My Grandfather Worked on a Haunted Japanese Film Set - [Part 1]
EXTERIOR. HIROSHIMA, JAPAN. 1945. DAY
A breeze of black smoke rises from below to fill a colourless sky in front of us. A distant military airplane hums across, coinciding with the action on the ground: the sound of slow-moving vehicles, shovels piercing earth, metal that bends and clamours.
On the ground: Japanese civilians lay forward on their knees amongst the scorched earth and building sediments, bowed in despair. An armoured bulldozer is manoeuvred to claw up rubble, creating a huge rubble mound.
Around this mound, six United States soldiers dig up heaps of the aftermath to help build it up, causing ash to spray the air around them.
Among these soldier’s is a young man, no older than 20. His weathered green uniform reads U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps). He shovels alongside the others, yet seems to be somewhere else - even worse than here. He digs and dumps like a machine.
The young man then stops. Shovel in the earth, he turns up to watch the fly-sized plane hum away, seeming to know its destination – before his attention turns to the giant scorched chess piece around him: the nearby empty souls, the Genbaku Dome the only thing erect in the distance, alongside the surrounding smoke. The young man now focuses beyond this, to the faraway mountainous hills. He zones out...
The peak of the rubble mound then collapses behind him, causing the other soldiers to jilt back from it. The young man turns back to the mound, to what the peak now reveals. His face displays both horror and uncertainty in what he sees, as the sound of wind gusts through him...
What you have just read is an excerpt from an old war movie script, written and based on his experience during the Pacific War, by James Howard Schraeder. My grandfather.
In 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War, James Schraeder was drafted to the twenty-third regiment of the fourth marine division, where he eventually experienced combat on the Pacific islands of Kwajalein, Saipan and Iwo Jima. After the end of the Pacific Theatre in 1945, James would spend the next seven years in Japan, serving under U.S. occupation.
By 1952 and having been in the military for nearly ten years, James finally left Japan and came home. For the next few years of his life, James would live and work in Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. By 1992, the year of his death, James left behind an ex-wife, an estranged son, and three grandchildren he never met.
Before my grandfather’s demise, he would leave a final letter among his possessions. A letter written and addressed to my father - his son. Although my father already knew about his experience during the Pacific War, along with the horrors he witnessed, he knew little to nothing about my grandfather’s time serving during the occupation of Japan. That was, until he found my grandfather’s letter. Despite the very real and human horrors my grandfather saw in the Pacific... what he would then experience on Japanese soil, supposedly during a time of peace, was not only horror... but horror of the paranormal.
What you are about to read, should you choose to, is this very same letter. A letter, that is less the final words of a dying old man... but a final confession...
To my son Johnathon,
I know it has been some years now since we last spoke. And I know any attempt by me to communicate with you will be ignored, and so that’s why I’m writing this letter for you to find. Upon my death.
I’m not writing this to apologize for the terrible father I was to you, nor for the indecent husband your mother had to bear. I’m writing this to tell you a story I have never told another soul. You are my son, and you may remember me for the monster I became, but you will never know me for the decent man I was, nor what it was that made that man the monster you know now. You may think it was the war. That the death and destruction I witnessed at the hands of the enemy, and even our own is what left me the shell of a man who raised you. And that is true. Very little of me had survived those brutal few years of fighting. But if you must know, it wasn’t the war with the Japanese that made me the man I became. On the contrary, it was what came after.
I have never told you this part of my life, Johnathon, nor did I ever think I would. I have seen the worst of humanity. I have seen the evil and horrors we partake upon those who are not alike ourselves... and I have seen what it creates. What it feeds and gives power to. I have told you every horror story I know from that war. But I have never told you this.
Back in 52, I was serving my seventh year during the occupation of the Japanese islands. I had known seven years without war, but no peace. Our authority over the Japanese people was shortly coming to a close, and so we had to make sure our influence in this country would carry on long after we were gone. You have to understand, son, the world back then was still a very fragile place. The war may have been over, but old enemies were quickly replaced by new ones.
The threat of communism was very real, and nowhere was it more real than east and south-east Asia. The commies in China had spread their influence south to Korea and Indo China – or what you would come to know as Vietnam. Before we left Japan to once again govern themselves, we needed to make sure the communist threat would not find its way here. For seven years after Hiroshima, we told the Japanese how they should live. What they could read or not read. What they could and couldn’t listen to. What they could and couldn’t watch.
I’ve always been a lover of movies. You know that. Whereas we Americans had our cowboys and Indians, the Japanese had their Jidaigeki. Period movies portraying feudalist Japan. Once Japan came under our occupation, Mccarthur put a permanent ban on Jidaigeki movies from being made. It was supposed to be a way of stripping the Japanese of their identity and history. But by 52, and with our eventual departure on the horizon, the ban on Japanese period films had finally been lifted. Although Japanese filmmakers could once again make movies about their nation’s history, we now feared what messages they may put in them. If they wanted to put a message of Japanese nationalism, that was of no such concern. But it was the message of socialism that my superiors truly feared the most.
In order to counter this fear, American operatives were to keep a close eye on the production of these pictures. I was among these operatives. My mission, assigned to me by Far East Command themselves, was to oversee the production of a picture being filmed in the Izu Peninsula, roughly 90 miles southwest of Tokyo base. My orders were to report any signs of socialist or anti-American allegories present in the picture's production, however minimal.
The picture assigned to me was called Rōnin no Tani, or in English, Valley of the Ronin. The plot was pretty straightforward. A small village during the Tokugawa period comes under constant attacks by bandits and criminals, whereby the villagers must turn to a masterless Samurai to train them in the art of combat.
The director of the picture was a man called Takumi Hasegawa, or as everyone else called him, Hase-san. I just simply called him Mr Hasegawa. Mr Hasegawa was one of the most prominent directors in Japan, and his previous film received much praise from several international film festivals. Although Mr Hasegawa knew all too well why I was present during the production of his movie, the man seemed to take a very keen liking to me. I think what it came down to was that we both had a shared love for wild westerns. He even claimed the script to Valley of the Ronin was his own reimagining of the western trope.
After arriving in the peninsula, I was then transported to the Tagata District, where lied a beautiful lush green valley. This is where the majority of the movie was being filmed. Each side of the valley was enclosed by a forested, very steep mountainous slope, where in the middle of the valley, was the movie set. A 16***^(th) century Tokugawa village of straw-rood huts and mud paths had been constructed, along with several rice paddies and a rickety wooden bridge over a stream. The first time I saw it, I’ll never forget. It genuinely felt to me as though I had been transported back through history, to a time of simple and honest living. Most of the actors playing the role of villagers wore ragged pieces of cloth, straw hats and nothing on their feet. The man playing the Ronin, I forget the actor’s name, wore a long dirty kimono where his sword hung out the side.
Among the actors and extras in authentic 16***^(th) century clothing were the rest of the film crew. Of course, there was Mr Hasegawa, but then there was the assistant directors, the sound and cameramen etc. I actually became good friends with the third assistant director on the picture, a young man called Benjiro – but I called him Ben for short. You know, son, the first time I ever saw Godzilla was with him inside a Tokyo movie theatre.
As idyllic as I appear to be making this valley and the production sound, I’m afraid this is where it must end. Because what follows, for the next year of this picture’s production... was nothing short of horror.
The movie began filming in the summer of 52, and the heat that year was nothing less than scalding. After only two weeks of filming, the thatched roofs of the village huts caught fire mid-day, and before long, the entire set had become ablaze. We were able to put out the fire, but by the time we did, the entire set, built painstakingly from scratch had been burnt to ash. What used to be a 16***^(th) century village, lying peacefully between the slopes of the valley, was now the charcoaled remnants of foundations. The scene of this for me was to say the least... haunting.
I’ve already told you about my time in Hiroshima, haven’t I, son? Well, once the bomb was dropped, myself and other marines were there at ground level. Our job was to help clear up the mess and provide aid to civilians... and let me tell you, the scenes I witnessed there have stayed with me my entire life. The black, charcoaled rubble of the buildings. The bodies we pulled out from under them, stiff and burnt to a crisp. Women and children. Babies. All the horrors I witnessed in those days, in what used to be a city, were swiftly brought back by the burning of this village. But it wasn’t just the burnt thatch roof huts. It wasn’t just the smell of smoke and charcoal that burns your eyes and down your throat... it was the bodies there too.
Once we put the fire out, two men from the film crew were later reported to be missing. After searching all over the valley, we eventually found them. Or I should say, we found the bodies. One we had pulled out from beneath the burnt stacks of rubble. But the other one... The other one was different. We found him inside one of the burnt huts that was somehow still standing. He was sat down in there, right there in the middle of the room. But what was so horrifically strange about this was... like the bodies I saw at Hiroshima, this man, sat crossed-legged and upright like the Buddha himself ... was completely black and burnt to a crisp. The way this man’s body was positioned, it was as though he had no idea he was in the middle of a burning room.
Did you know, son, Godzilla was an allegory for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I did. I knew it as soon as I saw it. A giant radioactive monster laying waste to the streets of Tokyo. When I walked out of that movie theatre and Benjiro followed me, I throttled him! Just because he said we should see the movie.
I wish I could say the fire was the only incident which happened during the production of Valley of the Ronin. That those crewmen were the only casualties we had. But I would be lying to you, son... and I would be lying to myself.
Weeks later, after the village was reconstructed and filming once again began, it didn’t take long for more strange things to keep happening. Like the two crewmen we found after the fire, more people on set started disappearing. Members of the crew, some extras and even a handful of actors. We found some of them in the forest, upon the mountain slopes. The first of which was a woman, wearing the ragged clothes of a villager. Except she hadn’t gotten lost. If she had done, all she needed to do was wander down the slope. No, she had just gone mad. Delirious. When we found her, she was digging up dirt from the ground with her bare hands. Her fingernails left bloody and out of place. Once she saw us approach, she turned up her head and just started laughing, as though she was playing a practical joke. But then, she starts clawing up the loose pieces of earth and stuffing it into her mouth, chewing down on it. The woman had somehow lost her damned mind.
We found some more of the crew like that in the forest. Some stark naked and crazy. Some just the latter. But the ones we didn’t find like that were a whole lot worse. The way we found them... they may have gone crazy, but we couldn’t know entirely for sure. We found them laying face-down on the sloping ground. Every single of them. A leg or an arm contorted in the air. In some cases, both. We found them that way because they had jumped from an incredible height. For whatever reason, these members of the crew had climbed up a tree to as high they could... and then they jumped. The branches seemed to do little to break their fall.
I’m sure you remember what I told you about Saipan in 44. God, how could anybody forget? You remember the women who threw their infants off the northern cliffs, don’t you? If the Japanese hadn’t lied about what we’d do to them once we took the island, a whole lot of innocent lives could’ve been spared. The way one of those ladies looked at me, and once she realized we meant her nor her baby no harm... I swear to God, it was the same look in her eye the woman we found in the forest had... Where there was once sanity and reason, only madness was left.