‘It’s an excuse,’ Ishy said. ‘Also it’s obligation. Citizens of Japan must remain and raise the country from its ashes. They must build the new Japan.’ I was beginning to understand, but was concerned that Chappy had said very little about his wife and children. Apart from the gift that he gave me to pass on, it was as though he were a man alone and preferred to be that way. Yet he had contacted me. When I told him of Nunu’s death, I could see that he was sad. When I talked to him about his wife and children, Paa and the rest of the family, he said it made him happy to know they were well.

‘We have to bring him to the place of sunshine,’ Ishy said.

‘If we could.’

‘What does he do?’ Ishy asked.

‘He’s a basket-maker,’ I said. ‘And a businessman. He was in the army, in the Japan war against North China.’

‘What business?’

‘Buying and selling fruit and vegetables.’

Ishy’s importing business was doing well by then. He was working long hours, many of them away from home visiting hotel shops and markets in tourist destinations throughout Hawai‘i and the Pacific. He needed an assistant who could speak and write Japanese, who could liaise with Tokyo and do the documentation and warehousing of goods.

‘What’s his name, his own name?’

I didn’t know the answer. ‘He told me he was from a shamed family and that his true name did not exist any more.’ I thought I should tell Ishy that. ‘It was something to do with his father being against war.’

‘I’m going to Tokyo,’ Ishy decided.

I don’t know everything Ishy did to get Chappy to Hawai‘i. I understand that, after some weeks of negotiation, he was able to engage this ‘family member’ to assist him in his importing business, the part of it which was to do with bringing souvenir items from Tokyo to Hawai‘i. But the same thing that worried me also worried Ishy. Chappy, without exactly refusing to come, was reluctant. Yet we knew he could die if we left him in Tokyo. Oriwia would never have forgiven me if I’d allowed that to happen, nor would I have forgiven myself.

In the letters I sent to Oriwia, I didn’t mention the state of her husband’s health, nor did I mention his languor, his hesitation about leaving Tokyo, his unwillingness to give good reasons.

‘Why?’ I asked Ishy.

‘Hmm. You ask me why?’ Ishy said, pausing for a long time before he continued. ‘What you want to think about, Aki, is Chappy’s words: “Japan is not loved.”’