https://archive.org/details/someonewillconqu0000unse/page/46/mode/2up
Someone Will Conquer Them
Overview
Mary Ogata, the American wife of a Japanese scientist, finds herself under house arrest in a mountain village during the Second World War with her steadfast and stubborn servant Suzuki. Enduring suffering at the hands of the sadistic Captain Tanaka who is tormented by desire for the woman he hates, Mary's miserable existence is suddenly disrupted when she helps to conceal a wounded American airman in her cottage.
Chapter 1
Asama Yama lorded it over
the village. He was a vulgar old mountain, suffering
continuously from stomach disorders and a hole in the head.
Usually, a wisp of grey smoke drifted from his lacerated topknot, but at times, rumbling and grumbling, he would give a thunderous roar, vomit crimson fire skyward, shower the surrounding countryside with fine ashes, and fill the people's nostrils with the harsh stink of sulphur.
When this happened at night-time, the foreign people who were living in the village that crouched at the volcano's foot leapt from their sleep-mats and beds in terror, thinking that they were at last the target of American bombing planes, those gigantic silver sharks so often seen swimming through the sky, on their ways to attack, mutilate and destroy other villages, towns and cities in Japan.
Before the war, the village near Asama Yama had been a summer resort for wealthy Japanese and for foreign residents of Japan; but, in 1944, it had become an eerie place, where the cream and dregs of many lands and nationalities huddled in overcrowded villas
Diplomats and international adventurers, business men and their families, people from all walks of life, stood in the queues for meagre food rations. They were a polyglot crowd, distrustful of each other, awed by the despotic village police, and intimidated by war's most potent weapon - starvation.
They had fled from the terror of Japan's bombed cities, and many were refugees here who had been refugees before, to escape persecution and death in their home lands.
Others, for varied reasons, had come to settle in, or visit Japan before the war. Belonging to neutral countries, they were not interned, but left to fend for themselves. As the war years dragged by they felt that being interned would have simplified their lives.
The village had at first appeared to them as a safe haven, but just as the soft air of summer and the stark beauty of winter became a mockery, throwing misery into greater relief, so did the village become a prison. Once they were registered as residents there, a special pass to travel had to be obtained. War-torn, starving Japan had little time and thought for these foreign liabilities in her midst, during this, surely the most savage war in the history of mankind.
A rough track led from the village into the wooded hills. At a turn in the track a grey boulder protruded. From here, the entire village could be viewed. Further up, isolated in a hollow and surrounded by pinewoods, was a fragile Japanese house. This was the wartime refuge and home of Mary, the American wife of Goro Ogata, a Japanese.
A kindly man, her husband was twelve years older than Mary. During a stay in San Francisco, Goro had been offered the opportunity of working as assistant to her father, a brilliant biochemist.
With interest and pleasure he had moved into the home of the
American man, and it had embarrassed him when he saw that the daughter of the house was also the servant, overworked, unpaid and ill-treated.
He could not help noticing that some mornings Mary's hands were swollen, at times even bleeding, from beatings inflicted by her father. Her eyes were filled with shame, because of the sympathy that she saw in his eyes. As she served his morning meal he would talk to her, attempt to interest and amuse her. This was not difficult, and her fleeting smiles delighted him.
When he knew her better, he asked why her father treated her so cruelly. She told him that it was because of her mother's death. 'My mother died at my birth. My father loved her, and he hates me because I caused his tragedy.'
'Your father should have taken another wife,' Goro had said philosophically. 'It was his duty to give you a new mother. Sorrow should be aired in the open - never kept in the
He spoke of Japan, of the beauty, ancient customs and remarkable family unity in his homeland. When it was time for him to return there, and he saw the loneliness, the bereft expression on the girl's face, he had blurted out, almost without thought - which was unusual, for he was a thoughtful man - 'Come with me, marry me, Mary! Leave this life you are living. I promise you at least something better ...'
He had expected opposition from her father, and had again been shocked and puzzled
when the older man had said, 'So you wish to marry my daughter - when?' If Mary's father had not objected to his daughter marrying an Oriental, Goro's conventional Japanese parents had been infuriated and horrified by the marriage of their only son to a blue-eyed Occidental, and they had shown their dislike plainly.
A few months after Goro and Mary arrived in Japan, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred. Instead of the better life she had been promised, Mary was once more under parental disfavour.
Goro had taken her into his parents' household to live, in Japanese style. No one treated her cruelly - unless coldness and dislike is cruelty. She had learned to speak Japanese, but had no interest in learning their ways, especially after the order that Goro's mother, the mistress of the house, had given her, 'Please do nothing! I do not need your
For more than a year, Goro, knowing that he had made a fatal mistake, did all in his power to make his American wife's life as pleasant as possible, under the difficult domestic and even more difficult wartime conditions. Eventually he had lost interest and openly agreed with his parents that he had done a foolish thing
When the Ogata home was burnt to the ground during an airraid, it was decided that this was the chance to rid themselves of the embarrassing enemy-American member of the family. They decided to send her to the foreign village near Asama Yama.
Goro had engaged as companion for Mary an English-speaking servant, Suzuki San, who had spent more than fifty of her seventy years working for British and American families in Tokyo. He had explained the situation to her; she understood perfectly and had no scruples against working for an American, war or no war.
Together, the old woman and the twenty-two-year-old girl had travelled to the mountain village, carrying with them a few personal possessions that had been salvaged from the fire. As the unbearably crowded train covered mile after mile, Suzuki was amazed and delighted to see the change that took place in her young mistress. 'She's pretty,' the old woman had at first decided, 'but, maa! she's a dull one.' The trip, to Mary, seemed a journey to freedom. This, she felt sure, was the real beginning of her life. At least she was on her own, free of her father, her parents-in-law, and yes - Goro.
When they had eventually reached their destination, Suzuki's opinion was: 'She's pretty, and maa! she's a gay bright girl.
8 / 221
