03/06/2026
They had tried to kill each other once.
Not personally. Not face to face. But in the same jungle, in the same months, on opposite sides of a line that the war had drawn through the Pacific and through everything else.
Ron Pickering was nineteen when he shipped out with the 2nd New Zealand Division in 1943. Kenji Murakami was twenty-one when his unit moved into the same theatre from the north. They did not meet in the jungle. They met fifty-three years later in a RSA in Levin, introduced by a woman named Margaret who ran the local historical society and had no idea what she was setting in motion.
Kenji had come to New Zealand with his daughter, who had married a man from Palmerston North. He had not planned to visit the RSA. His daughter thought it might be good for him to meet other men of his generation. She did not think carefully about which generation of which war.
Ron was there every Thursday. Had been for forty years.
The introduction was awkward. Margaret said their names. Both men looked at each other for a moment that lasted longer than it should have. Ron put out his hand first. Kenji took it.
They sat down.
They did not speak much that first afternoon. Kenji's English was careful and considered. Ron's hearing was going. They drank tea. They watched the lawn bowls through the window. When Kenji left, he bowed slightly. Ron nodded.
Ron told his wife that evening that he wasn't sure how he felt. She told him that was probably the right way to feel.
He went back the following Thursday. Kenji was there again.
It went on like that.
By the third month, they were talking. Not about the war — not yet — but around it, the way you walk around a thing that is too large to approach directly. They talked about their children. About the price of things. About how the world had accelerated past both of them in ways they found tiring.
The war came up eventually. It came up quietly, without drama, the way difficult things sometimes do between men who have learned to be patient.
Neither of them glamourised it. Neither of them minimised it. They had both lost people. They named the people. They sat with the names.
Ron said once that he had spent forty years not thinking about the Japanese soldiers as men. He said this plainly, without defensiveness. He said Kenji had made that harder to sustain.
Kenji said he understood. He said the same had been true in reverse.
Kenji returned to Japan in 1998. They wrote letters. Ron's daughter helped him type them when his hands got bad. Kenji's daughter translated. The letters were not dramatic. They were ordinary — the weather, the grandchildren, the garden, the slow progress of old age.
Ron died in 2003. His family found Kenji's letters in a shoebox under the bed, tied with a piece of string.
Kenji died fourteen months later.
Neither man ever described what they had as a friendship. They didn't use the word. They didn't need to.
Some reconciliations don't announce themselves. They just show up on a Thursday and drink tea.
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