“Are We Meant to… Ride This?” Japanese Women POWs Stunned by the Department Store Escalator
The Moving Stairs
December 5th, 1944
Brock’s Department Store, Omaha, Nebraska
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.
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The air inside the building was wrong.
Hana Ishi noticed it the moment the steel door closed behind them. It was warm, dry, and layered with scents that did not belong together: beeswax polish, cedarwood, and the faint sweetness of lavender. It was the smell of a place untouched by hunger. Untouched by fear.
The silence was heavy, deeper than the barracks at night. It hummed faintly, a low metallic vibration that seemed to come from the bones of the building itself.
Hana tightened her grip on Yuki’s arm and drew the younger woman half a step behind her as Corporal Evans stood holding the door open. He was too young for his uniform, his jacket hanging awkwardly from narrow shoulders. He gestured impatiently with his chin.
“He means now,” Yuki whispered in Japanese, her eyes fixed ahead.
Hana followed her gaze and felt her breath catch.
The stairs were moving.
They rose from the polished marble floor like a river of steel, step after step appearing from nowhere and gliding upward into darkness. The metal gleamed beneath the work lights, each grooved plate interlocking with the next in a seamless, endless motion.
Ugoku kaidan, Hana thought. Moving stairs.
She had never seen such a thing outside of rumor and rumor had always exaggerated. This did not feel exaggerated. It felt precise. Deliberate.
“Are we meant to ride this?” Yuki whispered.
Hana swallowed. “Daijōbu,” she said quietly. “It is only metal.”
Her heart did not believe her.
Six weeks earlier
Camp Alliance, Nebraska
The bus brakes hissed like a wounded animal, releasing a cloud of steam into the frozen October air. Hana pressed her forehead against the vibrating glass and stared out at the flatness that had defined the last three days of travel.
Sky. Earth. Fence.
The wire was new, stretched tight between thick wooden posts. It caught the pale afternoon light and gleamed faintly, as if proud of itself.
“Everyone out. Hayaku.”
The guard barked the Japanese word, his accent blunting its edge. The women moved stiffly, bodies aching from cramped benches and fear held too long. Hana kept one hand on Yuki’s back, guiding her gently. At nineteen, Yuki was the youngest among them, formerly a nursing assistant in Manila. Her hands trembled, not from the cold alone.
They had whispered stories in the dark holds of transport ships. Stories of American cruelty, of monsters who laughed at suffering. Hana had listened but never repeated them. Fear, she believed, traveled fastest when given a voice.
They were marched into a long, low building that smelled of lye soap and boiled potatoes. On the wall hung a sign printed in English and, surprisingly, in precise Japanese.
NOTICE TO CIVILIAN INTERNEES
ALL PROCEDURES GOVERNED BY THE GENEVA CONVENTION, 1929
Hana read the Japanese aloud for the women who could not. It spoke of inspections, correspondence, rights. It sounded like a fantasy written by someone who had never held a rifle.
A freckled soldier, barely older than Yuki, processed their names from a list. His pencil moved slowly. He did not look up.
This, Hana thought, was the true enemy. Not hatred. Indifference.
The inspection was brief. A stern army nurse focused more on delousing powder than faces. Then supplies were issued. An older guard manned the cage, tossing items onto the counter.
Two gray shifts. Soap. A thin towel.
When Hana stepped forward, he threw the items toward her. She flinched, expecting a curse or worse. Nothing followed.
The guard looked at Yuki, who was shaking visibly, teeth chattering. He sighed, deeply bored, and grabbed an extra wool blanket from the stack behind him. He tossed it onto the pile.
“Take it,” he grunted.
Hana froze. Extra meant nothing in camp life. Extra was dangerous. She reached for the blankets slowly. They smelled sharply of lye soap and cleanliness.
That night, Yuki cried silently into the wool. Hana lay awake, staring at the wooden slats above her bunk.
The propaganda had promised devils. Instead, there was monotony. And a blanket that was heavy, rough, and warm.
She had prepared herself for brutality. She had not prepared for this unsettling neutrality.
The days blurred.
Camp Alliance operated on bells and whistles. Wake. Roll call. Watery oatmeal. Cleaning. Soup. Laundry. Stew. Roll call. Sleep.
The Geneva Convention, Hana learned, did not prevent suffering. It organized it.
Then one morning in early December, the routine broke.
A sergeant entered the mess hall with Mr. Okabe, a Japanese American interpreter whose voice carried neither warmth nor cruelty. A notice was pinned to the board.
“Approved work detail,” Mr. Okabe translated flatly. “Voluntary. Paid labor.”
The word landed heavily.
“What work?” asked Chiyo, a former teacher from Guam.
“General labor.”
Whispers erupted. Factory work. Munitions. A trick.
“The Geneva Convention requires specificity,” Hana said, standing. “What is the labor?”
The sergeant spat into a can and muttered.
“Cleaning,” Mr. Okabe finally said. “A department store in Omaha. After hours.”
The room fell silent.
A store.
It was absurd enough to be believable.
“I will go,” Hana said.
Yuki stood immediately. “I will go too.”
Six others followed.
Chiyo caught Hana’s arm as they left. “They are showing you what you have lost,” she warned. “To break you.”
Hana pulled her thin coat tighter. “My spirit is already worn thin,” she said. “Perhaps it needs something new.”
The bus was gray and rattled like old bones. Corporal Evans counted them, rifle held awkwardly.
“No talking. Sit away from the windows.”
For twenty minutes they rode through darkness. Then lights appeared. Omaha glowed dimly, neon signs buzzing softly. Civilians walked the streets, bundled and unhurried.
At a stoplight, factory workers stared. One pointed. No one spoke.
Yuki shrank against Hana.
On the floor lay a wadded newspaper. Hana read the headline: Why Are We Coddling the Enemy in Our Own Backyard?
She looked up. Evans had seen her read it. He looked away.
Indifference again. Cold, but strangely protective.
The bus stopped at a loading dock behind Brock’s Department Store.
When the door opened, warmth and scent poured out like breath from another world.
Inside, under dim work lights, they stood frozen.
Marble floors stretched endlessly. Mannequins smiled in silk and fur. Glass cases gleamed with perfume bottles like captured light. Blankets in colors Hana had forgotten were stacked high.
This was not a store.
It was an assault.
Two women wept silently.
Yuki drifted toward a perfume display, reaching out as if in a dream.
“Don’t,” Hana hissed, grabbing her wrist. “Look only at the floor.”
She forced herself to move, to scrub marble floors that reflected lights like water.
Ghosts mopping a palace.
An hour later, Evans led them to the atrium.
There, the machine waited.
It hummed softly. Moving stairs of steel, rising endlessly.
Fear seized the women. No one moved.
Evans sighed and stepped onto it, gliding upward with casual ease.
“See? For people.”
Silence followed.
“Are we meant to ride this?” Yuki whispered.
The threat of punishment hung heavy.
Hana felt every eye turn to her.
She took Yuki’s hand.
“Iku,” she said. “We go.”
At the edge, she hesitated. Then she lifted her foot and allowed the step to take her.
The sensation was shocking. Weightless. Smooth.
She clutched the moving handrail, pulled Yuki on beside her.
Nothing happened.
No pain. No grinding. Only motion.
The ground fell away. The world shifted.
Yuki sobbed, then laughed—a small, involuntary sound of wonder.
For thirty seconds, they were not prisoners.
They were simply rising.
At the top, they stumbled onto solid ground. Yuki giggled again, then covered her mouth in horror.
Evans shook his head, baffled.
Hana looked back at the machine.
It was not cruel.
That was what terrified her.
They cleaned housewares until nearly three in the morning.
Refrigerators stood like white sentinels. Toasters reflected Hana’s exhausted face back at her.
On the way down, Hana stepped onto the downward escalator without hesitation.
Fear was gone.
Only understanding remained.
Back in the barracks, Yuki tried to explain.
“They have stairs that move,” she whispered.
Hana said nothing.
Some truths were too large to share.
Lying under her wool blanket, Hana stared into darkness.
The escalator was not magic. It was engineering. Steel and power used not for war, but for convenience.
How could a nation that built such things lose?
The thought chilled her more than the Nebraska wind.
The next night, the escalator was turned off.
Silent. Inert.
Hana felt an unexpected disappointment.
It did not need to move. Its existence was enough.
She picked up her bucket.
“Second floor,” she said evenly.
As she passed Corporal Evans, she gave him a brief nod.
Not surrender.
Understanding.
She climbed the marble stairs, step by step, into a future she could no longer pretend to comprehend.
