Lick your fingers.
Three words.
The messaul freezes.
47 Japanese women, hands still greasy from rice and vegetables.
Stop breathing.
Norico, 24, signals operator from Nagasaki, feels her stomach drop.
This is it.
This is what the training films promised.
The American guard is tall, blonde.
His uniform is clean.
His eyes are fixed on her hands.
She knows what comes next.
1,200 Japanese women in American custody by spring 1945.
Only 47 in this camp.
And right now, every single one is waiting for the assault to begin.
America ginwaiti noaruka surand noida.
The Americans will use our bodies.
That’s what occupation means.
That’s what Lieutenant Fujimura told them before capture.
That’s what the film showed.
Women screaming, soldiers laughing, dignity stripped away frame by frame.
Norico watched those films six times.
She memorized every scene.
She knows exactly how this ends.
The guard takes a step forward.
His boots thud against concrete.
The sound echoes.
Beside her, Tomaco, 19, field nurse captured on Saipan, starts shaking.
Her fingers are still raised, frozen midair, grease glistening under the bare bulb.
She’s the youngest in the barracks, 19 years old.
Walked 40 miles through jungle before surrender.
Now she can’t move.
The food was strange.
Meat, vegetables, white rice, actual white rice, not the moldy rations they’d eaten for months.
It smelled like home.
Tasted better than anything Norico had eaten since 1943.
But now she understands.
The food was bait.
Steam still rises from the metal trays.
The room smells like grease and fear.
That specific metallic tang that coats your tongue when your body prepares to fight or die.
Norico’s throat tightens.
The guard stops right in front of her close enough that she can smell soap on his skin.
Clean soap.
American soap.
He points not at her face, not at her body, at her hands.
Lick, he says again.
slower this time like she’s stupid.
Corporal Mitchell Hayes, 26, mess supervisor from Oklahoma, doesn’t understand why these women look terrified.
He said the same thing to every P group, Germans, Italians, everyone.
Waste nothing.
Rations are limited.
Lick your fingers.
Clean your tray.
Standard protocol.
but he doesn’t speak Japanese and the interpreter hasn’t arrived yet, so he just points again, waiting.
Noro’s fingers hover near her mouth.
Grease drips onto the tray.
The door behind Haze caks open.
Someone else is coming.
The door swings wide.
A Japanese American man steps through.
Nissi, second generation.
His uniform says US Army.
His face says something else.
Teeshi Yamamoto, 31, born in Sacramento.
Parents currently in Manzanar internment camp.
He translates for the military because the alternative was joining them behind barbed wire.
He sees the women’s faces, sees the terror, sees Hayes pointing at their hands and understands everything in two seconds.
Kiwa anatizo.
He’s not trying to hurt you.
His voice cuts through the silence, sharp, urgent.
The women don’t believe him.
He can see it in their eyes.
Why would they? He’s wearing the enemy’s uniform.
But Teeshi keeps talking faster now.
It’s a rule.
American mess halls.
You finish your food.
You clean your hands.
No waste.
That’s all he wants.
Noro stares at him.
Her brain won’t process the words.
They don’t match the training.
They don’t match the films.
They don’t match anything.
She was taught to expect.
Hayes watches the exchange, confused.
He just wanted them to finish eating.
Standard protocol.
Every P camp runs the same way.
2% food waste maximum.
Command tracks it daily.
Japanese P camps wasted 40% of rations.
Inedible, rotted, given as punishment.
Here, food is a resource, not a weapon.
She will meet the Ununo.
Why is he watching us? Tommo’s voice small, shaking.
She’s looking at Hayes, at his eyes.
They’re still fixed on the trays.
Teeshi hesitates.
The truth is simple, boring, bureaucratic.
He counts the food, reports how much is eaten.
It’s his job.
But that’s not what the women hear.
They hear, he watches, he counts, he reports.
That sounds like surveillance.
That sounds like assessment.
That sounds like selection.
Nordico’s hands are trembling now.
The grease has gone cold.
It feels like evidence.
Proof of something she can’t name.
Across the room, Cho, 27, former school teacher from Hiroshima, slowly raises her fingers to her mouth.
She licks.
Once, twice.
Her eyes never leave Hayes.
He nods.
writes something on his clipboard.
Chieo doesn’t know if she just passed a test or signed her own death warrant.
Teeshi watches her face, sees the calculation, the survival math, and realizes something that will haunt him for years.
He can translate the words, but he can’t translate the fear.
Hayes clicks his pen, turns toward the next row of women.
Noro’s fingers are still hovering.
She hasn’t moved.
Nor Rico remembers the projector, the clicking sound it made, the white sheet hung between bamboo poles.
March 1944, training camp outside Osaka.
40 women in signals corps learning to fear capture more than death.
Corga Anata Watsu Monoda.
This is what awaits you.
Lieutenant Fujimura’s voice.
Calm, educational, like she was teaching mathematics instead of manufacturing nightmares.
The film showed American soldiers laughing, drunk, and women, Chinese women, the narrator said, being dragged into buildings.
The camera cut away before the worst, but the sounds continued, screaming, then silence.
500 Japanese women killed themselves rather than face capture between 1944 and 1945.
Okinawa alone, 200 in one week.
cliffs, grenades, knives, anything to avoid what the films promised.
Noro almost joined them.
When the American patrol found her unit, she had a grenade in her hand, pin half pulled, 3 seconds from ending it.
But she hesitated.
One second of doubt.
And now she’s here, fingers covered in grease, waiting for the films to become real.
The messaul feels smaller.
The walls are pressing in.
Tomoko is crying quietly, tears sliding down her cheeks while she tries to stay invisible.
Cho’s jaw is locked so tight Noro can see the muscles straining.
Hayes moves to the next table.
Clipboard ready.
Pen clicking.
Is he writing our names? Selecting us? Aayumi, 22, factory worker from Kobe, whispers the question.
No one answers because no one knows.
The food is gone.
The trays are empty.
But the women can’t leave.
Hayes hasn’t dismissed them.
So they sit waiting, watching him watch them.
Teeshi moves between tables, explaining over and over.
It’s just food waste protocol.
Nothing more.
But his words bounce off like rain on stone.
Three months of propaganda can’t be erased in 3 minutes.
Noro finally moves slowly mechanically.
She raises her fingers, opens her mouth.
The grease tastes like salt and animal fat, like survival, like surrender.
She licks once, twice, three times until her fingers are clean.
Hayes nods, makes a mark.
Norico doesn’t feel relief.
She feels something worse.
Confusion.
The assault hasn’t started.
The violence hasn’t come.
The films were specific, detailed, inevitable.
So why is she still sitting here uncicked, untouched, untaken? That’s when the real terror begins.
Because if the films were wrong about this, what else were they wrong about? Hayes finishes his round.
47 marks on his clipboard, 47 trays cleared.
He doesn’t know he’s being studied.
Every woman in that room is tracking his movements.
when he looks up, when he looks down, when his hand moves toward his belt.
The belt, that’s where the weapon would be.
But Hayes isn’t carrying a sidearm.
Mess supervisors don’t.
He has a clipboard, a pen, and a protein bar in his pocket for later.
Watch his hands.
What is he going to do to us? Hetsuko, 34, senior nurse, oldest in the group, mutters the command.
She was trained for this.
Combat medicine triage, reading bodies for damage.
Now she’s reading haze for intent.
His body language is wrong, relaxed, shoulders loose, eyes unfocused, the look of a man thinking about his shift ending, not a predator sizing up prey.
US P camps tracked everything.
Food consumption 3,200 calories per day allocated per prisoner.
Medical checks weekly.
Weight monitoring bi-weekly.
Every number reported, every calorie counted.
Japanese soldiers ration in 1944 when available was 1,800 calories, often less.
These women were eating better as prisoners than they ever did as soldiers.
But that calculation hasn’t landed yet.
Right now, all they see is a man with a clipboard watching, writing.
Tomoko’s fingers are clean now.
She licked them while crying.
Salt from tears mixed with salt from grease.
She’s staring at her empty tray like it contains answers.
Hayes walks toward the door.
His boots echo.
Each step sounds like countdown.
Then he stops, turns.
Good job, he says.
In English, two words the women don’t understand.
Teaeshi translates yoku dekimashta.
The words hang in the air.
Praise.
Actual praise for eating.
Etso’s medical training kicks in.
She’s seen this before in psychiatric wards.
Patients rewarded for basic functions.
Eating, bathing, compliance.
Is that what this is? Conditioning.
But Hayes is already gone.
Door closed.
Footsteps fading, the women sit in silence, trays empty, fingers clean, and a question nobody can answer.
What happens now? In Japanese camps, empty trays meant permission to leave.
Then work detail.
16 hours, no breaks, guards with bayonets.
Here, nothing happens.
The door stays open.
No guards rush in.
Noro stands.
Her legs shake.
She takes one step toward the door.
No one stops her.
That’s when Cho says it.
The thing everyone is thinking.
Maybe everything they told us was wrong.
Satsuko won’t lick.
20 years old.
Imperial Army radio operator captured because her unit ran out of ammunition, not courage.
She sat through the entire meal with her fingers curled into fists.
The grease dried on her skin, hardened.
Evidence of resistance.
Wakuku.
To obey is to surrender.
That’s what she whispers when Noro asks her why.
Her jaw is set.
Her eyes are fixed on the door where Hayes left.
97% of Japanese soldiers chose death over surrender in early Pacific campaigns.
Bushidto code.
Imperial honor.
The propaganda wasn’t just words.
It was meep programming.
Setsuko absorbed every lesson.
Tomoko tries to reason with her.
He didn’t hurt us.
He just wanted us to finish.
That’s what they want you to think.
Setsuko’s voice is flat, cold.
The voice of someone who’s already decided what reality looks like and won’t let evidence change it.
The messaul empties.
Other women drift toward the barracks.
Noro stays.
So does Teeshi.
He’s supposed to report to command, but something holds him here.
You don’t have to lick, he says in Japanese.
It’s not required, just encouraged.
Satsuko stares at him at the uniform, at the face that looks like hers, but serves the enemy.
Anati no wrai, you betrayed our side.
Teeshi doesn’t flinch.
He’s heard it before from his own parents in letters smuggled from Manzanar, from Japanese PS who see him as proof that blood means nothing.
I’m trying to help you understand.
I understand perfectly.
Setsuko stands.
Her fingers are still greasy.
She walks to the corner of the mess hall, wipes her hands on the wooden wall deliberately, slowly staring at Teeshi the entire time.
Then she leaves.
Norico watches her go, feels something shift in her chest.
Admiration, fear, confusion.
Will she be punished? She asks Teeshi.
He shakes his head up.
For what? Wiping her hands on a wall.
That’s the part that doesn’t compute.
In the Imperial Army, defiance meant beatings.
Public humiliation.
Sometimes worse.
Here, defiance means nothing.
A woman refuses to lick her fingers and the world continues spinning.
That’s more terrifying than punishment.
Because if there are no consequences for resistance, then what is this place? Noro looks at her own hands clean now, licked clean.
She’s not sure if she made the right choice.
That night, Setsco sleeps with her back to the room and her fingers still unwashed.
Morning, a new poster on the Messaul wall.
Cartoon American soldier smiling, holding an empty plate, tongue out, licking.
Two words in English, clean plate club.
Below it, Japanese translation in handwritten characters.
Teeshi’s handwriting.
He was up until midnight making it.
Noro stares at the poster for a full minute.
Her brain refuses to process what she’s seeing.
Corwa Judan, is this a joke? In the Imperial Army, messaul signs meant one thing, regulations, violations, consequences.
Clean your plate would be followed by orfaced discipline.
This poster has a cartoon, a smiling cartoon.
Miyuki, 23, former factory clerk from Yokohama, starts laughing just once.
A sharp sound quickly cut off.
She covers her mouth like she’s committed a crime, but nobody punishes her.
US military food waste reduction campaigns saved 2.
1 million tons annually by 1944.
Enough to feed 8 million soldiers for a month.
The program was called Food Fights for Freedom.
They made it cheerful.
Tomo approaches the poster, touches it.
The paper is thin, standard military issue.
Nothing special.
They’re not mocking us, Teeshi says.
He’s standing in the corner watching the women’s reactions.
This is how they communicate.
Everything is positive.
Setsuko snorts.
She hasn’t entered the messaul yet.
She’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed.
Positive, she repeats.
Like the word is poison.
Edsuko, the senior nurse, examines the poster with clinical detachment.
Propaganda, she concludes, different flavor, same purpose.
That lands.
The women understand propaganda.
They lived inside it for years.
Japanese, American, same machinery, different messages.
But there’s a crack now, a small one.
Because Japanese propaganda never used cartoons, never used smiles, never used encouragement, fear, duty, death before dishonor.
Those were the tools.
Here they’re being asked to clean their plates with a wink.
Eraanani to Tatakata Ununo.
If this is their method of fighting, what are they fighting for? Noro asks the question out loud.
Nobody answers.
The breakfast line forms rice.
Eggs.
Actual eggs.
Fresh, not powdered.
Coffee.
That smells real.
Norico takes her tray, sits, eats.
When she finishes, her fingers are greasy again.
She looks at the poster, at the cartoon soldier’s ridiculous smile.
Then she licks her fingers, not because she’s ordered to, not because she’s afraid, because something inside her is starting to wonder.
And wondering feels like the first step towards something she can’t name yet.
Day five.
No assaults, no selections, no punishments.
Nor Rico tracks the pattern.
Meals at 700, 1200, 1,800.
Same food, same guard.
Haze with his clipboard.
Same routine.
She’s waiting for the pattern to break for the mask to slip.
Common witsu o.
When does the mask fall? She whispers it to cheek during dinner.
Cheek doesn’t answer.
She’s too busy eating her third meal in a row without shaking.
14 days.
That’s the average.
14 days for PS to show repatriation anxiety.
fear of returning home because captivity was better than service.
These women are on day five already.
Small things are changing.
Tomoko asked for seconds yesterday.
Wasn’t punished.
Miyuki left the mess hall before official dismissal.
Nobody noticed.
Each tiny act of freedom is a test.
Each pass test cracks the propaganda further.
Setsuko still won’t lick.
She’s eaten every meal, but her fingers stay greasy until she reaches the barracks and washes them in the basin alone in silence.
Her resistance is costing her.
The other women have started avoiding her, but Norico watches and wonders, “Is Satsuko the only sane one?” Hayes enters for the evening round.
Clipboard ready, pen clicking.
That’s what Sitsuko believes.
He’s selecting us.
For what? She never says.
The films never specified the timeline, just the inevitability.
But day five becomes day six.
Day six becomes seven.
And nothing happens.
Etso, the senior nurse, makes an observation during washing hour.
If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it already.
Waiting serves no purpose.
Medical logic.
Cold, clean, correct.
But logic doesn’t erase the films.
Logic doesn’t unwatch the screaming women on that white sheet in Osaka.
Nor Rico lies awake that night staring at the wooden ceiling.
If the assault isn’t coming, if the films were lies, then what did those 500 women die for? What did her hand on that grenade pin almost accomplish? Moshi subete gauo data.
if it was all lies.
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
Can’t finish it.
Because finishing it means admitting something too large to hold.
That her country fed her nightmares disguised as training.
That her leaders chose her fear over her life.
That the cliff jumpers on Okinawa died for fiction.
She pulls her blanket tighter, American issue wool, warmer than anything she had in the Imperial Army, and doesn’t sleep for hours.
Fumi gets a letter.
Red Cross delivery Japanese postmark.
She opens it at the messaul table.
Hands shaking.
The other women pretend not to watch, but everyone watches.
Kayat Kuruna keshite.
Don’t come back ever.
Five words from her husband’s mother.
Written on rice paper informal script, the kind used for official documents or disownment.
Fumi, 33, former officer’s wife, married at 19, reads the letter three times.
Her face doesn’t change.
She’s been trained for this, too.
Officer’s wives don’t show emotion in public, but her hands keep shaking.
Postwar Japan’s shame culture was precise, surgical.
Women who survived capture were damaged goods whether assault occurred or not.
The fact of capture was the violation.
60% of repatriated female PS faced family rejection.
Divorce rate 85%.
Survival was the crime.
Fumi folds the letter, puts it in her pocket, finishes her rice.
Then she does something that stops every woman in the room.
She asks for seconds.
Motto kurasai.
The server, a private from Texas who doesn’t understand Japanese, looks at her empty tray, nods, and refills it.
Fumi eats slowly, deliberately, every grain.
When she finishes, she raises her fingers to her mouth.
The other women hold their breath.
She licks once, twice, slowly, thoroughly, making eye contact with no one and everyone.
Then she stands, walks to the door, pauses.
They told me I have no home.
So this is my home now.
She leaves.
Noro feels something crack in her chest.
Not sadness exactly.
Something bigger.
Fumi has nowhere to go.
Japan rejected her before she even arrived.
But here in this camp, with these guards, with this food, she’s eating better than she has in years, being treated better than her own army treated her.
The math is ugly, but it’s real.
Hayes enters for his evening count, clipboard ready.
He doesn’t know what just happened.
Doesn’t know the letter exists.
Doesn’t know he’s running a camp that some prisoners would choose over home.
He just counts trays, makes marks, nods at the clean plates.
Yoku deashta, good job.
The words feel different now.
Not conditioning, not surveillance.
Maybe, maybe, just routine.
Tommo looks at her own fingers.
Still greasy.
She hasn’t licked yet today.
She thinks about Fumi, about the letter, about what home means when home doesn’t want you.
Then she licks and it doesn’t feel like surrender anymore.
Cho tells Naro the truth.
Night barracks, everyone else asleep.
Noimoto Okinawa.
My sister was on Okinawa.
Noro doesn’t respond, just listens.
She was a nurse like me.
When the Americans came, she had two choices.
Surrender or die.
Cho’s voice is flat.
The flatness of someone who’s told this story to herself a thousand times.
She chose the cliff.
Okinawa civilian suicides, 10,000 in the final weeks.
Women, children, elderly, entire families walking into the sea or jumping from heights.
The uh Imperial Army encouraged it, distributed grenades, called it honor.
Watashi wokubat imuto yukandata.
I was a coward.
My sister was brave.
Norico shakes her head.
You’re alive.
Is that better? The question hangs in the dark.
Unanswerable.
Cho’s hands are trembling.
She’s been holding this since capture.
The weight of being the one who hesitated.
Every time I lick my fingers, she says, “I think she died so she wouldn’t have to do this.
And I’m doing it three times a day.
” Noro reaches out, takes Cho’s hand, holds it.
Your sister died for lies.
You’re living for truth.
The words come out before Noro knows what she’s saying.
But once they’re out, she can’t take them back.
Cho stares at her, eyes wet, something shifting behind them.
What if I can’t live with that? What if knowing the truth is worse? Noro doesn’t have an answer.
There isn’t one.
Some burdens don’t get lighter.
They just become familiar.
Setsuko is listening.
She hasn’t said anything, but Norico can tell by her breathing.
Too shallow, too controlled.
She lost someone, too.
Everyone in this room lost someone.
And every one of those losses was built on propaganda.
Hayes doesn’t know about the cliffs, the suicides, the lies.
He’s asleep in his barracks, dreaming about Oklahoma, about a girl named Dorothy, about wheat fields and sunsets.
He’ll wake up tomorrow and count trays again.
And these women will sit in that messaul eating better than they have in years, licking their fingers clean, living with the truth.
They’re dead.
Never got to learn.
Noro squeezes Cho’s hand.
Tomorrow we eat again.
That’s all we can do.
Outside the Pacific wind rattles the barracks walls.
Inside 47 women carry 10,000 ghosts.
Final meal.
Same mesh hall.
Same trays.
Same guard.
But nothing is the same.
Norico finishes her rice, looks at her fingers.
Grease glistens under the bare bulb.
evidence of food, of survival, of choosing to live when everything told her not to.
Namaruka namarika, to lick or not to lick.
3 weeks ago, those words would have meant submission, violation.
Proof that the Americans had broken her.
Now they mean something else.
She raises her fingers, opens her mouth, licks.
Not because Hayes is watching, not because the clipboard demands it, because she chooses to.
Hayes nods, makes his mark, closes the clipboard.
Good job, he says.
Same words, same tone.
He’ll say it again tomorrow to a different group.
It means nothing to him.
But to Naro, those two words translated by Teeshi, heard across a gulf of language and war are proof.
Proof that what she was told would kill her, kept her alive.
I thought the enemy would consume me.
They fed me instead.
6 months later, Norico works in a US military hospital in Yokohama.
Translator: Bridgeween Worlds.
She keeps a metal tray on her desk, dented, scratched.
The same one she ate from that first night.
1,200 Japanese women PS by war’s end.
98% survived American custody.
Zero documented assaults.
More than half faced rejection when they returned home.
The enemy treated them better than their own country.
Setsuko never did lick her fingers.
She washed them in the barracks basin every night until repatriation.
When she returned to Japan, she wrote a letter to Norico.
demo.
You were right, but I couldn’t comply.
That was my way of surviving.
Both paths led to the same place alive.
Tommo became a teacher.
Cho opened a clinic, treated everyone, especially Americans.
Fumi never went home.
She stayed in Okinawa near the cliffs near her family who would never speak to her again.
She planted flowers there every spring.
Three words nearly broke them.
Yubi wo nomero.
Lick your fingers.
But what those words meant, waste nothing, survive everything, became something no propaganda could touch.
Noro looks at the tray on her desk 40 years later, still greasy in her memory.
Sora Shinjjitsu no Shuko data.
It was proof of truth that what we fear most is sometimes just a man with a clipboard doing his
