KB-BP

Mary Kay, she does skin. Cosmetics. Fixes people up, makes them look good, and gives them confidence.

Captain 'Kandy', Kay Nogami, she did just the opposite. You wouldn't have wanted her near your skin. She wouldn't have been making you look too good. She'd probably have destroyed your confidence while making you beg.

They say she could do pain. Her work was serving up pain for the dreaded kenpeitai.

I do not know what happened to Kay. Her face was one of more than eighty million. It revolved in my consciousness for a while, then gradually receded until finally I saw her no more. She was just one of the people you meet in a business like mine.

When asked if she had tortured any of the prisoners, she denied it.

And even if I were guilty, your American intelligence officers aren't smart enough to prove it.

Keyes said she liked the Americans. And knew who was going to win. So, she passed off 'gifts' to the men. Stuff like soap, cigarettes, chocolate... sweets.

 

Want some candy? 

But one of those little men did something stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Then, one day, one of the guards found some candy on one of the prisoners. When he refused to tell where he got it the guard beat him up. The he told the guard that I had given him the candy. A stupid man! I was called to the prison for an explanation, of course. I denied everything. When I was confronted by the prisoner I flew into terrific rage and beat him up again.

You see, I had to; otherwise he would have destroyed my usefulness to the other prisoners.

Keyes said she had connections, after the war. And that she knew everybody on both sides of the law, the rule makers, the rule breakers, a well as the muscle in between. Ended up as kind of a nanny, Mary Poppins-like. Began to run the show.

I always knew when he was going to call on his Japanese mistress because he always took along his swagger stick.

 Homer modeling a 'swagger stick'

It made him feel superior.

 At the end of the war, when Hiroshima was the first to get hit,  the government of Japan kind of didn't know what was going on. But she did. She knew exactly what it was.

I was listening to the short-wave radio broadcasts from America.

Keyes thought that was not allowed, but she explained to him:

It was [prohibited]. But I knew an American GI at Camp Omori who had a short-wave set and we heard President Truman's announcement.

Keyes couldn't figure out how the POW had access to a set. If there were any airmen there, maybe a navigator like Bill Dixon, they probably would have known how to build something like this:

He builds boxes.

Making things make things.

The material or 'quotes' for this post come from pages 77 and 78, from here.

  Sweet stuff from right here.

Homer's mention/inclusion in the blog is mainly because he's holding a swagger stick. He is not the individual our Kandy Kay refers to. Homer was kind of bad-ass and probably didn't need any kind of prop whatsoever.