Author’s Note: This essay is based on a story my grandfather told me when I was thirteen years old, my surviving memories of that story thirty-eight years later, and the limited historical context I have so far been able to establish. Throughout, I have tried to distinguish between what I know, what I remember, what I merely suspect, and what may simply have become family legend.
That distinction matters. I do not yet have Tom’s complete Navy records, and I have not independently established that the central incident described here occurred at all. Some of the chronology is almost certainly wrong.
There is, however, one promising development. While finishing this piece, I called my mother and learned that the family autobiography I wrote in eighth grade from taped interviews with Tom apparently still exists. The original cassette tapes are almost certainly gone. The written project, however, may be sitting in a box inside a tub somewhere in a shed in California.
Naturally.
If it surfaces, the case reopens.
Epigraph:
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between
It’s been a long time, mama, since I heard you call my name
Ah, been a long time since I heard you call my name
I got to see my Colorado girl again
—Townes Van Zandt, “Colorado Girl”
I. Introduction
My grandfather Tom Thomas once told me that he killed a man in Japan.
I was thirteen years old when he told me this. I believed him. Thirty-eight years later, I am no longer entirely sure. I have been wanting to write this story for many years. The story has remained lodged somewhere between family history, childhood memory, and legend: an extraordinary story told to a boy by his grandfather and preserved, imperfectly, across nearly four decades.
Now I would like to know what actually happened.
II. The Family Autobiography
In the spring of 1988, when I was in eighth grade at St. George’s School outside Spokane, Washington, my social studies teacher, Laura Pierce, assigned us a family autobiography project.
Laura was a nice woman and a good social studies teacher. I was friends with her son Ben, who was a year or two older than I was. The Pierces lived in a modest suburban home about twelve minutes north of St. George’s. My parents, my brothers, and I lived a little farther north in Wayside, Washington, which in those days was far out in the country.
When my brothers and I were younger, we sometimes went to the Pierces’ neighborhood for Halloween. This was in the early to mid 1980s, and it was the era of panic about tainted candy on Halloween. My feeling today is that this panic was largely, if not entirely, overblown. Nevertheless, we checked our candy haul for razors carefully. We never found any.
Wayside was not much good for trick-or-treating unless you were prepared to hike half a mile between houses. The Pierces had neighbors.
These are some memories of my time. I mention them here because I am trying to establish what I know, what I remember, and what I merely think I remember.
I believe Laura assigned the autobiography project sometime around March 1988. I cannot today establish this date with any degree of certainty. The project took some time, and we finished eighth grade in early June. Four years later, twenty-eight of us graduated from St. George’s together, so I guess my eighth-grade class would have been roughly the same size.
For my project, I chose to interview my paternal grandfather, Tom Thomas. I sent him a list of questions, and he kindly sent back about half a dozen tapes. On the tapes he talked about his whole life, with a focus on his time in World War II. Tom was a career Navy man who also served in the Korean War. I believe he served valiantly, and he told me that he shot in the leg on one of the islands off of Guam; I believe in 1944. He leg healed and he went on to a successful real estate career in Healdsberg CA, just outside of Napa Valley. I believe that he did quite well for himself, and by the time I was little he was already retired. Gin was a lifelong housewife. I was born in 1974, so my first memories of him and his wife Virginia (Gin) would have been around 1977.
My parents Ross and Claudia and my younger brother Mike visited Tom and Gin almost every summer until the late 1980s. We called them Moo Grandpa and Moo Nana because they owned cows. My mother’s parents Bill and Barbara were Regular Grandpa and Regular Nana as they lived in the city of Santa Clara.
We would usually start just three or four days with Tom and Gin, and often a week or two with Bill and Barbara. At this remove, I am not exactly sure why this was, however it may have been the fact that Tom was not, at least of the time, the nicest man. Tom died in 2001 and Gin in 1996, so RIP to two real ones. There is no avoiding the fact, however, that Tom had a bit of a mean streak.
Looking back today, I fully understand why this was. He grew up in rural Colorado in the early part of the 20th century. He was born in 1916 to a homesteader family, and he told me for the biography that his own father was a drinker and had a mean streak too. I believed this and still do. Tom and Gin liked to drink too, and I remember every evening at 5 PM sharp that would make martinis in what I then saw as a pretty swank cocktail set.
Tom would have maybe two martinis before dinner as I recall, while Gin would usually have just one. He probably had a few more drinks with dinner. I don’t ever remember him drinking beer or wine, so my guess is he stuck with martinis. I myself have inherited a taste for alcohol, and today I would describe myself as a managed drinker. I have also had periods of my life where I drank more, however that is a subject for another day.
In addition to having a bit of a mean streak, Tom could also be very generous. My parents bought a house in the country somewhere north of Spokane, WA in I believe 1980 or 1981 and it turned out to be a bit of a con job as the house had no water. This was a problem because everyone needs water, and also because my parents had zero money at the time. My dad was just starting his teacher career at St. George’s School in Spokane, one of the two most prestigious private school in the city. Prestigious though it may have been, it did not pay well/ Spokane only had about a quarter of million people at that time. It probably has more today, but I am note sure as I have not been back for 25 years. I never really cared for Spokane, however I do have fond memories overall of growing up there.
In any case, my folks needed to get out of the house with no water pronto and Tom kindly paid the entire down payment on a new house, in Wayside. Wayside was also north of Spokane, however it was much closer to school, just about a 17 minute drive. I can state this with certainly because we made the drive every school day for the 13 years I attended St. George’s.
III. The Yokohama Incident
As mentioned above Tom Thomas served in the United States Navy for about 20 years. At one point in the late 1930s, he said, he was a military policeman. I do not have his service record in front of me, and I am not going to convert rather vague memories into historical fact just to make the story cohere. His exact Navy rating, rank, assignments, and dates of service are unknown to me. That distinction will become important.
What follows is the story as I remember Tom telling it to me.
He told me that he was stationed in Japan sometime in the very 1930’s and perhaps the early 1940’s. As I will go into in more detail below, when I ran this story by my good friend Sergio Mandiola a few weeks ago he said a US Navy man would absolutely not have been stationed in Japan in 1941 at all, and in addition he said that it was also quite unlikely to have happened in 1940. He went on to say that if indeed such an took place, it may have occurred in 1938 or 1939 when US Japan relations were still at least on reasonably good terms.
My present recollection places him in Yokohama, although I do not want to claim more precision than the available evidence permits. For many years I have remembered the incident as occurring in 1941—more specifically around October 1941.
This date may be wrong. It is almost certainly is.
The location may be wrong, although I am confident that Tom did tell me that he stationed in Yokohama at some point.
In any case, Tom told me was that he was off duty one night and drinking in a bar with some of his fellow servicemen somewhere in Yokohama. A Japanese man came into the establishment extremely drunk and began causing trouble.
Tom intervened, and the man left the bar, only to come back several hours later with a knife. By this point, Tom said, it was very late, and we can assume that everybody had been drinking. As Tom exited the bar, the man came at him with the knife and Tom defended himself. Tom was not a tall man, however he was quite well built. Things went his way, and he tossed the man off a small cliff his death.
Again, I want to be careful here. I don’t remember whether Tom said that his position as a military policeman formally obligated him to intervene, whether he simply felt some responsibility for maintaining order, or whether he was a young sailor who decided that somebody needed to throw a drunk out of a bar and that somebody was going to be him.
I want to make this distinction clear because thirty-eight years is a long time and memory has a habit of polishing its own edges.
I do not merely remember Tom inferring that the man died. I remember my he telling me that he killed him.
IV. Aftermath
According to Tom, this was not the end of the matter.
He told me that the killing caused some degree of difficulty between the United States and Japan. This is understandable, as the two countries were, at the time, on anything but good terms. My recollection is that he said the whole thing became a minor diplomatic incident.
I also remember Tom telling me that he was imprisoned afterward, and my recollection was that he spent several months in a Navy prison or brig in Japan.
That is one of the details I now strongly suspect to be wrong.
Perhaps Tom said he was imprisoned somewhere else. Perhaps thirteen-year-old me misunderstood. Perhaps I have unconsciously moved the prison back to Japan in order to make the story narratively tidy.
And this is where my friend Mandiola enters the story.
V. Mandiola Objects
As mentioned above, when I told Mandiola the story some he told me “dude no way.”
He didn’t buy the date.
Mandiola is one of the smartest people I know and knows more history than anyone I have ever met. When I told him that my recollection placed Tom in Yokohama in October 1941, his reaction was immediate.
No way in hell.
Mandiola did not necessarily doubt that some version of the incident could have happened. His objection was to my chronology and to some of the surrounding circumstances. He thought an earlier date—perhaps 1938 or 1939—was considerably more plausible.
I agreed.
After all, it would be foolish of me to regard a date remembered from a conversation in 1988 as incontrovertible evidence. But I also don’t want to correct the record before I have investigated it fully. For now, therefore, I am leaving 1941 on the board.
VI. Why the Date Matters
The relationship between the United States and Japan changed enormously during the years immediately preceding the Pacific War.
Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchukuo the following year. Full-scale war between Japan and China erupted in 1937. The United States and other Western powers increasingly objected to Japanese expansion in China, while Washington gradually moved from diplomatic opposition toward economic pressure.
The confrontation intensified considerably in 1940 and 1941.
Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact in September 1940. The United States progressively restricted exports of strategically important materials to Japan while increasing support for China. Japanese expansion into French Indochina further worsened relations. In July 1941, after Japan moved into southern French Indochina, the Roosevelt administration froze Japanese assets in the United States. In practice, the resulting restrictions threatened Japan’s access to the imported oil upon which both its economy and military depended. Japan consequently faced a severe strategic problem.
However it would be misleading to reduce the road to Pearl Harbor to a simple story in which the United States surrounded an innocent Japan and cut off its oil, leaving Japan no alternative but war. The economic pressure did not emerge from nowhere. It developed in response to years of Japanese military expansion in Asia. Japanese leaders nevertheless increasingly perceived themselves as being strategically contained and economically strangled.
Negotiations between Washington and Tokyo continued through 1941 even as both sides prepared for the possibility of war.
Then, on December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
This is why the date in my grandfather’s story matters so much.
1938 is not 1941. Neither is 1939.
An altercation involving an American serviceman and a Japanese civilian would have existed within a substantially different political environment depending on in which year it occurred. so the question becomes:
Was Tom Thomas actually in Japan when he said this happened?
This ought to be knowable.
VII. Opening the Case
Mandiola suggested that if I really wanted to investigate the story, I should look for American records from the time.
He mentioned the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Having looked into the matter further, I suspect the National Archives and military records will be more useful.
This is where the story stops being merely a family anecdote and becomes an investigation. First, I would to get my hands on Tom’s Navy service record.
I want to know when he enlisted, where he was stationed, his rank in the Navy, the ships or shore posts to which he was assigned, and—most importantly—where he was during the years immediately before Pearl Harbor.
If Tom was sitting in San Diego throughout 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941, we then have a problem.
If, on the other hand, he appears in naval records connected to Japan or Yokohama during this period, we have something considerably more interesting.
Then there is the alleged imprisonment.
If Tom in fact killed a Japanese civilian, was arrested or detained, and spent some number months in military confinement, I would expect at least the possibility of a documentary trail. There may be disciplinary records. There may be court-martial material. There may be official correspondence of some kind.
And then there are the Japanese records.
I have a distinct recollection that Tom told me the incident made the Japanese papers. I am less certain of this memory than I am of the killing itself, so I want to mark it accordingly. But if a Japanese newspaper did report the death of a Japanese man following an altercation with an American sailor, that changes everything. It would, at a minimum, have been news.
There is even likely to be diplomatic correspondence if Tom was right that the affair caused some kind of friction between the two countries.
Or there could be no records of any kind.
This would tell us something too.
VIII. Memory Is Not an Archive
Here are the facts that I want to establish:
i) What actually happened in Japan nearly ninety years ago?
ii) How accurate is Tom’s version of events?
iii) In turn, how accurate are my own recollections of what he told in 1988?
Memory does not operate like a filing cabinet. We lose things. We combine them. We unconsciously embellish chronology. Details that once carried periods eventually acquire question marks.
Sometimes families do this collectively. An event becomes an anecdote. An anecdote becomes a story. The story gets told often enough that eventually nobody remembers which pieces belonged to the event and which pieces belonged to the telling.
Maybe Tom killed a man.
Maybe he fought a man who survived and the story grew in telling over the years.
Maybe the basic event happened but I have misremembered some of the facts.
Maybe my grandfather was bullshitting his grandson with a magnificent sailor’s yarn.
At thirteen, none of these possibilities occurred to me. My grandfather told me something. I wrote it down.
At fifty-two, I simply want more evidence.
IX. Why Now?
This raises the question: Why am I doing this now?
I originally went to graduate school to study history. In January 1999, I enrolled at Northern Arizona University (NAU) intending to complete a master’s degree in Asian history within two years.
I almost made it.
I wrote approximately twenty-five pages of the first chapter of my thesis, which I still have in print form, and accumulated perhaps another hundred pages of notes in various stages of usefulness. For somewhat complex reasons that I have discussed elsewhere, I never finished the thesis.
I left NAU in August of 2001.
Within two months, I was back in my wife’s hometown of Kumamoto, Japan, teaching English to preschoolers. Not long afterward I joined Ritsumeikan Uji Senior High School in South Kyoto. I have now worked there for twenty-four years.
Teaching is a good profession. It has been my profession for a very long time, and I am past ready to do something else.
I have now written blogs with varying degrees of regularity since 2008, and now write almost daily for my current blog the Kyoto Kibbitzer. I think I am a good writer. At a minimum, I have considerable range. And I am trying, with more seriousness than before, to professionalize my writing.
Writing is, unfortunately, a notoriously difficult way to make a living.
J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown have made fortunes from it. Although I consider myself a better writer than both of these people, I have zero expectation of reaching anything remotely resembling their fame or fortune.
I would settle for less.
If I can patch over patch together a modest living through writing, online tutoring, and perhaps another job or two here and there, I can imagine selling my house and moving somewhere cheaper. Perhaps downtown Kyoto. Perhaps Osaka.
Increasingly, however, I find myself thinking about Thailand.
Bangkok is too large, crowded, and noisy for me. Pattaya, on the other hand, attracts me, and I am hoping to visit soon if my financial circumstances cooperate. If I do manage get there this summer, I will assess its suitability as a place to live.
All of this may seem some distance from a Japanese bar in the years just prior to World War II.
To me it isn’t.
I am trying to decide what kind of writer I want to be during the next part of my life. I write about music. I write fiction. I am working on my memoirs. I write about education, sex, dreams, politics, bars, cities, relationships, and whatever else happens to interest me on a particular morning.
I would also like to return to history, at to least modest extent.
And if I am serious about becoming a little of an historian again, then I owe this story more than the version I have been carrying around since I was thirteen.
I owe Tom more than that too.
X. The Open Case
I am going to try to find out what happened in 1941, or whenever it happened, if anything happened at all.
This mother I asked my mother if she still has the family biography. She said she thought in was a box somewhere, and she would try to find it soon.
Then, when I have the time, I will send an email to the National Archives.
If I can establish Tom’s military assignments, I can establish whether his story is even plausible. If I can establish this, I can begin narrowing down the dates. If I can pin point the date and location with reasonably accuracy, I may be able to consult Japanese newspaper archives from the time. If Tom really was imprisoned in Japan, which I now regard as unlikely, there may also a disciplinary record somewhere.
And perhaps, somewhere deep in an archive in Japan or the United States, there is another man’s name.
This possibility changes the story.
For nearly forty years the man Tom said he killed that night in Yokohama has existed in my mind only a legend
If he existed, he was more than that.
He had a name. He probably had a family. He had a life that began long before he allegedly walked into a bar drunk one night and encountered a young American sailor named Tom Thomas.
I would like to know who he was.
Maybe the records will vindicate my grandfather’s story.
Maybe they won’t.
My suspicion is that the truth will be more interesting. That perhaps somewhere beneath eighty-five years of history, forty years of storytelling, and thirty-eight years of my own imperfect memory, there is an actual event that gradually became the story I know of today.
But that’s only my suspicion.
For now, all I have is a deceased grandfather, an eighth-grade autobiography for 1988 that I hope to acquire soon, and an imperfect memory. And in any case, I have one hell of a family story.
That is enough to begin with.
Nearly ninety years after whatever happened happened, I am now determined to get to the bottom of it.
Stay tuned.
Dedication:
For my grandfather, Tom Thomas. Although we had our ups and downs over the years, I still love you very much.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 