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While saying it he shook with laughter and Bono looked at him in a friendly way. After the third helping of sashimi and a sufficient quantity of hot Saki I was in a euphoric mood and kept on ordering ginger, which earned me the name Ginger Sun, which the chef relentlessly repeated with laughter at every serve. Then Kasimir fell silent for a moment and said quietly to me:
“Now I’ll show you how vivid the memories of the war are and how easy it is to manipulate the Japanese.”
Having said that, he stood up from the bar stool with an uplifted glass full of Saki, walked to the middle of the room, clicked his heels together, and said in a loud baritone voice:
“Yamamoto!!”
To my astonishment everyone present stood up with filled glasses and each one repeated loud and clear,
“Yamamoto!!”
And they emptied their glasses with one draught. A toast for a dead hero, Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbour, hated in America and honored in Japan. He did not experience Japan’s inglorious end as he died in 1943. I felt at that moment that the strategic alliance of Japan and the US was based on feet of clay, similarly the much too openly proclaimed demilitarization of Japan. The future would bring changes; the Japanese measured time in another way than Europeans or Americans and they had long memories. In their hearts the fire of revenge was glowing. After yet more Saki we left the place in the early hours of the morning. Kasimir sat at the steering wheel of his monstrous Chrysler Suburban, which demanded a bit of an effort to get into. To my surprise Kass grabbed a baseball bat from behind the seat and placed it on the centre console.
“You never know what happens at this time of night,”
He said succinctly. Then he set off in the direction of Highway 278, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and ... took the exit in the wrong direction that took us straight into the centre of Brooklyn instead of Queens. We did not want to go that way. A white man, who has had something to drink does not belong to Brooklyn at 1.30 a.m. The night was the time for the junkies, drug dealers and dark figures of all types that stick to your heels and you cannot attribute good intentions to them. Robbery and murder were frequently the result. When Kasimir became aware of his mistake he took the next exit at high speed.
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