In 1929, the fledging and weak Republic of China, in order to focus on the domestic Communist rebellion, appeased Japan by signing the Sino-Japanese Mutual Cooperation Treaty. The treaty formally ceded all Chinese territories in Manchuria to Japan, which averted the prospect of all-out war between China and Japan and halted Soviet ambitions in Manchuria. This was the capstone on Japan’s thirty-five-year drive for imperial expansion. Now, with Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria incorporated into the Empire and a collaborationist China within its orbit, Japan had access to vast reserves of natural resources, cheap labor, and a potential market of hundreds of millions for its manufactured goods.
Internationally, Japan announced that it would continue its rise as a Great Power henceforth by peaceful means. ??Western powers, however, led by Britain and the United States, were suspicious. They were especially alarmed by Japan’s colonial ideology of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” which seemed to be a Japanese version of the Monroe Doctrine and suggested a desire to drive European and American influence from Asia.
Before the Western powers could decide on a plan to contain and encircle Japan’s “Peaceful Ascent,” however, the Great Depression struck. The brilliant Emperor Hirohito seized the opportunity and suggested to President Herbert Hoover his vision of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel as the solution to the worldwide economic crisis.
The work was hard and dangerous. Every day men were injured and sometimes killed. It was also very hot. In the finished sections, they installed machines to cool the air. But in the most forward parts of the Tunnel, where the actual digging happened, we were exposed to the heat of the Earth, and we worked in nothing but our undershorts, sweating nonstop. The work crews were segregated by race—there were Koreans, Formosans, Okinawans, Filipinos, Chinese (separated again by topolect)—but after a while we all looked the same, covered in sweat and dust and mud, only little white circles of skin showing around our eyes.
It didn’t take me long to get used to living underground, to the constant noise of dynamite, hydraulic drills, the bellows cycling cooling air, and to the flickering faint yellow light of arc lamps. Even when you were sleeping, the next shift was already at it. Everyone grew hard of hearing after a while, and we stopped talking to each other. There was nothing to say, anyway; just more digging.
But the pay was good, and I saved up and sent money home. However, visiting home was out of the question. By the time I started, the head of the tunnel was already halfway between Shanghai and ?Tokyo. They charged you a month’s wages to ride the steam train carrying the excavated waste back to Shanghai and up to the surface. I couldn’t afford such luxuries. As we made progress, the trip back only grew longer and more expensive.
It was best not to think too much about what we were doing, about the miles of water over our heads, and the fact that we were digging a tunnel through the Earth’s crust to get to America. Some men did go crazy under those conditions and had to be restrained before they could hurt themselves or others.
? ? ?
From A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel, published by the TPT Transit Authority, 1960:
Osachi Hamaguchi, prime minister of Japan during the Great Depression, claimed that Emperor Hirohito was inspired by the American effort to build the Panama Canal to conceive of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel. “America has knit together two oceans,” the Emperor supposedly said. “Now let us chain together two continents.” President Hoover, trained as an engineer, enthusiastically promoted and backed the project as an antidote to the global economic contraction.
The Tunnel is, without a doubt, the greatest engineering project ever conceived by Man. Its sheer scale makes the Great Pyramids and the Great Wall of China seem like mere toys, and many critics at the time described it as hubristic lunacy, a modern Tower of Babel.
Although tubes and pressurized air have been used for passing around documents and small parcels since Victorian times, before the Tunnel, pneumatic tube transport of heavy goods and passengers had only been tried on a few intracity subway demonstration programs. The extraordinary engineering demands of the Tunnel thus drove many technological advances, often beyond the core technologies involved, such as fast-tunneling directed explosives. As one illustration, thousands of young women with abacuses and notepads were employed as computers for engineering calculations at the start of the project, but by the end of the project electronic computers had taken their place.
In all, construction of the 5,880-mile tunnel took ten years between 1929 and 1938. Some seven million men worked on it, with Japan and the United States providing the bulk of the workers. At its height, one in ten working men in the United States was employed in building the Tunnel. More than thirteen billion cubic yards of material were excavated, almost fifty times the amount removed during the construction of the Panama Canal, and the fill was used to extend the shorelines of China, the Japanese home islands, and Puget Sound.
Afterward we lie still on the futon, our limbs entwined. In the darkness I can hear her heart beating, and the smell of sex and our sweat, unfamiliar in this apartment, is comforting.
She tells me about her son, who is still going to school in America. She says that he is traveling with his friends in the southern states of America, riding the buses together.
“Some of the friends are Negroes,” she says.
I know some Negroes. They have their own section in the American half of the City, where they mostly keep to themselves. Some Japanese families hire the women to cook Western meals.
“I hope he’s having a good time,” I say.
My reaction surprises Betty. She turns to stare at me and then laughs. “I forget that you cannot understand what this is about.”
She sits up in bed. “In America, the Negroes and whites are separated: where they live, where they work, where they go to school.”
I nod. That sounds familiar. Here in the Japanese half of the City, the races also keep to themselves. There are superior and inferior races. For example, there are many restaurants and clubs reserved only for the Japanese.
“The law says that whites and Negroes can ride the bus together, but the secret of America is that law is not followed by large swaths of the country. My son and his friends want to change that. They ride the buses together to make a statement, to make people pay attention to the secret. They ride in places where people do not want to see Negroes sitting in seats that belong only to whites. Things can become violent and dangerous when people get angry and form a mob.”
This seems very foolish: to make statements that no one wants to hear, to speak when it is better to be quiet. What difference will a few boys riding a bus make?
“I don’t know if it’s going to make any difference, change anyone’s mind. But it doesn’t matter. It’s good enough for me that he is speaking, that he is not silent. He’s making the secret a little bit harder to keep, and that counts for something.” Her voice is full of pride, and she is beautiful when she is proud.
I consider Betty’s words. It is the obsession of Americans to speak, to express opinions on things that they are ignorant about. They believe in drawing attention to things that other people may prefer to keep quiet, to ignore and forget.
But I can’t dismiss the image Betty has put into my head: a boy stands in darkness and silence. He speaks; his words float up like a bubble. It explodes, and the world is a little brighter, and a little less stiflingly silent.
I have read in the papers that back in Japan, they are debating about granting Formosans and Manchurians seats in the Imperial Diet. Britain is still fighting the native guerrillas in Africa and India, but may be forced soon to grant the colonies independence. The world is indeed changing.
? ? ?
“What’s wrong?” Betty asks. She wipes the sweat from my forehead. She shifts to give me more of the flow from the air conditioner. I shiver. Outside, the great arc lights are still off, not yet dawn. “Another bad dream?”
We’ve been spending many of our nights together since that first time. Betty has upset my routine, but I don’t mind at all. That was the routine of a man with one foot in the grave. Betty has made me feel alive after so many years under the ocean, alone in darkness and silence.
But being with Betty has also unblocked something within me, and memories are tumbling out.