When they got to the harbor, Western buildings predominated again. They went with machinery, as they did in the railroad yards. They seemed more solid and sturdy than their Japanese equivalents. And the machinery, or the ideas behind the machinery, came from the West, too. Perhaps it was more at home in familiar structures.

Gulls wheeled and mewed overhead. They descended on fishing boats in vast skrawking clouds, hoping for a handout or a theft. The salt tang of the sea-slightly sullied by sewage-filled Shimizu’s nostrils.

He trudged up a pier toward a big merchant ship. Her name-Nagata Maru — was painted in hiragana and in Roman letters on her stern. Up the gangplank he went. His boots clanged on the iron plates of the deck. Sailors stared at him as if he were nothing but a monkey. He glared back, but only to show he wasn’t intimidated. On land, he knew what he was doing. But this was the sailors’ world. Maybe he wasn’t a monkey to them. Maybe he was just… cargo.

“This way,” Lieutenant Yonehara called, and led them down a hatch into the hold. The Nagata Maru had been a freight hauler. Now the freight she would haul was men. Double racks of rough, unsanded wood had been run up in the hold. Each one held a straw mat. They had numbers painted on them. Yonehara checked them. “My platoon goes here.” He raised his voice to make himself heard over the clatter of more soldiers marching with their hobnailed boots on the steel deck not far enough overhead.

Two of his squads got upper racks, two lowers. Corporal Shimizu and his men were assigned to uppers. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. They were right under the deck and could bang their heads if they sat up carelessly, but nobody was spilling anything on them from above.