Within These Lines

by Stephanie Morrill

  Something about it made my eyes go misty, a mix of sadness and gratitude that he and Taichi had both come back from war safe and whole. Diego still struggles with blue periods, understandable after his three weeks in a POW camp before a prisoner exchange. But his wife, a sweet former war nurse, said Diego’s sad times seemed less severe than they once did.

  From here, we’ll head to San Francisco to visit Mama and Daddy. I will also get to meet Gia’s new husband and baby, which I’m looking forward to. She mourned Lorenzo and his death so bitterly that for a time her parents had raised Lorenzo Junior, but Gia’s strength and stubbornness finally served her well when she determined to break free of her grief. A year ago, she married a bookstore manager, who my mother says looks at Gia as though she hung the moon. They welcomed their first child just before Thanksgiving.

  And I’ll have a whole week to soak up time at home with Mama and Daddy. Plus they’ll come to Chicago in a few months when the baby is born. Five years ago, when we told them we intended to settle in Chicago where Taichi’s family had all found jobs after the war, I thought they might be mad. Good lawyer that I was, I had armed myself with all the arguments about how Taichi had job opportunities in Chicago, and we didn’t face the prejudice in the Midwest that we did in California.

  Instead, Mama had laughed about me somehow finding my way back to my roots. “Maybe you will be able to argue some of my nephews out of jail.”

  No matter how many times I explain that civil rights attorneys don’t handle criminal cases like that, they never seem to understand. But they do always seem very proud.

  Taichi points out the window, drawing me back to the present. “We played baseball over there. You’d never know it now.”

  The car bumps violently over the neglected road, and James sits up, rubbing his eyes. “Time to get up?”

  “Perfect timing, buddy,” Taichi says over his shoulder. “We’re getting out of the car.”

  He stops at a tall, white obelisk with Japanese writing. The stone looks as though it’s a monument of some kind.

  “What does it say?” I ask as Taichi rummages in the back for our coats.

  “This wasn’t here when I was.” Taichi studies it a moment as I put on my coat. “I think it says soul consoling tower.”

  Together we get out of the car, a gust of wind assaulting us and drawing tears to my eyes. How in heaven’s name did all those residents endure the wind whipping through the gaps of their homes? James buries his head against my shoulder as I follow Taichi out to the cemetery.

  Though he never said this was why we came, I’m not at all surprised that this is where he drove to first, and that he walks along the stones until he finds the one for James Kanito. Taichi tucks his hands deep into the pockets of his wool coat. I lean against him, silent.

  Not until we married did I realize how haunted Taichi had been by the death of James Kanito. On our honeymoon, he asked me if we were to have a boy, could we please name him James? Even after everything Taichi experienced while away at war with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, when he had nightmares it was always James’s name that I heard.

  “Nineteen.” Taichi speaks the word as though it tastes bitter. “A senseless waste.”

  The wind stops, and James squirms to get down. He wanders aimlessly near us, singing a convoluted version of the ABCs.

  Taichi fits an arm around my shoulders. “How will we ever explain this place to him?”

  I watch James pick up a rock, his silky black hair slipping forward. I wish I could freeze him at this age. When he doesn’t know racism or hate. When he doesn’t notice what an oddity he is, half-Japanese and half-Italian.

  “We’ll find a way,” I say as I lean into him. “We always do.”

  About the History

  The first time I ever really thought about the incarceration of Japanese Americans was at a family dinner with my nana, a native Californian. She was fifteen when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and she told me how there had been a Japanese family down the street who was sent to the camps. “They didn’t mind going,” she said. “They liked it there.”

  Nana was in her late eighties at this time, so I didn’t argue. Even though I didn’t know much about the evacuation, I was unsettled enough by her statement that I found myself thinking about it often. How could she truly believe that they didn’t mind? That they liked it there?

  As I did the research to write Within These Lines, I learned how she could believe it. Because that’s what the general population was told. They were shown (posed) photographs of Japanese American families enjoying camp life. Maybe they even heard stories about how the residents had everything in the camps from Boy Scouts to three “free” meals a day. These weren’t like Hitler’s death camps.

  If you wanted to believe it wasn’t so bad for the 120,000 Japanese American families forced out of their homes and imprisoned in places that eroded their dignity, culture, and family life, it was very easy to do.

  While I like to think I would have been an Evalina, I know more than likely that’s not true. History storyteller Dan Carlin talks about how dangerous it is to judge those who have come before us from our 20/20 hindsight, and he applied this statement specifically to the incarceration of Japanese Americans. That when modern Americans talk about WWII, we ask why so few Germans stood up to Hitler. Carlin makes the point that for Germans, speaking out had deadly consequences. In America even when it wouldn’t have been deadly, and perhaps there would have been no real consequence at all, very few spoke out on behalf of the Japanese Americans.

  But their history has been preserved for us to learn from. Thanks to the bravery of so many who have spoken out about the incarceration, and to those who have been wise enough to document it, there is an amazing amount of history recorded and available to us. I deeply admire that our country eventually formally admitted the mistakes made with a public apology in 1988, and that instead of steamrolling a place like Manzanar, the former concentration camp has been turned into a national historic site that we can all visit.

  I struggled to narrow my focus for this book. There were so many stories from all the camps and all the families that I longed to tell. If this is a subject that has captured your interest, there are many books available for you to read. The ones that moved me the most were Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Dear Miss Breed by Joanne Oppenheim, and Looking Like the Enemy by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald.

  In my blend of history and fiction, I had to take multiple liberties that I would like to address.

  For the Hamasaki family, who is a fictional family, I struggled with where they should be sent. The evacuation was very hasty and disorganized, so sometimes newspapers said that a group had gone to one assembly center when really, they’d been sent to another. The first group that left San Francisco reportedly went to Santa Anita Assembly Center. As mentioned in the story, these were meant to be temporary housing locations, and were on converted fairgrounds or racetracks.

  Originally when I wrote this story, I had the Hamasaki family going to Santa Anita because I wanted to talk about the hard emotions of temporarily being housed in horse stalls. But the result was a muddled story, and there was no room to give attention to the arc of the complicated events at Manzanar. So while it would have been much more likely that a family in the Hamasakis’ situation would have gone to Santa Anita, for the sake of effective and clear storytelling, I sent them directly to Manzanar.

  The more I dug into Manzanar’s complex history, the more confused I became by the various viewpoints. Fortunately, many personal stories have been preserved about camp life and the events that culminated in the riot. But just like us, each person involved had their own beliefs on what really happened, so trying to nail down the “real story” is impossible. I did my best to stick with facts, but ultimately this is a work of fiction being told from the perspective of a character who never existed.

  At the riot, in addition to several who were hospitalized for injur
ies, two young men were killed. Both happened to go by different nicknames for James. Instead of fictionalizing one of their real stories, I created James Kanito as a way to recognize the loss of life that took place.

  Similarly, while the Black Dragons are a real gang that existed at Manzanar, Raymond Yamishi was not a real person. I did include several real people in the book, including Joe Kurihara, Harry Ueno, the Yoneda family, Dr. Goto, and those mentioned on the death list. My purpose in doing this was to realistically frame Taichi’s world, not to put words into the mouths of real people.

  I am more thankful than words can express to Patricia Biggs of Manzanar National Historic Site who read Within These Lines to help with accuracy. Not only is she deeply knowledgeable about Manzanar history, she is also generous with her time, opinions, and resources. Any mistakes that remain in the book are my fault.

  I’m also grateful to Holly Frey and Tracy V. Wilson of the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, whose teaching on Executive Order 9066 sparked the idea for Evalina and Taichi.