Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [125]
All I had to do was manage my money well. After buying my plane ticket I had only a few dollars left, which, when supplemented with some donations collected during our layover in Honolulu, totaled about fifty dollars. Fortunately, fifty dollars then was like five hundred dollars today. I could get a steak dinner for twenty-five or thirty cents, and usually we were fed in Japanese homes or at communal meals with church groups. Because the army had neglected to collect my official I.D. card when I separated from the service in 1946, I could even go to the PX, where food was cheap. Sleeping accommodations were another matter. We slept where we slept, often on pads at cheap hotels. However, between the hospitality and the anticipation of my public appearances—I had no idea I’d be so well received—I slowly began to enjoy my stay.
FROM MY MANY postwar appearances I had long ago established my standard talk. I had learned to condense the story to thirty minutes because most people don’t want to listen for longer than that. Even though I’d recently made a decision for Christ, I didn’t change the content of my lecture much or load it up with the Word of God. I believed then, and still do, in going very light on Scripture, saving that for the end, and letting listeners take from my total experience what they need and what works for them.
The only difference was that I’d never told my story to a Japanese audience before, and I wondered how they’d react. Could they handle the harsh detail and my memories of hate and anger? I decided to do what I did when I spoke to the occupation troops on Okinawa: just tell the truth—about Kano, the good guard; about the Bird; about my life being spared on Kwajalein and how I’d never been able to figure out why.
Whenever I finished a talk, my group passed out tracts and pamphlets, and we were struck by the eagerness with which people accepted them. In America much of our material was tossed on the auditorium floor, left for the janitor. The Japanese discarded little.
One afternoon I was about to leave my hotel for a speech at Waseda, one of Tokyo’s biggest universities, when the school president called and said he had to cancel my appearance. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “but there’s a little trouble on campus.”
“Little trouble” was an understatement. The Communist movement was strong in postwar Japan, and over a thousand students and an equal number of policemen were at that very moment engaged in a bloody battle that lasted six hours. One hundred forty-three people were arrested, and thirty-four students and eleven policemen were injured, some critically.
I spoke at four factories instead, and three days later we decided to try Waseda again. The university president made it clear that I’d come at my own risk. “I’ll announce the event,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anyone will attend.”
The stage at Waseda was about five feet off the floor. I was preparing for the assembly when students began to arrive. Many wore bandages; they were the radicals. That frightened me, yet again I didn’t pull any punches talking about the Bird and the torture. Everyone listened politely, and when I finished the interpreter gave the invitation to become a Christian. Suddenly a sea of students surged forward, many of them wearing bandages. It occurred to me that they might not be rushing the stage to accept Jesus. I admit that even after two years in prison camp I still found it difficult to look in a Japanese face and know whether the owner is happy or mad or about to kill me.
I turned to the interpreter and said, “Hey, what do they want?”
He asked one guy with a bandaged head, turned back to me, and said, “They want to become Christians.” Our usual harvest was fifty or sixty. That night nearly three hundred renounced all other gods and ideologies, even communism. Beautiful!
TOKYO HAD BUILT a huge new civic auditorium, which held about sixteen thousand people. The