Free The Navidad Incident by Natsuki Ikezawa Page A

the Empire of Greater Japan, having severed diplomatic relations with Germany on August 23, landed its First Naval South Seas Expeditionary Force in the Marshall Islands on October 6. This was followed on the twentieth of the month by a Second Expeditionary Force to the Carolines and Maríanas, and a third to the Navidads on the twenty-fifth. The Germans put up almost no resistance. Germany lost territories five and a half times the size of the Fatherland, and Japan gained vast spoils with no actual fighting. It was like picking up a dropped wallet.
    And so the inhabitants of these islands were pocketed into the twentieth century. Considering all that followed, that fateful day was either the beginning of a new era or the end of good times. For whereas the Spanish and Germans had endeavored to edify and manage these colonies, never intending to actually live there, the Japanese wanted to emigrate. Japanese settlers came crushing in en masse, as if the islands were uninhabited. They dried katsuobushi bonito fillets, they planted sugar cane, they brought rice and soy sauce too. Like the dirt-poor Spaniards who shipped out to the Americas in the seventeenth century, or Irish to New England in the eighteenth, or Chinese to California in the nineteenth, early twentieth-century Japanese headed either to Manchuria or the “Domestic South Seas.”
    When people move, cultures move with them. So when these “domesticators” came, it goes without saying (yikes, those words again!) the natives found themselves overtaken by Japanese culture. The new landlords built Shinto shrines on the islands, established Japanese schools. Unlike the British who never made the Queen’s English mandatory for the whole Indian population—only those ambitious individuals seeking employment with the ruling class—Greater Japan required all the islanders, now second-class imperial subjects, to learn the Japanese language, pray at Japanese shrines, and ultimately—if male—be drafted into the Japanese military.
    Among the waves of Japanese who flooded into Navidad at the time was a katsuobushi maker from Kochi, across Osaka Bay on the backwater island of Shikoku. A bonito fisherman in his youth, he’d lost three fingers of his right hand to a tangle of rigging, which dry-docked his career. Up to that point he’d caught fish; now he went over to the processing side and mastered the art of curing them. In 1929, hearing that a new bonito-curing plant was to be set up in the Navidads, he left behind a wife and child and made for Namidajima , the “Tearful Islands” as they were then called. Formerly mere ports of call for taking on food and water and bait, these Domestic South Sea islands were now producing great quantities of sugar and katsuobushi, and technical skills like his were in high demand.
    Matías Guili believes this Chujiro Miyakura was his father. He’s never told anyone, nor is there any official record of his father being Japanese. Still, the idea is not as farfetched as it might sound. Not that he ever met the man or even heard anything about him from his mother. She herself was from Melchor Island, far away from Gaspar and Baltasár. When her parents died one after the other, the orphan made her way to the capital and found employment at a Japanese-run barbershop. Which is where, her son Matías supposes, she met Miyakura. Supposes, because when Matías was only three, she succumbed to a Japanese tuberculosis epidemic.
    His mother’s younger sister took the child back to Melchor and entrusted him to the care of distant relatives, where he received little attention and, after finishing three years of public school, was thrown out on his own. An unruly boy, he headed back alone to Baltasár. There, an aunt found him living hand-to-mouth and gave him a box—keepsakes from his mother, she told him. Cheap Japanese perfume, a few pencil stubs, a dirty handkerchief printed with a