window of the swaying, rattling streetcar. Her stop was close at hand. She had an early appointment to see Captain Horace Milmay, a British turncoat who had found a niche of safety in the war by transferring his allegiance from the British monarchy to the Japanese emperor.

She had gone to work at Radio Tokyo in April, first as a clerk-typist and later as a broadcaster. Now she was the POW specialist at the station and she had a one-hour program on Saturday nights. Other women—all Nisei—broadcast on different topics on other nights. All the programs were called the “Zero Hour.” The number of Allied prisoners-of-war in Japan was mounting as the conflict in the South Pacific grew more savage. Helma’s job was to relay information about these POWs to their former comrades in the combat zones and, through their comrades, to relatives back home: “Hi, there, you guys. Jeepers, is it ever cold here in Tokyo! First, I’ve got news about one of your buddies. Private Tom Maxwell is alive and healthy and sends regards to his friends in the Second Marine Division on Guadalcanal. He is doing productive work in a coal mine—never mind exactly where—in Japan. I can tell you he’s a lot better off than you fellows are, so why don’t you pick up one of our surrender leaflets and raise both hands over your head? Then, just walk on over to the Japanese lines and all that pain and fear and filth will be behind you. God did not mean for men to kill each other, so why are you fighting?”

Helma Graf felt no qualms of conscience about making these broadcasts to Allied military personnel in the South Pacific. Why should she? She was, first of all, Swiss, and that had always meant being neutral. She hated no race or nationality, but loved one and all. Besides, what was wrong about her appeals? She was asking them—the Allies—to lay down their arms and surrender—surrender to the concept of Brotherly Love. Given the same chance she would have said as much to Japanese soldiery. “Quit fighting. For the love of God, stop killing each other! Embrace your enemy.”

There had been times when Captain Milmay had tried to change her script to include inflammatory admonitions she thought would only increase the slaughter. So far Helma had resisted his editing, and Baron Matsui had ruled in her favor. She was, after all, Swiss—protected by a treaty of neutrality between Japan and Switzerland. Most of the other broadcasters had dual nationality, so Japan had a whip to crack over their heads.

However, Helma was dear-minded enough to recognize that what made her case somewhat different was that she loved—to the verge of distraction—a man who, as an American, was an enemy of the Japanese and who might even now, for all she knew, be fighting and killing Japanese in Guadalcanal or New Guinea. In rebuttal she riposted to her imaginary prosecutor that she could just as easily have fallen in love with a Japanese. Really? the prosecutor asked. Who, for example? Well, I don’t know exactly, just someone—I doubt it, her opponent said. If so, give me a name. All right, I will, Helma answered. Uh—Baron Matsui. Matsui? Yes, Baron Matsui: he’s fine-looking, he graduated from Cambridge, and he dances the tango.

If Helma had not given her heart and her chastity to Bill Macneil, she would almost certainly have said yes to Matsui’s invitations to go dancing, but now that was out of the question. Or was it? She wondered.

One man who would never engage her affections was Captain Horace Milmay, whom she faced in the small conference room on the third floor of the Radio Tokyo Building.

Milmay was a sandy-haired Englishman in his early thirties. He had been a radio broadcaster in Hong Kong, with a commission as a reserve officer. When war broke out, he was called to the colors, but the British forces in Hong Kong, including Captain Milmay, surrendered to the Japanese in short order.

Baron Matsui, chief of the foreign broadcast division of Radio Tokyo, had sifted through POW records and had found five Americans and Britishers with broadcasting experience. They were brought to Tokyo for interviews with Matsui.

Of the five, two were rejected out of hand by Matsui. The remaining three were offered the opportunity to make broadcasts in English to Allied forces throughout the Pacific. Only one—Horace Milmay—accepted the offer enthusiastically. The second was doubtful, the third said no unequivocally.

Milmay, out of uniform but with the equivalent yen salary of a captain, was designated an assistant to Baron Matsui. His job was supervising the preparation of the broadcasts, approving script contents, planning broadcasts, and teaching correct delivery to the broadcasters.

At first, Baron Matsui, who came as close to being a British aristocrat as a Japanese could, got along famously with Milmay. They drank and dined together in out-of-the-way corners of the capital, but gradually certain flaws in Milmay’s character became apparent to the baron, who began to distance himself from the British officer in mufti. Now Matsui kept a close watch on Milmay, but had yet to find little to complain of in the man’s performance of his duties.

If anything, Milmay was leaning too heavily toward the cause of ultranationalistic Japan: the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. His anti-British and anti-American bias was becoming too blatant, too rabid, and the broadcasters themselves—who were given some discretion over the words they spoke over the airwaves—were trying to tone down Milmay’s excesses. Matsui, too, recognized that a certain degree of subtlety in these propaganda programs would be more effective than strident, Hitlerian bashing of the Allied broadcasts.

“You don’t like me, do you, Helma?” Milmay began.

“I don’t really know you, I’m afraid.”

“You could get to know me if you wanted to,” the British officer said in his precisely enunciated English. “It would be difficult for a couple like ourselves to move about freely in Tokyo these days, but we could meet at your place or in my room, you know.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, Captain. What did you want to see me about?”

“I have a script here for your next broadcast. I want you to read it over and then discuss it with me.”

“I hope it’s not like the one you gave me last week.”

“Just look it over, Helma. Then we’ll talk.”

“Very well, Captain.”

“And I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Captain.’ You will notice I’m not wearing a uniform.”

“I would hardly expect you to do so—not in war-time Tokyo.”

“Is that what you don’t like about me—the fact that as a British officer I am now in the employ of the Japanese?”

Helma said nothing, but looked steadily at Milmay. What I really don’t like about him, she thought, is that his pale eyes are too close together. Although he was tall and slim and his other features were patrician, the positioning of his eyes made him look crafty. Besides, his voice was pitched too high and dripped with upper-class British condescension.

“After all,” he pressed on, “every week you yourself urge the British and the Americans throughout the Pacific theater to surrender. That’s all I did, isn’t it?” Milmay tried—largely in vain—to inject a degree of warmth into his voice. “So let’s do try to be more chummy, what? I’d like that, really I would.”

Helma’s reply was as frosty as the snowflakes beginning to fall outside Milmay’s window. “If that is all, sir, I’ll excuse myself.”