Prologue / Kobe, Japan August 1945 On a sweltering summer day, just before noon, a petite young woman sat in a crowded streetcar that rolled along the industrial waterfront of Kobe, Japan's main international seaport. The streetcar's progress was painfully slow. Mounds of rubble were heaped all around, the result of recent American carpet bombings that had killed thousands of people and destroyed large swaths of the city. Entire blocks down near the harbor had been leveled, and to the young woman, it seemed miraculous that the streetcar could even still operate. Her hair was dark, nearly black, and although Kobe was the city of her birth she was not Japanese. Her name was Helmi Koskin, and she was Russian-Jewish, part of a small community of foreigners who had survived in Japan throughout the Second World War. She was on her way to one of the waterfront black markets where fresh fruit and vegetables, officially unavailable, might yet be for sale. She and her mother, with whom she lived in a small boarding house that her mother managed, had subsisted mostly on rations of moldy white rice and beans for the past four years of war. Suddenly the streetcar lurched to a stop in the middle of a block, and the conductor gestured impatiently for everyone to get off. Helmi joined the other passengers filing into the street. It was probably just a blockage on the tracks. No one moved with any particular urgency. Weariness and resignation were in every face. Sirens had sounded several times in recent days, but no American bombers had appeared over Kobe for over a month. Everyone understood that Japan was on its knees. Tokyo, the capital city, had been ravaged repeatedly by fire-bombings, as had most other major cities. Word was circulating that a week ago some kind of new bomb - one bomb dropped from a single plane - had obliterated the city of Hiroshima, only 150 miles to the east. Another, three days later, supposedly had done the same to Nagasaki, a bit further away. In between these horrors, the Soviet Union, fresh from fighting the Nazis, finally declared war on Japan. Would Russians soon be dropping bombs too? No one knew what to believe anymore. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, Helmi looked upward at the hazy sky, wondering if Kobe's fate was also to be wiped off the map. But there was nothing in the sky and no sound of a plane. Traffic all around stopped, and people had congregated on the sidewalk, maintaining an odd silence. Some gathered around a table set in front of a storefront, on which a large console radio had been placed. The radio suddenly crackled to life, as did the loudspeakers mounted on rickety poles that normally broadcast air raid sirens. There were no sirens now, just the crackling static, but everyone around her appeared intent on listening. Then a voice began broadcasting, tinny and peculiarly high-pitched. She strained to listen, but she could understand nothing. She had lived in Kobe long enough to learn conversational Japanese, but this voice spoke in an unfamiliar dialect. Whether a man's or woman's voice, she couldn't even tell. People all around glanced at each other with shocked expressions, but no one looked at her. The voice from the speakers went on for several minutes and then abruptly stopped, and all was quiet again. For a few seconds, nothing happened and no one moved, as if the world had been frozen. Then, slowly, people shuffled to life again on the sidewalks, cars and trucks and bicycles started moving up the street, and passengers made their way back to the streetcar. Faces remained stunned. Hardly anyone spoke. A few had begun to weep. She overheard a word, spoken in a whisper: Showa . This is what they called their Emperor. Was the voice his? What in the world could he have to say? As far as she knew, he had never before addressed the populace. Had he announced new restrictions? Would there be the great invasion of the mainland that many had feared? It wasn't until later, when she finally returned home with a few meager vegetables, that she learned the news, from an English-speaking Japanese neighbor. Indeed it was the Emperor, speaking directly to his people for the first time in his life. His speech had a title, The Jewel-Voice Broadcast , and it had been delivered in the arcane dialect used for rare royal decrees. The message was simple: Japan had surrendered to America. Helmi Koskin was twenty-two years old in 1945. She saw that everything now would change. It would be a different world, whether better or worse, she couldn't tell, although it was hard to imagine things getting much worse. She had long hoped for her life to be different. She had hoped to live in a place where she could feel she belonged. Her first languages were Russian and English, yet she had never lived in a place where these were the native tongues. Although her birthplace was Japan, her mother had raised her in Shanghai, across the South China Sea, under impoverished conditions. The Japanese had bombed their tenement there during the invasion of China before the Second World War even began. After fleeing back to Japan, they had endured more privation and more bombs. Their house was one of the few on their block still standing. They had no citizenship anywhere. They had no true home. Throughout the war, the Japanese had relentlessly publicized that Americans were vicious barbarians and that if war ever came to the mainland people would be slaughtered mercilessly, tortured, eaten alive. Helmi Koskin never believed this. For as long as she could remember, she had harbored an image of America gleaned from books and movies and music, and from a few actual Americans. If America would stop raining down bombs, then she believed in her heart that things would get better. If the war was really over, then maybe she could finally find a place to call home. Excerpted from Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West by David Horgan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
