Voyage Log of the Battleship Kongo

I

I changed out of my hot frock coat and into a summer jacket, then went up to the upper deck with the others. Three young engineer sub-lieutenants came over and entertained us with all manner of stories. Being the newcomer, I was meeting all three for the first time, whereas each of my companions had at some point lectured to them in the classroom. I therefore stood outside the circle and listened quietly to their talk. One of the sub-lieutenants said that when he had encountered S walking in Yokosuka with his wife, the sight of their affection had affected him so violently that his stomach had been upset from that evening onward. At this the others burst into loud laughter. Only S, still newly married, did not join them; he merely grinned with evident pleasure. Looking out over the naval harbor drenched in sunset, I felt something close to pity for S, who had left his new wife at home. For some reason, I was suddenly seized by the forlorn feeling of being on a journey.

The ship towing our target had for some time been pulled astern by two small steam launches and was trying to turn to starboard. To an untrained eye, even the white foam churned up behind the launches gave no clue how much force they exerted upon this twenty-nine-thousand-ton battle cruiser. The Haruna, which had weighed anchor before us, was already sending up smoke as she slowly headed west and drew away toward the mouth of the harbor. Against the vivid green hills rising and falling beneath a sky newly clear after the rainy season, and the mercury-bright sea flashing back the sun, she formed a magnificent panorama. As I watched, I grew a little impatient that the Kongo showed no sign of sailing so readily. I rejoined the others' conversation in hopes of distracting myself from the delay.

Just then a gong clanged loudly beneath the hatch beside us to announce dinner. Its sound was so antiquated that one could scarcely believe it came from within a warship. The instant I heard it, I remembered a secondhand shop in Hase. There, beside a vermilion-painted striker, a suspicious-looking gong hung above a pot of sacred lilies or something of the sort. Suddenly eager to see the ship's gong, I descended the hatch ahead of the others and caught up with the sailor who had struck it. Yet when I did, the source of that grand clang proved to be nothing more than a plain, thin, paltry metal basin for which the name "gong" was altogether too exalted. Comically disappointed, I slunk through the dark-red curtains of the wardroom.

Several large electric fans revolved overhead in the wardroom. Beneath them stood two long tables covered in white cloth, while at the far end two silver vases rested upon a large mirrored cupboard. As soon as we sat down, the stewards brought our food and served us quietly yet briskly. Picking at a plate of fresh salmon, I said to S, "The stewards aboard a warship are wonderfully attentive, aren't they?" S gave some indifferent reply—"Yes," or something like it. Perhaps he thought his wife more attentive than any naval steward. The others, seated at the same table as Chief Engineer Hatta, were discussing such matters as Kobayashi Houn's art of kiai.

As a rule, the wardroom was where all officers from the executive officer down, provided they held the rank of lieutenant or above, came to eat. I consequently learned many faces on that occasion. At the same time, I discovered that the faces of seamen possess a type all their own.

II

After dinner we climbed from the upper deck to the highest deck. A handsome young sub-lieutenant appeared from somewhere and took us to the forward bridge. Nowhere else aboard allowed one to survey the whole ship, from bow to stern, at a glance. Standing outside the conning tower, we looked down fore and aft upon the vessel, which had begun to make way without our noticing. We were perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet above the deck, so the sailors and officers below looked quite small. What especially fascinated me was one little sailor standing on the sounding platform, facing the blue sea and casting into it a lead weight fastened to the end of a long line. To say merely that he cast it hardly does the performance justice. In truth, he swung the long, weighted line whistling above his head like some warrior of old wielding a chain-and-sickle, and then hurled it as far ahead as he could while the ship moved forward. Seen from above, the slender line writhed over the sea like a living thing each time he threw. The lead at its end caught the lingering daylight and flashed white like a leaping fish. Thinking, "Good heavens, that looks dangerous," I watched it alone in admiration for some time.

After seeing the interior of the conning tower and the chartroom, we returned to the middle deck. Hammocks had already been slung along the narrow passage, and many sailors lay asleep in them. Two or three were reading by the dim electric light. We all bent low and made our way almost crawling beneath the hammocks. It was then that I keenly smelled "the odor of a warship." It was not the smell of paint, nor the smell from the galley drains. Neither was it the smell of machine oil or of human sweat. Most likely it was all of these blended together—in short, "the odor of a warship." It was by no means a refined odor. As I pondered this and happened to raise my head, the cover of the book being read by one sailor suddenly appeared directly before my nose. On it were the words, "Heaven and Earth Have Feeling." For one instant I forgot the odor of the warship and fell into a strangely novelistic mood.

Even so, once we had passed beneath the hammocks and entered the bath, I felt reborn. The water had been heated from the sea and looked as blue as alum in the white porcelain tub. To borrow T's phrase, "It is so blue you feel it might dye your skin." Stretching my arms and legs in the tub, I listened to T expound upon the bathhouses of Kyoto. In return, I told him about Jakotsuyu in Asakusa. Such was the perfectly peaceful comfort with which we took our bath.

By the time we emerged, the executive officer's inspection was over. We changed into light cotton robes and returned to the wardroom. On a warship there is another meal after dinner, a late supper; that night it consisted of somen noodles. Someone offered me sake. As a lifelong abstainer, I have no judgment whatever as to whether sake is good or bad, but after two or three cups my face immediately grew hot. Then a man seated himself beside me and said, "Japan twenty years ago and Japan today are utterly different." His very agreeable face did not belong to the seaman's type, and it had turned bright red. Apparently he was discussing some national-defense plan or other.

III

I offered a suitably solemn reply—"I suppose so," or words to that effect. "Indeed they are. That is something I, sir, I can guarantee with certainty. Do you understand? With certainty, sir." With an enthusiasm incomprehensible to the sober, the man alternately filled his cup and mine and held forth at considerable length. Unfortunately, I had for some time been assailed by a drowsiness equally incomprehensible to the sober, and as I listened my replies gradually became less reliable. Our exchange somehow retained the outward form of a conversation only because I cleverly deceived his eyes and ears with answers that were neither yes nor no. Now that I know the patriot I thus deceived was Lieutenant Yamamoto, silence would be absurd, so I confess: I had not the slightest idea how Japan twenty years before differed from Japan today. To be fair, once Lieutenant Yamamoto had sobered up, he may not have understood it terribly well either.

I therefore brought the talk to a suitable close and left the wardroom with the others. Then M and I went up to the upper deck again. Outside, between the dark sky and sea, the Haruna's searchlight streamed a pale beam like the tail of a comet. Our ship was probably crossing Sagami Bay. Gripping the handrail, I peered down at the water far below, but saw nothing except the faint blue gleam of the waves. "Looking down like this rather makes you want to jump in, doesn't it?" I called. M did not answer. Instead he brought his bespectacled, nearsighted face close to mine and said, "Listen, I have made a haiku." "What sort of haiku?" "An exile weeps aboard ship through a night of cuckoos. It is about S, you see." We laughed softly, looked once more at sea and sky, and then quietly went below to sleep in our cabin.

The elevator stopped, and Chief Engineer Hatta, who had arrived before us, opened the door from outside. When I saw the boiler room through that opening, the first thing that came to mind was the opening chapter of Paradise Lost. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is not. Before us stood row upon row of terrifyingly enormous boilers, roaring like volcanoes. The passage in front of them was extremely narrow. In that cramped space, engine-room sailors blackened by soot moved busily about with green-glass goggles hanging from their necks. Some shoveled coal into the furnaces; others came pushing bins piled with it. All were bathed in the incandescent glare pouring from the furnace mouths, which cast their figures as fearsome silhouettes. Coal dust continually showered the faces of us who had stepped out of the elevator. The heat, moreover, was extraordinary. Half stupefied, I gazed across this savage spectacle of labor that scarcely seemed human.

One of the engine-room sailors lent me his green-glass goggles. When I held them to my eyes and peered into a furnace, beyond the green pane a mass of fire, like the sun melted and fallen to earth, blazed with the violence of a storm. Even my inexperienced eyes could distinguish the burning fuel oil from the burning coal. The truly unbearable thing, however, was the heat. No one could wonder that each sailor working there drank several quarts of water during a three-hour watch.

IV

Then the chief engineer came to our side and said, "This is the coal bunker." No sooner had he spoken than he suddenly vanished. Looking closely, we found in the iron plating beside us an opening barely large enough for one person to crawl through. One by one, almost scraping the floor with our bodies, we wriggled through it. A single electric lamp burned high overhead inside, leaving the place nearly as dark as night. Imagine standing at the bottom of a mine shaft and you will not be far wrong. Treading upon the loose, rolling coal, I looked up at that high lamp. Within the hazy ring of light, things like insects swarmed blackly in confusion. When one looks up at the sky on a snowy day, the snow sometimes appears black, like scattered ash—it was just like that. I soon realized that what I saw was coal dust suspended in the air. Thinking of the sailors who worked in this place, I could scarcely believe they were human beings possessed of bodies much like my own.

At that very moment I could see two or three of them shoveling coal down inside the dark bunker. They all labored in silence, as inexorably as fate. They worked like men unaware that outside there was a sea, that wind blew, and that sunlight fell. A peculiar uneasiness came over me, and before anyone else I crawled back through the entrance toward the boilers. Yet there too the same savage labor continued without respite amid the iron, coal, flame, and heat. Life upon the sea is no less painful than life upon the land.

We ascended in the elevator from the bottom of the ship to the middle deck and returned to our cabin. When I stripped off my khaki work clothes, at last I felt restored to humanity. Since morning we had done nothing but go round and round the interior of the ship: gun turrets, torpedo room, wireless room, engine room, boiler room—the mere enumeration is no easy business. Wherever we went, the air was stiflingly warm, machines worked furiously, and iron floors and rails shone with oil. For a man like me, remote from physical labor, five minutes in any such place was enough to strain the nerves. Yet throughout it all a certain thought had clung persistently to my mind—an idealistic thought of the kind that most men of my age had begun to entertain since the war in Europe. Even now, lying on the bunk in our cabin with my tired legs extended and turning the pages of the Obermann I had brought, that thought would not leave me.

What follows happened later. After dinner one evening, while I was talking with the gentlemen in the wardroom, a great shout rose from the upper deck. Wondering what it was, I climbed the hatch and found the ship's entire company massed like a black hill behind the fourth turret. Every man had his mouth wide open, singing the martial song "The Brave Sailor." The deck officer stood upon the capstan, presumably to lead them. From where I was, that officer and the naval ensign at the stern appeared black as ink above the heads of more than a thousand sailors, cut out against a cloudy sky tinged by sunset. Below, all the men sang in rough, salt-bitten voices, "No smoke can be seen, not a cloud is there..." Once again that certain thought took hold of me, for the song that ought to have sounded gallant struck my ears instead with a tragic grandeur.

I tossed Obermann aside and closed my eyes. The ship seemed to have begun to roll a little.

V

After the paymaster had shown us storerooms more than twenty feet below the waterline, and the chief medical officer had shown us the sweltering wartime treatment room, my legs were thoroughly tired. I went up to the upper deck and watched the sailors practicing judo until the chief engineer sent someone to say that I must come see him demonstrate the art of kiai.

Afterward we were invited to the junior officers' mess, and when we all arrived, the men lounging on sofas in their cotton robes rose to toast our health and S's marriage. Only lieutenants and sub-lieutenants occupied this cabin, so the place was exceedingly lively. In particular, a dark-complexioned gentleman with large eyes, a sharply raised nose, and a Kansai accent raised the level of merriment with such vigor that he reminded me of Akagi Kohei. It was this gentleman who nicknamed me Jiraiya. He claimed this was because my hair resembled a theatrical wig worn for a century-old character; yet in physiognomy he himself bore a far stronger likeness to Jiraiya than I did. This is not mere resentment on my part. One look in a mirror would have made the truth immediately apparent even to the gentleman himself.

He gave me ham, pineapple, and various other things. Between mouthfuls he kept calling me "Master Jiraiya" or something of the kind and recklessly filled my glass with beer. "Was that you who climbed the mast this morning wearing nothing but socks on your feet?" "It was. This man and I." I pointed to U. During a break in the rain that morning, he and I had climbed from the forward bridge up the mast to the fighting top. "Ah, so it was you. Climbing in socks—that is excellent. Master Jiraiya indeed!" And so it went. While conversing with this gentleman, I mixed nicotine and alcohol indiscriminately. Before long, a nagging pain began in my stomach.

The pain remained stubbornly lodged beneath the pit of my stomach even after I took my leave of the junior officers' mess. I therefore got some Jintan pills from T, chewed them, climbed into the bunk in our cabin, and went to sleep. If I remember correctly, it was that night I dreamed of a warship whose mast wore a hat.

The next morning I went up to the upper deck without eating breakfast and was astonished to find the color of the sea utterly transformed. Until the day before it had been a deep indigo, but that morning it was a beautiful verdigris green wherever I looked. A pale mist lay over everything, and from within it rounded mountains rose like bowls turned upside down. I asked the chief engineer, who happened to come by, and learned that the ship had already passed through the Bungo Channel into the Seto Inland Sea. If so, we would certainly enter the anchorage at Yu in Yamaguchi Prefecture by two or three that afternoon at the latest.

My spirits became curiously light. It was not that the mere few days of life at sea had bored me. Nevertheless, there was something pleasant in being close to land. Near a gun turret, the chief engineer and I talked about the Lotus Sutra.

Presently I raised my eyes without any particular thought and saw a yellow swallowtail butterfly alight upon the barrel of the fourteen-inch gun before me. Quite literally, my heart leapt. It was a strange start of mingled surprise and joy, though naturally no one else could have understood it. The chief engineer continued his earnest discussion of difficult points of doctrine. As for me—merely to say that I watched the butterfly would not be enough. With the butterfly I was tenderly imagining the land, the fields, people, towns, and the early summer that lay over them all.