By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive To Rense
11-21-24

It was assumed by foreign officials everywhere that my career was protected by the local U.S. Embassy - which was an absurd joke indeed about truth-unfriendly American diplomatic careerists cowering to the demands of blustering fools in the White House like Clinton and Bush or their Israeli masters for that matter. The consistent preference was to stand my ground against official lies and deception, if for no reason other than to wake up the American public to the facts on the ground and also to show foreigners what it takes to be an American in one’s heart and soul: The personal ethos that it's better to die for truth than to live in falsehood.

Turkeys for sustenance, Eagles for glory

As the unique national holiday of Thanksgiving approaches, I share the obscure experience of my immigrant grandfather from a then-impoverished Japan who toiled as a sailor aboard a U.S. Merchant Marine vessel returning from the embattled Philippines during the Spanish-American War just prior to the turn of century in 1898. His heroism aboard that ship during a massive Antarctic storm led to be granted the rare privilege of legal immigration in the United States of America during the height of the (anti-) Japanese Exclusion Act. His saving the lives of 70 sailors, wounded soldiers and malaria victims aboard that nearly doomed vessel set the standard for the courage and willingness to self-sacrifice that it takes to earn the honor of legal residence and his children becoming American citizens. And that action was possible only because of his unswerving belief in God the Almighty.

Turkeys shipboard was how my granddad learned how to prepare a massive Thanksgiving dinner at his home and spacious vegetable garden in Los Angeles. Thus, for me it was a delight to spot a flock of wild turkeys, as happened to me by chance while driving through the forests of northern Pennsylvania, on my way to research the old logging region that inspired Stephen Foster’s song “Camptown Races”, Strutting along in a tight-knit band parallel to the roadway, their necks held straight up with a single-minded focus on waddling ahead comically although with possible tragic consequences in a shotgun encounter with a hunter prowling in the dense forest. The mild quality of their fine flesh - lacking the gaminess of waterbirds such as the French geese or the duck preferred by the Chinese - is another special quality that adds to the sweetness of the American national holiday of Thanksgiving.

Along that same corridor winding through hills, I swerved off the road up onto a dirt track to an abandoned fire-watch tower that I had spotted. The magnificent view was interrupted by two bald eagles, who swooped down and circled past my astonished gaze and cawed loudly at this rare intrusion by a human. That chance sighting in the wilderness must have been rather routine for the Pilgrims - the founding fathers and mothers of the USA - encountering a vast and yet untamed continent. Those new arrivals from an over-civilized England must have experienced as sense of uneasiness as strangers there because of intolerance in their colony-hungry homeland opposed to the colonists’ sense of divine injunction - always unexpectedly reinforced by fortuitous twists of fate.

As one who was born overseas in postwar Japan, my own uneasy sense of nationality has always been reassured by the memory of my paternal grandfather Saburo and his war-hero son Ken, my America-born father. My first awareness of America’s unique national holiday was immediately after the divorce of my parents, which rendered me into child laborer for my hard-working immigrant paternal grandparents from the backwaters of northern Japan.

On the run-up to Thanksgiving, my tough-as-nails granddad Saburo showed his skill at every aspect of American cuisine, learning in the galley of a U.S. Merchant Marine vessel hauling wounded and ill soldiers from the Philippines during the Spanish-American War of 1898. How and why he served aboard that ship, which was essential to his rarist legal admission into the United States - during intense anti-Asian agitation by nativists including the early-socialist novelist Jack London.

Saburo’s youthful departure from his homeland Japan was due to the social scorn he had suffered during childhood, At early age, he had fallen into a fire-pit, a traumatic event that left him unable to speak. Throughout early youth, he was relentlessly taunted for being an idiot - an act of vengeance against this samurai family who spearheaded the overthrow of the caste-based Shogunate government and installed a modern constitutional government under the figurehead Emperor. After the sudden recovery of his speaking voice at age 15, Saburo walked the 1200 km (700 miles - actually farther on old dirt roads) to Hiroshima to sign a labor contract as a farmworker on a Hawaiian sugar plantation and shipped off to Honolulu. The job of clearing man-made water channels of storm debris eventually became repetitious boredom on dusty plains on the dry leeward side that were certainly not a tropical paradise.

Joining the Merchant Marine

His curiosity was piqued when hearing news of the unexpected arrival at Honolulu Harbor of a U.S. Merchant Marine vessel conveying wounded and sickly American soldiers from brutal jungle fighting in the Philippines and tropical infections during the Spanish-American War. Striding to dockside out of curiosity, young Saburo was astonished to encounter a junior officer who asked if he’d come to apply for the galley job. By reflex the lad bowed at being addressed by a powerful official and so the sailor - impressed by the boy’s deferential manner - had him write his name on a job application and told him to bring his belongings dockside on the following morning and also to be ready to haul foodstuffs and water barrels up the gang-plank to the ship’s hold.

As an ambitious young fellow who was still weak at English comprehension assumed - wrongly - that the vessel was bound for the City of Gold - San Francisco. His youthful hope was delivered a shock when discovering his actual destination was newly captured Havana, Cuba, and that his job was to clear the toilets and toss the stinking slop overboard - and then mop the restrooms, stairs and floors of the living quarters along with dozens of other menial tasks not befitting a proper sailor.

When you’re the lowest man on the totem pole, there’s nowhere to go but up, right? Wrong, especially if you were an Asia with a limited English vocabulary. And aboard a sailing ship on the Pacific the only way to quit is to jump overboard into the circling sharks. As it turned out grandfather earned the rarest right to legal immigration during the era of the Japanese Exclusion Act - and that was achieved the hard way by his heroic single-handed saving of that huge sailing ship from sinking in the Antarctic passage during a fierce midnight storm.

Passage between Fire and Ice

After coming in sight of Tierra de Fuego (land of fire) at the tip of southern Chile, threatening clouds gathered and then exploded with lightning strikes as the waves swelled, heaved and crashed over the deck. After nightfall, the huge vessel seemed to shrink while churning through ever-rising sea swells. Along with three older crewmen, he was ordered by the captain to climb up to take down the top-sail to prevent the main mast from being snapped and splintered by the now monstrous waves - a dire impending threat to the entire crew. It’s not as easily done as it might sound to a land-lubber.

As the foursome shimmied up the wave-tossed pole, the doomed quartet could not see even their own hands in the growing darkness. Continuing by the sense of touch, they felt their way along the bottom edge of the top sail, sliding their bare feet along the beam to position themselves on an even spread along the cross-beam to pull down sail. Then, the ship suddenly dipped into a deep trough, they faced the imminent risk of falling overboard as the flapping canvas pulled away from their helpless grip. Then a massive swell rolled up above the hapless vessel like a phantom of doom and crashed down over the vessel, sending the three fellow sailors overboard into the oceanic depths and thrusting Saburo into freefall through the darkness with his arms stretched out like wings of a seabird. By chance - or as he solemnly believed, by divine intervention - his life was saved when a loose rope swinging wildly in the icy wind lodged between his right-hand’s pinkie and ring fingers. He gripped the rope tightly while between battered against the mast.

Then, sliding down that rope onto the deck, the boy landed on his feet. The captain rushed toward him and seized the rope while shouting out orders - because it was the manila-fiber strand that raised and lowered the top-sail. Saburo joined the other sailors to pull down the fatal sail, thereby preventing the loss of a Merchant Marine vessel along with its screw into the freezer of Davy Jones’s locker. The cries of joy at miraculous salvation resulted in the lowly and timid Saburo becoming a lucky mascot for the crew, who immediately terminated his latrine duty and elevated him to the enviable post as a cook’s helper. From arse to mouth, it was a giant step up indeed.

In the ship’s galley, the Japanese youth learned how to decapitate pluck and prepare three huge turkeys - the last of a flock of live birds kept on board from Boston for delivery to the war-weary troops in the Philippines. After plucking and gutting, the carcasses were soaked in kegs of seawater along with salty ham shanks. Saburo learned how to prepare and cook all the trimmings for a Thanksgiving meal along that calm and warm journey across the southern Atlantic. At some distance off Brazil, the joyous Thanksgiving dinner preceded by a solemn prayer for the lost souls and in thanks for salvation.

On arrival at U.S.-occupied Cuba, Saburo whiled away the idle hours by the docks learning to play cards before arrival of the return cargo from the USA destined for the Philippines. Then unexpectedly at predawn two months later, his commander shook him awake and told him to grab his duffel bag and run to another vessel about to depart for Boston. “And be sure to hand this document to that captain.” What had arrived earlier that morning was a naval commendation for bravery that saved a Merchant Marine ship at sea, an exceptional action that permitted his admission to live and work in the United States of America. In those troubled times of anti-Asian agitation prior to passage of the Japanese Exclusion Act, personal valor in defense of the USA was the only certain ticket to freedom.

In memory of a glorious era

That same ritualized preparation for the national holiday feast was repeated verbatim in my grandparent’s backyard garden with a week of soaking a massive tom turkey carcass in brine, desalting a huge ham with changes of fresh water, scrubbing yams - as if I was expected to serve as the galley slave for my extended paternal family - call it a homage to tradition. That’s because I was a black sheep sent off in summertime to toil in desert farms south of India following the divorce of my WWII hero father and my Japan-raised mother in a clash between lowly peasants descended from a once powerful samurai clan (losers) versus her high-class merchant family (winners) in westernized Yokohama. Disappointed with second-class social status, she returned to work as an actress and tourist-guide for Toho Studios (during the early years of the “Godzilla” craze”).

This inherent cultural/class divide was worsened for me by the Thanksgiving family feast, when my cousins descended like a flock of starving crows piling on the steaming food and gobbling like turkeys in a cornfield. Raised by my strict military-retiree father, I was appalled by their indiscipline. Ken had served as the oldest soldier, trainer and interrogator with the since legendary 442nd infantry battalion, enlisted by the post-Pearl Harbor military draft and then serving in the entire U.S. campaign during World War II - from the landing in Morocco to fight the legendary Rommel in North Africa, then onto Sicily, up the Italian Peninsula notably at Monte Cassino and then capturing the Alpine pass to Austria, the Mediterranean landing at the French Riviera, the northward push through eastern France to the crossing of the Rhone into southern Germany for the capture of Bavaria. That valorous unit suffered more than a 200 percent casualty rate, the highest toll in American military history. Yet Dad never suffered even a scratch in the desperate fighting against the Mussolini Italians and the German SS troopers, despite his unit’s lack of air cover and heavy weaponry. And, yes, indeed, he was a devout Christian since there could be no other explanation for his remarkable survival. And as a survivor of the Depression Era, when he spent idle hours practicing ballroom dancing in cheap L.A. dance halls, he emerged as the greatest dancer in the French Riviera since Fred Astaire. How one’s fate can swing from abject misery to momentary glory and back again.

Meanwhile, the family heritage of my grandfather’s terrifying fall in darkness to be saved by an unlikely rope made Thanksgiving for me a day of cult-like devotion to God’s grace, a special moment of thankfulness and wonder, a familial memory that has subsequently carried me through many a life-threatening adventures and harrowing escapes as a frontline journalist. Thanksgiving is a day to reflect on unanticipated salvation, which partly at least must be earned though faithful action as it was for the Pilgrims.

Rather than leave my grandfather’s presence on an American vessel in somewhat mystery, briefly what compelled his departure from a still-backward agrarian Japan should be disclosed, if only as a tribute to chance and courage. He was a third-generation descendant of the ruling clan in Satsuma (the southern Kyushu region featured in the Tom Cruise film “The Last Samurai”). His grandfather was the class equivalent of a knight, who rode a huge white horse as chief of a battalion during the Imperial Restorationist drive to depose the Shogun in Edo (Tokyo). After defeating the shogunate armies between Kyoto and Tokyo, he was among clan members assigned to guard the seven passes between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific coast. North of that line, shogunate hold-outs and so-called “barbarian” tribes enjoyed their freedom in the wild. Given those intense social pressures and simmering hatred, Saburo - meaning third son - fathered the only familial line in the North bearing the Shimazu crest and name of the clan that defeated the Shogunate and build the Japanese Navy that crushed the Tsarist Russian armada at Tsushima Strait in 1905. Following the terrible disappointment, indeed betrayal of his wartime internment in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, he made a failed attempt to restore his hereditary honor in Japan but failed in a modern nation forgetful of its feudal past. Saburo realized toward the end there was no longer any looking back and that he was heart and soul a Christian and an American. That is the legacy for his descendants, friend and neighbors on Thanksgiving Day: We have everything to be thankful for, by the grace of God.