Whoever laid out the flight paths into the sultan’s new airport must have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you’re lucky enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda flyby.
Kinakuta’s matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there’s an intermittent fringe of nearly flat land—a beige rind clinging to a giant emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the Sulu Sea for a mile or two.
Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the plane gets closer to the water, and it begins to seem as if the pilot is threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a pigeon on the wing.
Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories, some puckish but basically glowing articles in the Economist. Putting his rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about Kinakuta: one of about a million out-of-print World War II memoirs that must have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he hasn’t had time to read it, and so the two-inch stack of pages is just dead weight in his luggage.
In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of the modem Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a smoking crater, but of course it’s not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan’s new Technology City. All of the glass-walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan’s palace, which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it’s like a reddish-beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.
Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation. He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir. One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and dead center is the Sultan’s Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with his view. There’s the river. There’s Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with slave labor. There’s the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field, which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a constellation of flickering white stars—arc-welders at work.
Next to it is something that doesn’t belong: a patch of emerald green, maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there’s a placid pond toward one end—the 777 is now so low that Randy can count the lily pads—a tiny Shinto temple hewn from black stone, and a little bamboo teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to follow it, until suddenly his view is blocked by a high-rise apartment building just off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window, he gets a microsecond’s glimpse of a slender lady swinging a hatchet towards a coconut.
That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north—in Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Randy got on this plane a couple of hours ago at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself, a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan or Filipino), and everyone else Nipponese. Some of the latter looked like businessmen, traveling on their own or in twos and threes, but most belonged to some kind of an organized tour group that marched into the boarding lounge precisely forty-five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.
Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of the peculiar pointy-topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who all died on August 23, 1945.