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If you really couldn’t stand it, they provided comfort women from Korea for the men. But you had to pay a day’s wages.
I tried it only once. We were both so dirty, and the girl stayed still like a dead fish. I never used the comfort women again.
A friend told me that some of the girls were not there willingly but had been sold to the Imperial Army, and maybe the one I had was like that. I didn’t really feel sorry for her. I was too tired.
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From The Ignoramus’s Guide to American History, 1995:
So just when everyone was losing jobs and lining up for soup and bread, Japan came along and said, “Hey, America, let’s build this big-ass tunnel and spend a whole lot of money and hire lots of workers and get the economy going again. ??Whaddya say?” And the idea basically worked, so everyone was like: “Dōmo arigatō, Japan!”
Now, when you come up with a good idea like that, you get some chips you can cash in. So that’s what Japan did the next year, in 1930. At the London Naval Conference, where the Big Bullies—oops, I meant “Great Powers”—figured out how many battleships and aircraft carriers each country got to build, Japan demanded to be allowed to build the same number of ships as the United States and Britain. And the US and Britain said fine.1
This concession to Japan turned out to be a big deal. Remember Hamaguchi, the Japanese prime minister, and the way he kept on talking about how Japan was going to “ascend peacefully” from then on? This had really annoyed the militarists and nationalists in Japan because they thought Hamaguchi was selling out the country. But when Hamaguchi came home with such an impressive diplomatic victory, he was hailed as a hero, and people began to believe that his “Peaceful Ascent” policy was going to make Japan strong. People thought maybe he really could get the Western powers to treat Japan as an equal without turning Japan into a giant army camp. The militarists and nationalists got less support after that.
At that fun party, the London Naval Conference, the Big Bullies also scrapped all those humiliating provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that made Germany toothless. Britain and Japan both had their own reasons for supporting this: They each thought Germany liked them better than the other and would join up as an ally if a global brawl for Asian colonies broke out one day. Everyone was wary about the Soviets, too, and wanted to set up Germany as a guard dog of sorts for the polar bear.2
Things to Think About in the Shower
1. Many economists describe the Tunnel as the first real Keynesian stimulus project, which shortened the Great Depression.
2. The Tunnel’s biggest fan was probably President Hoover: He won an unprecedented four terms in office because of its success.
3. We now know that the Japanese military abused the rights of many of the workers during the Tunnel’s construction, but it took decades for the facts to emerge. The bibliography points to some more books on this subject.
4. The Tunnel ended up taking a lot of business away from surface shipping, and many Pacific ports went bust. The most famous example of this occurred in 1949, when Britain sold Hong Kong to Japan because it didn’t think the harbor city was all that important anymore.
5. The Great War (1914–1918) turned out to be the last global “hot war” of the twentieth century (so far). Are we turning into wimps? Who wants to start a new world war?
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After the main work on the Tunnel was completed in the thirteenth year of the Shōwa Era (1938), I returned home for the first and only time since I left eight years earlier. I bought a window seat on the westbound capsule train from Midpoint Station, coach class. The ride was smooth and comfortable, the capsule quiet save for the low voices of my fellow passengers and a faint whoosh as we were pushed along by air. Young female attendants pushed carts of drinks and food up and down the aisles.
Some clever companies had bought advertising space along the inside of the tube and painted pictures at window height. As the capsule moved along, the pictures rushing by centimeters from the windows blurred together and became animated, like a silent film. My fellow passengers and I were mesmerized by the novel effect.
The elevator ride up to the surface in Shanghai filled me with trepidation, my ears popping with the changes in pressure. And then it was time to get on a boat bound for Formosa.
I hardly recognized my home. With the money I sent, my parents had built a new house and bought more land. My family was now rich, and my village a bustling town. I found it hard to speak to my siblings and my parents. I had been away so long that I did not understand much about their lives, and I could not explain to them how I felt. I did not realize how much I had been hardened and numbed by my experience, and there were things I had seen that I could not speak of. In some sense I felt that I had become like a turtle, with a shell around me that kept me from feeling anything.
My father had written to me to come home because it was long past time for me to find a wife. Since I had worked hard, stayed healthy, and kept my mouth shut—it also helped that as a Formosan I was considered superior to the other races except the Japanese and Koreans—I had been steadily promoted to crew chief and then to shift supervisor. I had money, and if I settled in my hometown, I would provide a good home.
But I could no longer imagine a life on the surface. It had been so long since I had seen the blinding light of the sun that I felt like a newborn when out in the open. Things were so quiet. Everyone was startled when I spoke because I was used to shouting. And the sky and tall buildings made me dizzy—I was so used to being underground, under the sea, in tight, confined spaces, that I had trouble breathing if I looked up.
I expressed my desire to stay underground and work in one of the station cities strung like pearls along the Tunnel. The faces of the fathers of all the girls tightened at this thought. I didn’t blame them: Who would want their daughter to spend the rest of her life underground, never seeing the light of day? The fathers whispered to one another that I was deranged.
I said good-bye to my family for the last time, and I did not feel I was home until I was back at Midpoint Station, the warmth and the noise of the heart of the Earth around me, a safe shell. When I saw the soldiers on the platform at the station, I knew that the world was finally back to normal. More work still had to be done to complete the side tunnels that would be expanded into Midpoint City.
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“Soldiers,” Betty says, “why were there soldiers at Midpoint City?”
I stand in darkness and silence. I cannot hear or see. ??Words churn in my throat, like a rising flood waiting to burst the dam. I have been holding my tongue for a long, long time.
“They were there to keep the reporters from snooping around,” I say.
I tell Betty about my secret, the secret of my nightmares, something I’ve never spoken of all these years.
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As the economy recovered, labor costs rose. There were fewer and fewer young men desperate enough to take jobs as Diggers in the Tunnel. Progress on the American side had slowed for a few years, and Japan was not doing much better. Even China seemed to run out of poor peasants who wanted this work.