The Flag Waver

I call this series “Just Vignettes” because that’s what they are, just short snapshots of things that have happened to me or have been told to me. I can vouch the stories you read here are mostly true.

Since the Kirk was homeported in Japan, she made frequent calls to the port of Sasebo on the southern island of Kyushu. Besides being a bustling port for commerce, it also contained a U.S. Navy base and a Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force base. Sasebo is considered one of the safest ports during a typhoon in Southeast Asia because high, tree-covered mountains surround the port and its approaches. The mountains plunged precipitously to the sea, leaving few level areas suitable for people to live until you arrived at the flat land where the city was.

High atop a distant mountain, usually veiled in a thin fog, were three giant high-frequency radio towers, the same towers that sent the message, “Climb Mount Niitaka,” giving the distant pilots the command to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. They would have also received the response, “Tora! Tora! Tora!” from the pilots, which indicated the surprise attack was successful.

On a small promontory that nearly brushed the ship as she passed by, stood a traditional Japanese home surrounded by trees. A small patch of a green garden tilted towards the Kirk, with the same scene every time the Kirk entered Sasebo Harbor.

An elderly Japanese woman with her hair in a bun and sporting a tight-lipped smile stood holding a tea tray with a tea set. She was dressed in a frumpish gingham mother Hubbard dress with a long dark blue kitchen apron. Next to her was her husband, an ancient, scrawny man who wielded a long wooden flagstaff, the butt end firmly planted in the ground. He wore nothing but a white fundoshi and sandals as he waved the large flag affixed to the top of the staff in a broad figure eight above his head. The flag was an American flag.

I was surprised the first time I saw this spectacle; then, with subsequent visits to Sasebo, it became familiar.

After transferring off the Kirk, I did not visit Sasebo for about four years. Returning on another frigate, I searched anxiously for the couple as we entered port. There was no trace of them. I never saw them after that. I could only ponder what happened to them and why the old man with the supportive wife waved the American flag so heartily. I think I will never know.