Why This Book?
11/15/2007
I like it when folks ask about my new book. It doesn’t happen all the time, so like any writer, I’m pleased when it does. But they usually want to know why I wrote “that” book. I’ve been a criminal defense lawyer longer than I care to remember and somehow managed to sell two legal thrillers to small presses. What lots of people don’t understand is why I would switch genres, move away from something I understand, and write a novel about such an obscure time as 1970 and such an obscure place as Wakkanai, Japan.
Well, there’s the standard reason. Writers move on and that means writing about other things. But for me 1970 isn’t obscure at all; neither is Wakkanai, Japan, for that matter.
For Americans who’ve been to Wakkanai, like my old Air Force buddies and civilian employees or dependants, it was home at one time. Remote? Sure, I’ll give you that. There’s nothing more remote than twelve feet of snow, but never obscure. I knew the place well, though not nearly as well as I might have had I not been a twenty-year-old lunatic. So part of what I wanted to do was to record the place I knew, not forgetting the little things, and remember my friends, to do all that while I’m able. Funny how that works. As I young man I couldn’t forget about all those places quick enough. But the older I get, the more I remember. We were faithful in a time of faithlessness and great upheaval. I’m proud of that, but I have my regrets too.
My friend in Wakkanai, Yoshihiro Nakagawa, tells me there is a huge new luxury hotel at Port of Wakkanai. It even has a swimming pool on the roof. I’ve seen pictures of today’s Wakkanai. My old friends and I would never recognize it. New and gleaming and massive and concrete. It was different back then. Just fish and fish racks and baskets of dried fish on the bar and warm-hearted people—and not so warm-hearted people. Oh, and snow too, lots of snow. The Cold War was on. We were Cold War warriors, if you will. The Port District was a “bad neighborhood.” Lots of “G.I. no thank you” signs in the bar and restaurant windows. Of course it was off limits to base personnel. After all, Wakkanai was the Casablanca of the Vietnam War. There were always Russian fishing trawlers in port. That meant Russian fishermen in the bars. That meant we could practice our Russian on real Russians. That’s one of the reasons we liked to hang out there, one of the reasons we could have gotten arrested too. But most of the guys opted for “safe” places like Jimmy’s Club Seven or Mama Young’s.
In short, it was the perfect environment for spies and we even talked about that. They talked about it in security briefings too, but when the Air Force talked about it, the idea sounded like bullshit. So from my point of view, you see, Wakkanai in 1970 was the IDEAL place and time to set a political thriller.
The other reason I wrote “this” book, I think the primary one, was the Koreans themselves, for the ones I knew in Wakkanai and the ones on Sakhalin I never knew. It was a story I heard in my very early days at WAS and never forgot. There was a girl tending bar in the Airmen’s Club. Her name isn’t important but it was Korean. I was young and wild, sure, but even then I wasn’t stupid. I knew damn well Japan was about the most homogeneous place on earth. They were always uneasy with differences, more comfortable with conformity. So it surprised me that this Korean girl would be living there—and speaking perfect Japanese.
One night I asked her and she told me this incredible story about thousands of Koreans essentially kidnapped during the war as forced laborers and brought to Karafuto (Sakhalin) and then left to the mercy of Stalin’s Red Army when the war ended and the Japanese fled their Soviet conquerors. I remember thinking that if the American government were to find out, they’d make it all right and bring the people back. They’d been over there as captives some 30 years at that time. Well, maybe I was stupid, naive anyway. The story moved me, maybe because Sakhalin was so close. On a clear night we could see the lights in their Soviet houses.
Well, I never forgot the story and when I finally decided to write about it, I buried myself in research. It’s out there. I suppose it always was. What I learned was that all the governments of the free world knew about it from the beginning, including ours. But it would have been embarrassing to all of them to send those poor bastards home. Every government, including Park Jung Hee’s South Korea had a reason to let them rot under the thumbs of their Soviet captors as they had rotted under Japanese thumbs.
So I guess you’d say I wrote the book for three reasons. First to write the best novel I could; secondly, to record and share my memories of that place and the people I cared about—and cared little about, and, thirdly, to make a point that I learned later in life: You can be faithful without being blindly faithful.