I was inspired to write this after someone said that baseball is so big in Japan that Japanese people are surprised when told it's considered America's national pastime too. So anyway, hope you enjoy!
The day began with a growl in Abe's famished stomach. An overcast sky seemed liable to break up as the day wore on, guaranteeing this August 20th would be a hot summer day in Kyoto. Takaya Abe walked with one hand over his eyes to shelter the glare breaking through the clouds. Behind him, the scrawny Ren Mihashi sulked forward, his arm pressed to his growling tummy. They would have no breakfast before they got to their destination today.
The war ended five days ago. Abe heard the announcement over a public address system sometime after it started. He didn't quite realize what was going on, having missed the introduction and confronted by the archaic language of its orator, but the reaction of the adults as the day wore on told him. The war was finally over. All the sacrifice had been in vain. Now the goal was survival, which was Abe's primary focus from day-to-day, as it had been the last two months. Part of that survival was decompressing at their favorite baseball diamond, and preparing for the day when Japan would be born anew.
16-year-old Takaya Abe and Ren Mihashi had been the battery on the Nishiura High baseball team after its inception in 1944. They competed in the national tournament for the Koshien last year but with their freshman team didn't make it. There was no tournament this year. Abe sometimes wondered if Hanshin Koshien Stadium was even still standing.
Mihashi walked with his head down as always. Abe glanced back at his partner in the task of survival. Mihashi's wealthy parents died from a stray bomb last May, while Abe's perished in firebombing around the same time. Mihashi was appropriately insecure and weak, meaning Abe had taken the job of caring for him. Despite their losses, they still attended school, still played baseball, still aimed for Koshien, until their school vanished in a puff of smoke one day in early June. Abe and Mihashi weren't there that day, having overslept in a remarkably comfortable makeshift shelter built by a probably dead homeless guy. When they arrived, their friends, teachers, and teammates were gone. They hadn't been to school since.
"Do you have the ball?" Abe asked to distract Mihashi from his panging stomach. It had been three days since they'd eaten anything. Abe was used to hunger pangs by now, but the sheltered Mihashi, albeit unintentionally, still made himself look as poorly as possible. Mihashi snapped to attention and murmured an affirmative before digging into his pocket. From it he withdrew a dirt-stained, suspiciously squishy baseball. On the day their school vanished, Mihashi found it lying by the baseball field. He saw a red splotch on it, groped it tightly, and collapsed in tears. Except when pitching, he never let go of that ball. To Abe as well, that ball was their lifeline. Even though Japan was literally in flames, even though there were rumors of an American superweapon that had destroyed Hiroshima to the west, even though there was no school, home, food, friends, family, or baseball, he knew Japan would recover. The Koshien would happen again. And when that day came, they would be ready for it. And so they continued to play, pitcher and catcher, every day.
They arrived at the empty baseball diamond carved out of an unused patch of land beside a canal. An adjacent dark three-story building missing a few bricks from the third floor stood tall and silent. No one used the field except them. The grass, once choked by daily dust and debris storms, shared color with the infield dirt. The backstop over the catcher's box arched concave from the recoil of a bomb. The lines on the infield could barely be perceived any more. To the east, a berm along the third-base line separating the diamond from the road where spectators would once sit was insipidly brown. Beyond the field along the adjacent road, a steely truss bridge, looking in good condition, spanned the canal proudly. Yet as the sun broke through a spot in the clouds, Abe noticed a glimmer of green on the outfield. Splotches of green grass could be seen on the yellowed berm too. Mihashi danced ahead of Abe to the mound, the ball in his hand. Baseball had a way of making them forget their problems but especially Mihashi. Abe grinned before he flinched. In the stuffy air, still choking from smoldering rubble and lingering dust, came a whiff of noise—voices, and they weren't Japanese.
Sgt. Bryce didn't know why his five-man squad was assigned to the bridge over this forsaken river. Supposedly it was to prevent sabotage of the remarkably intact crossing, but one would have to be stupid to commit sabotage five days after a war was over. Then again, there were a lot of stupid Japs. He sighed and pushed out his belly. This was make-work pure and simple, and they would do it like they were told to until moved somewhere else. The river underneath the bridge was brackish and still. Pvt. Letofski, a Pole from the Bronx, thought it no uglier than the Hudson but didn't say anything. Sgt. Bryce curdled the vomit that wanted to leap into his throat.
"All right," he proclaimed. "Let's see what we got. Samson, Husky, follow me." He took the corporal and Pvt. Husky of Montana over the bridge, leaving Lowell and Letofski on the south side. The scenery was banal. If Kyoto had any mountains, they couldn't see them through the haze that hovered over the war-torn horizon. Letofski spat into the dirt road, the spittle evaporating on impact. To the west stood a manmade hill blocking what appeared to be a disused baseball diamond. It made Letofski pine for home and the street diamond a block from his family's house. But that was five years ago, and he was a bit too old for that sort of thing, he figured. He wasn't going pro any time soon, so there was nothing to be envious about.
"Well, guess we should make the best of it," Lowell remarked, swinging around his Carbine. He propped himself against a row of sandbags facing the road that had been set up by either the US Army or the Japanese in preparation for an invasion. Letofski rested against the leading truss of the steel bridge.
"So, what? We just look out for some Japs and threaten to shoot?" he sarcastically asked.
"You mean like those over there?" Lowell nonchalantly pointed. Letofski jerked his head to see two scraggly Japanese teenagers in torn clothes, peeking around an inconspicuous row of barrels on the north corner of the berm near the embankment of the river. Letofski had difficulty distinguishing the pair's skin and drab clothing against the yellow surroundings; Lowell, a San Diegan, claimed that because Cali was once full of Japs, he could spot them quite easily. Letofski nevertheless readied his rifle instinctively, even though he still couldn't make out his foes' forms in the hazy morning. Seeing the rifle aimed at them, Mihashi jittered and ducked, covering his head as if hiding from a bomb. Abe knew an empty barrel wasn't going to protect them in this situation, but he still wasn't quite convinced the pale-skinned American knew where they were.
Lowell sighed at Letofski's embarrassing search and aimed his Carbine square at the one visible Jap's head. "OK, kid. Move it," he muttered. Abe backed away slowly in a crouch, finally alerting Letofski to his location. In a moment Letofski lowered his gun. "Oh my God. He's just a kid."
"That don't mean nothin'," Lowell barked. Even teenagers had been known to be a threat.
Abe froze when he noticed the soldiers' incomprehensible dialogue. At that moment the trembling Mihashi peeked open an eye and spotted Abe suddenly a distance away from him. He flinched. From the corner of his eye, Abe noticed Mihashi staring straight at him in fear. "Mihashi, don't move," he whispered.
"Abe," Mihashi whimpered. He squeezed the baseball in his hands until suddenly, perhaps fatefully, it popped up and out. The ball flew to the south between the berm and the road and landed in the open air away from the barrel. Mihashi instinctively crawled for it, right out into the open.
"Mihashi!" Abe screamed.
Across the road Lowell tensely tracked the spherical projectile with the barrel of his gun until it bounced meekly and rolled a few steps. Almost immediately the other teenager whom he had lost sight of appeared in view. Letofski merely gawked, his gun pointed toward the ground.
"Don't move!" cried Lowell as Mihashi reached for the discolored sphere. Mihashi jumped three feet into the air. His hand, initially nervously reaching for the ball, unintentionally banged it and sent it rolling across the road. Lowell and Letofski watched the spherical weapon saunter over to them until it stopped six feet away. Even at that distance, the students of America's national pastime knew what it was. Both completely forgot about Abe, who by now had also run out of cover and grabbed Mihashi. Abe pulled the shivering boy tight into his chest. Mihashi's stomach growled louder than it had before as Mihashi gawked longingly for the ball.
When he had found it on the site of the school grounds, it seemed to magically roll out of a collapsed shed and stop right in front of him. He saw the red blotch—which had long since rubbed away—and long believed it was the blood of one of his teammates. His house had burned to smithereens, the school was otherwise inaccessible. To Mihashi, that baseball and Abe were the only remnants of the life he once had. Without it, he and Abe couldn't practice. Without it, they had no mementos of their friends. Without it, Mihashi's dream of going to Koshien with Abe was null. And now two lumbering white-skinned, green-clad individuals, both muscular, well-fed, armed, and speaking an incoherent language, were eyeing his only possession as if to take it.
Lowell gazed at the ball, glancing up periodically at the two boys opposite the street. The tougher one held the scrawnier boy tightly. The pair's embrace briefly wrought a suspicion of sexual impropriety, but he dismissed it. Letofski stepped cautiously over to the baseball without Lowell's notice. By the time his squadmate realized what he was doing, Letofski was already bending down to pick up the ball.
Pvt. Letofski joined the Army in February. Still in training during Iwo Jima, he narrowly avoided the brunt of Okinawa, arriving as reinforcements in the battle's final days. He likely would have been part of the ground force in the invasion of Kyushu, the imperial nation's southernmost major isle. He hadn't experienced the terror of banzai charges and kamikaze attacks or the sickness of uncovering mass civilian suicides like Lowell and others had. He didn't know much about the horrible maltreatment of POWs. Sometimes he felt like the Japanese treatment of Americans barely differed from Anglo-Americans' treatment of "Polacks" (like him) or Italians, Jews, Mexicans, and Irishmen. America wasn't so great either. In a way, he thought he understood where the Japanese were coming from. And in that same light, he imagined how these two boys felt at this very moment, seeing scary foreigners taking over their land, their livelihood, and even their toys. It was guys like himself, he thought, who could break the cycle and move the world forward.
Abe had only one thought in mind as the slightly less burly Yankee studied their ball. If he wanted he could dash away and grab their bat: a makeshift wooden cylinder or dowel salvaged from wreckage and shaved by Abe to give it a better semblance of a bat, currently still hidden in a ditch-like crater beneath the nearby building. But that would likely just get them both killed. He would do anything to protect Mihashi, and although part of that meant protecting the object the fragile pitcher held so dear, it would not involve risking either of their lives to do so.
Abe rose slowly, pulling the shaking Mihashi up with him, his hawk eyes not redirecting from the soldiers. Letofski wrapped his fingers around the ball before noticing the change in the boys' position. Lowell reflexively aimed his rifle again while Letofski bolted upward quickly, ball in hand. And after a pause, he took one step forward.
Abe jumped, while Mihashi couldn't tremble more violently than he already was. Letofski spotted the quaking even at that distance and from that knew the scrawnier boy wasn't a threat. Clearly the more stoic one was protecting him, so as long as he gave off no signs of being a threat, he figured he would be fine. Lowell gawked, unsure what to do. His time in Okinawa told him Letofski was walking into the grim reaper's arms and yet he couldn't make a move. Letofski paused twelve feet away from the teens in the middle of the road. He knelt down, fingered the ball on the dusty street, and then propelled it along the ground toward the kids. It rolled a bumpy, mostly straight path back to its owners until gently knocking Mihashi's foot. Mihashi gazed at his prize that was once again within reach, once more forgetting the noises from his stomach.
Lowell squinted as the sun's promised appearance on the cloudy day finally seemed more imminent, the change in light snapping him out of his awe. "Letofski, get back over here!" he screeched. He couldn't see all the way to the end of the bridge from his angle but figured Sgt. Bryce and the others would be returning soon. Letofski, however, raised his hand in a "Quiet" motion as he stood up. The noise was unmistakable. At first he thought a bomb might have landed, but his suspicions were correct: their stomachs, especially the thinner boy's, were very audibly starving.
"Wait," Letofski said raising a hand to the hungry boys. They both gawked back, clearly having no grasp of English. Letofski nodded his head and kept his hand up as he backed away. He turned and dashed to the other side of the street where his pack lay. Lowell switched his focus back and forth between Letofski and the teens as his partner retrieved a ration box from that morning. Lowell was shocked Letofski still had it. Mihashi hastily swept up the ball, drawing Lowell's rifle again, before Abe gently sidestepped towards the barrels to regain some cover, where they could dash behind the berm and escape as soon as it was safe. Mihashi still hung close to Abe's chest and flinched, jittering strongly again when Letofski trotted and then walked and then creeped towards them, extending forth a small black box. The soldier muttered some stuff in English, carefully set the box on the ground, and stepped back cautiously.
Abe glared ahead, and Letofski could suddenly see the boy's expression for the first time changing from guardedness to perplexity. He tried to point at the box, telling them to take it, mumbling a few words they couldn't understand anyway. Abe kneeled down, bringing Mihashi with him. Mihashi observed his partner's face, suddenly guarded again, as he carefully guided Mihashi to rest behind him at the base of the hill before he slowly crept into the street. Abe stayed crouched and crawled forward on his toes. Letofski stared hopefully, Lowell incredulously. Abe took the box carefully with his hands, shot up in a moment, and turned and ran. Mihashi, the baseball pressed to his chest, watched Abe zip by him, then scrambled to his feet and scurried after him. As they disappeared beyond the hill, the sun finally upstaged the overcast sky.
"Feeding the locals, I see?" Sgt. Bryce immediately remarked. Letofski and Lowell jumped as Sgt. Bryce, Cpl. Samson, and Pvt. Husky glared from the bridge. Bryce was the least Japanese-friendly of the squad, having served since Tarawa in 1943. The Nebraska cornhusker also had a biting sense of humor, his most oft-repeated joke being: "Japs are the color of corn—just the way I like 'em."
Stunned for a moment, Letofski and then Lowell immediately stood at attention.
"No, sir!" Lowell barked.
"It seemed right, sir," Letofski said in contrast, making Lowell grimace. Sgt. Bryce cocked an eyebrow.
"And what are you gonna do when those baseball-loving brats come back for more?"
Letofski blinked. "Sir, did you see?"
"We saw everything ever since Private here turned around and spotted those two bozos spying on you from the barrels. Tell me, Pvt. Lowell. Were the Jap kids that nice on Okinawa?"
"No, sir," Lowell guiltily replied.
"You're lucky it was just a baseball, Private," he snapped at Letofski. Letofski gulped. The sergeant glared at him until he sighed. "If there were still a war going on, I'd be chewing out your ass and blowin' it up like bubblegum. But we can't fight forever." And with that, the tension seemed to dissipate. "So, Letofski," the sergeant continued, "I heard you brought some jerky with you. Care to share with the class?"
It wasn't a request, and Letofski hadn't told anyone he saved his ration to snack on later. The only way Bryce knew about it was if he caught him take it or dug through his pack. He suspected the latter.
"Yes, sir, but I already ate it, sir," he lied.
Bryce sneered. "Damn it. You gave it to those Japs, didn't you?"