I was away at sea for two days after that, with plenty of time to put thought to ‘Japan is not loved.’ Up until then I had dismissed all Chappy’s fears about his safety and the safety of his wife and children. They were silly thoughts, especially now that the war was more than a decade behind us.

But I had to remember. As a seaman during wartime, I was on the boats that landed and evacuated troops from the Japan-occupied islands. I knew about the enslavement by the Japanese of native people on those islands, who as a consequence became hungry, homeless and sick, who were beaten and stoned, who died, were beheaded, or killed in other despicable ways. I had heard stories of prisoners being starved and subjected to hard labour as well as to prolonged interrogation and torture. I knew of men, now at home in New Zealand, ex-prisoners of Japan, who had lost their minds because of the treatment they’d received. My own cousin Noddy was one of them. There were those who reviled the Japanese and would have been pleased if the whole race had been exterminated. I had never in any way associated any of this with Chappy, my brother, nor had I thought about how he might feel because of it.

At the time, these atrocities were worse than anything we had heard of before. We were not aware of what we were to find out later regarding camp conditions, ovens and experimentations in other parts of the world. We did not know that, in our own country, more than forty Japanese war prisoners in Featherston had been fired upon and killed. And we did not understand, at first, the force of the two bombs that ended it all.

I tried to put myself in Chappy’s place in the hope of better understanding, and decided also to keep my war experiences to myself. What good would it do to share what I knew with Oriwia? It was over, the US occupation of Japan had ended, and we were all buying things from each other now. We were supposed to be friends. That didn’t mean that in my far-off homeland there wouldn’t be resentment, ill will, and even hatred. I had to remind myself that to many at home the Japanese were despised. Indeed, not loved.

Chappy did come to Hawai‘i, and began work two days after his arrival. He had been given a limited work permit with possibility of renewal, and would have an opportunity to apply for immigration to Hawai‘i. What I had in mind, and what Oriwia would have had in mind too, was eventual immigration to Aotearoa. We believed this wouldn’t be difficult once she and Chappy were together in Hawai‘i. I wrote telling her to come. There’d be time for fish and kalo to get meat on her husband’s bones before she arrived, I thought.