On the way out of DC, as you traverse the verdant Virginia highlands, Lucy exclaims out of nowhere, “Hey, I wanna know who’s going to go on a road trip with me when I’m sixty-five!” Maybe she’s interrupted your NPR podcast or the audiobook reading of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, or maybe you’re stopped on some ridge comparing Google Maps to your sister’s highlighted AAA map. You laugh though you feel that Lucy’s anxiety is real, but what the heck. Who wrote that song “When I’m 64”? Good grief, is it all about getting old? Lucy’s only twenty-six. The road trip, you guess, is one of those vestiges of your generation. When Lucy is sixty-five, you can’t speculate what would replace it; probably something virtual. What twenty-six-year-old in the next forty years is going to want to go on a road trip? Like, are we there yet? One thing you realize is that Lucy is a stickler for the truth of history, and what you do anyway is fiction. Seeing might be believing.
Your first incarceration stop: the southeastern edge of Arkansas along the Mississippi River and McGehee, the local town that’s converted its old train depot into the Jerome-Rohwer Interpretive Museum and Visitor Center. Susan Gallion, the museum’s curator and host, greets you with Southern hospitality and stories of Jerome and Rohwer internees and their descendants who’ve preceded Lucy and you to this moment. Lucy will probably remember the precise context of Susan’s southern phrase “God doesn’t make junk,” but you’ll only remember the phrase that will follow you like a GPS satellite on that long road trip, the probing matter of human-made junk left behind in camp museum after camp museum. At the Rohwer site, you walk around the remake of a mini guard tower on a gravel road rising in a field of cotton and push buttons on the placards to hear the disembodied voice of George Takei (aka Mr. Sulu) tell you about life circa 1942 and his boyhood relationship to the present desolation of the landscape and the snakes and mosquito-ridden bayou cleared by inmates. You think, you could be beamed up now, please, but you walk on down the gravel road, trying to ignore the oppressive and scalding humidity, looking for the cemetery. Stone monuments mark bodies left behind and bodies sacrificed in battle, and outside the human burial perimeter, a dog named Papy. You imagine the deep, surreal voice of George Takei departing in his starship to that final frontier where no man has gone: God doesn’t make junk.
For over a decade, you’ve been collecting your family junk with some idea it might be useful research material for another book. You didn’t know what book or what story, but that’s the way writing is. If you knew, you wouldn’t bother. By the time you propose the road trip to Lucy, you’ve mostly finished the book. The road trip is an excuse, a kind of finishing up of the project—realizing and experiencing what had been read in letters and seen in photographs. Maybe if you’d done the road trip before, the book would be different, but circumstances make the archive real and the real places surreal. Or perhaps the contemplation of the past and its memory is the work of the written book, and the realization of being at locations of incarceration finally visceral and unwritable.
Literally and figuratively getting out of Dodge, you and Lucy make your escape in the trusty Fit, then saunter over the Kansas border into the quiet town of Granada on the eastern edge of Colorado. The Amache Museum is a small house on the corner of Goff Avenue and Irwin Street, across from a grain silo. You peruse the “Preserve America” information signs outside the museum, and Lucy calls the number on the door. Five minutes later, John Hopper pulls up, and the Amache Preservation Society turns out to be John Hopper and his crew of high school students. John arrives sans students (it’s a school day), but he’s like a one-man show: the principal, the coach, and the AP teacher of the local high school, a former city councilman, and the director of the Amache Preservation Society. The museum began as a high school project; then, John got on the city council to secure the ninety-nine-year land lease for the Amache internment site. John says the students do everything except run the tractor to mow the brush and maintain the roads. “Too dangerous,” he says. He does that work himself, so he’s the maintenance man as well. If the site goes over to the National Park Service, they’ll handle all that. Big loss will be the students won’t have hands-on access to the collection, but, says John, “I need to retire.” Considering his energy, you don’t quite believe him.
Inside, the small house is packed with what John says is the largest and most varied collection of Japanese American internment artifacts of any of the camp sites. Usually John’s students run the museum, trained by John and university scholars to guide visitors, curate exhibitions, participate in site archeology. He opens a box with a recent acquisition, a dark-green 1944 Amache high school sweater. Some collector contacted John and wanted $1,000 for the sweater, said if John didn’t take it, he had a wwii collector waiting to buy it. John said he didn’t have that kind of money, offered the guy $35. The students got mad; they wanted it for their planned exhibit on high school in camp. Eventually, as John suspected, the seller came around for reasonably less. But everything else is donated. “We don’t turn anything down. If they send it to us, it has a story and meaning.” You observe a glass jug that could be any glass jug except that it held sake distilled locally and consumed by internees; you snap a photo.
Riding north, two days later, at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, you meet Darlene Bos, who tells you and Lucy her story of growing up in nearby Cody in one of the camp’s repurposed barracks, reshaped into an l-shaped ranch-style homesteading home. You think you’ve spotted these barracks, likely scattered all over the region as shotgun houses and barns, and maybe haunted, well, haunted with old history since Darlene became curious and studied that history, eventually volunteering to work at the Heart Mountain site. Now she’s the center’s marketing and development manager. From childhood, she says she argued with her father, a U.S. military veteran. When the interpretive center finally opened, and both her parents had also volunteered their energy to build the meditation garden, her father finally said to her, “You were right.” She admits she’s always on the lookout for visitors like her dad, hoping to change their minds. She says, “I love my work.”
The Heart Mountain center is impressively curated, packing history into a small and concentrated space, deeper layers of documentation and oral histories for visitors who care to take the extra time. In the foyer, a windowed outlook to the meditation garden, visitors have strung, Tanabata-like, on a barbed-wire fence replicas of the internee name-tags, leaving behind messages of their impressions and wishes. As you leave, you note the box of Kleenex discretely placed on a bench.
What the road trip reveals is the broader nature of your family archive, its being subsumed into one museum project after another, curating and deciding the stories of the past. Every museum and its collection is different and yet the same—same in the urge to preserve, to historicize, to teach, to place values, and to entice you to enter. To you, books and museums are much the same. Your road trip, like every other account of a road trip, is an open and physical book. You retrace the steps of others, stand in the places of their discovery, loss, and misery. Books and museums curate stories, a version of events and truth.
Two days after Heart Mountain, you come through Yellowstone to visit Minidoka in Idaho. Then, you and Lucy take the Fit south into Utah to a town called Delta and the camp site named Topaz, the jewel of the desert. It’s a desert all right. The clear blue sky sweeps the horizon, sun and hot wind unrelenting. You squint across a landscape of salt desert shrub and greasewood and follow your guide Jane Beckwith’s sure steps, sinking into the parched and cracked crust of soil that churns into fine dust. Jane is a retired teacher who, like John Hopper, taught history through Delta’s local stories, storing internment artifacts in her house until she founded, with the passionate efforts of a lifetime, the Topaz Museum. Jane points to the outline of rocks and stones that mark the garden and threshold of barrack 6-3-F in block six and ushers you through an imaginary door. You walk around the twenty-by-twenty-four-foot perimeter of your family
’s confinement, home to thirteen people from 1942 to 1945, and scuff around in the remains of rusty nails, wood scraps, broken pieces of cement foundation. Jane picks up rocks and identifies them geologically. What you learn is that every rock and stone had to be brought to the area by the internees to create the gardens that have since disappeared. Every rock and stone. You want to find a piece of pottery or perhaps the rusty hardware of your family’s abandoned waffle iron, but even if you found it, you’d be prohibited from taking anything from the site. All that past broken and discarded stuff, every rock and stone, belongs to the place, to be left untouched, scorched by sun, weathered, and returned to the earth, an archeological site whose desolate surface memory is now a sacred memorial. Kondo’s admonition that clutter is the failure to return things to where they belong, her insistence on simplicity and minimalism, all this only reminds you of what you assume is the Japanese American motto: “Leave it cleaner than you found it.” Kondo writes, “No matter how wonderful things used to be, we cannot live in the past. The joy and excitement we feel here and now are more important,” but you have the deep urge to exchange the word wonderful for awful and sit in that spot and weep.
To be fair to Kondo, she could be your daughter (O.K., unfair), a yonsei raised in a capitalist consumer society with great privilege (no war, no refugee boat, no exile from genocide, no Trail of Tears, no Underground Railroad, no Great Depression, no eyes on the prize), but she is still a product of the long postwar. You wonder what people in what forty languages have required Kondo’s advice. Can the trauma of the hoarder be undone with the methodic and ceremonial movement of clothing, books, paper, miscellany, and sentimental value rendered into honorary trash? She says, “The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.” This could the most succinct clarification and synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism, the revolution you’ve been anticipating. Voilá.
Kondo might say that this stuff in your family archive and this stuff in all these internment museums were parted with to launch them on a new journey. You cogitate the joy spark thing, and you think about simple furniture made from wood scraps, the pink crocheted dress, the sen nin bari, the green high school sweater, the jug of sake, and the waffle iron you know your family smuggled into camp. You know your family had to gather precious eggs, milk, butter, flour, and syrup, and they convened in the ironing room for access to an electrical outlet that wouldn’t blow the barrack fuse. All this for a small celebration made special by probably the only waffle iron in camp.
Jane Beckwith pauses with a last story. She remembers bringing a class of children to visit the Topaz site and one boy who was particularly rambunctious, jumping and noisily running about. A girl his age admonished her classmate, “Be quiet.” She advised him, “Don’t you know? They are here.”
You will finally also visit Manzanar under the Sierra Nevadas, between the desert towns of Independence and Lone Pine. You reflect as you enter California that you and Lucy have traveled through those red states and communities that will vote for the current president and his race-and religion-based mandate against immigrants and refugees, but that in each of those remote sites of Japanese American incarceration, there are monuments, interpretive centers, museums, and real people, volunteers and docents, that all decry the racism, hatred, and fear that unjustly imprisoned citizens and honest, hardworking immigrant families. These sites and their caretakers stand as places of evidence, accountability, resistance, and hope.
You and Lucy are home now. Lucy opens the garage door and is greeted by the seven humongous UPS boxes, plus, on the porch, a narrow box containing her bicycle. She announces that one of her next projects is to go through the stuff in her family storage unit. You return to your personal Tokyo Bay, a landfilled space of junk you can’t abandon. You know you can’t hold each item and feel for the spark of joy, kick your foot back and point your finger up in the joy position. If there is joy, it’s a painful joy. You ponder the thought that Lucy has beamed up most of it into digital space and reorganized it into a website story. A new journey. You reflect on the lives of Jane Beckwith and John Hopper and every other curator and keeper of history along your incarceration road trip, and you think that keeping the stuff, saving it, might also be a way of transforming your life.
Sansei Recipes
Karen Mayeda’s Furikake Popcorn
Mix ½ teaspoon of shoyu into 3 tablespoons of butter. Toss over bag of popcorn with furikake mix and spicy sembei. Watch a movie and eat.
Teresa Yokoyama’s Sesame Shoyu Philly Cheese (J.A. Brie)
Pour ½ teaspoon of shoyu over a slab of Philadelphia cream cheese. Sprinkle sesame seeds. Heat in microwave 1 minute. Serve with crackers and gossip.
Garrett Hongo’s Volcano Poke
Combine best-quality diced tuna or marlin, minced white onions, chopped scallions, and pickled seaweed. Splash in shoyu; squeeze in wasabi; drizzle sesame oil; sprinkle with salt. Toss, and serve with sake and beer. Play cards.
Tosh Tanaka’s Mexican Bao
Mix up bao dough (package of yeast in 2 tablespoons of warm water, 3 cups flour, 1 cup water), let rise one hour, and punch down. Sauté chopped onions and salt in lard or oil, then mash in cooked beans, adding water to keep smooth consistency. Place dollops of beans with grated cheese into four-inch flat rounds of dough, gathering into bundles. Steam and eat warm.
Buddhahead Spam Musubi
Cut rectangular slices of Spam and fry until browned. Place Spam slices with sesame seeds between rice and wrap with nori. Use a plastic musubi mold for best results.
Paul Yamazaki’s Natto-don
Heat up a can of chili. Sauté chopped green onion with cubes of Spam. Stir up a portion of natto with shoyu and Colman’s mustard. On a hot bowl of rice, layer in order: chili, sautéed Spam and onions, natto, raw egg. Garnish with fresh chopped onions. Eat this when Sara isn’t home.
Jane Tomi’s Avo/Cottage Cheese and Natto
Layer cottage cheese, slices of avocado, and natto mixed with raw egg, Colman’s mustard, and shoyu. Eat like that. For real.
KT’s Crab Miso Bake with Egg
Having saved the crab shell with miso guts, crack an egg into the shell and bake until egg is soft cooked. Eat with spoon. Offer to guests to test their Asian quotient.
Jonny Grandson’s Asako Signature Tofu-You
Sauté chopped onions and sliced ginger with bite-sized pieces of pork. Mix funyu with shoyu, water, and cornstarch, add to sautéed pork, and cook until thickened. Add block of chopped tofu and simmer. Garnish with chopped green onions. Serve with rice.
Carole Ono’s Baked Sushi
Mix ½ cup of mayonnaise with 1 cup of sour cream. Stir in crab, chopped shrimp, chopped hydrated shiitake mushrooms (soaked and cooked in mirin and shoyu water), chopped green onions, chopped water chestnuts, and slivered cucumber. Spread this mixture over a casserole of rice sprinkled with furikake. Put under the broiler about five minutes until bubbling. Garnish with beni-shōga and serve with nori, as cone makizushi.
Asako’s Nihonmachi Corned Beef and Cabbage
Make corned beef and cabbage as usual, boiled in water, adding potatoes and carrots. Serve in bowls of salted soup with rice and Colman’s hot mustard. (Discarding soup would be mottainai.)
Tamio Spiegel’s Miso/Mayo Salmon
Lay half filet of salmon over oiled pan skin up. Broil until skin bubbles and chars. Turn over and slather miso and mayonnaise (one-to-one) mixture over salmon and broil until top begins to char. Serve with rice.
Finally, that Layered Jell-O Potluck Casserole
It was usually green, in several complicated layers, and had cottage cheese in it.
A Selected L.A./Gardena J.A. Timeline
___________
* selected with emphasis in L.A./Gardena and with apologies for omissions
II. Sensibility
Author’s Note
The following stories were published posthumorously and are dedicated to my sister, who, due
to her powers of projection, thankfully destroyed all our correspondence prior to my despondence, making conjectures about our personal lives impossible. What we did and said is none of your business. That said, the fictional lives of the characters exposed here represent the minutiae of sansei life as it once existed in a small provincial island in an armpit of postwar sunshine.
Respectfully,
J.A.
Shikataganai & Mottainai
Mukashi, mukashi, as they used to say in our little world of teahouses and dainty gardens of pine bonsai and azalea, dappled in puffy mounds of lime-green dichondra, lacquered bridges expanding serene ponds of fat polka-dot koi resting in the shadows of water lilies, leaning red maple and purple wisteria, the click-clack of bamboo on rock. The clatter of geta over wood and the swishing of silk were the happy undertones of the chatter of the two young sansei sisters who appeared on the bridge to scatter round pellets of koi food from a small handwoven basket. A flutter of banana-yellow butterflies seemed to swirl from their bright kimono and scatter over the pond, when suddenly a gigantic white koi broke the surface, its large albino lips and gullet open and flaring, and handily gulped down the largest of the butterflies, though perhaps only the impudent size of a baby canary. The sisters watched the delicate wings fold and crush and the koi’s pink eye blink and disappear.
Sansei and Sensibility Page 11
