“So are you going to do it or what?” she asks Joan.
“I said forget about it. And not just because it is a stupid idea or because I am offended, though it is and I am. But because bright ideas like this should have come like a month ago already, while we’re still on Ninetieth Street. But they just don’t think these things through, do they?”
“Well, Mel’s is the total case in point.”
“How horrible that must have been. Well, see. It happened how? Someone got a bright idea all of the sudden. There’s a time to improvise, when you can just go off, and other time when you stick to your script.”
“There was no script,” says Tania. “That was the problem.”
“I have my own script. The pigs come out here, get us surrounded, I go out the door with my arms up in the air. That’s my script. Take me, I’m all yours. What’s jail next to a million years in a hole in the ground? I can get along in prison. I can get along in any place.”
Joan Shimada was from anyplace. She was sansei; her parents had been born in the United States, but did that mean dick all as the Christmas season approached California in 1941? No, by then all eyes were on the coastal skies, looking out for treacherous, crafty, devious, scheming, wily, perfidious Japs in their “Zekes,” “Kates,” and “Bettys,” zooming in for another cowardly sneak attack. None seemed to show up, so by and by Californians had to look closer to home, finding what they sought in the merchants and tradesmen of Japanese descent who’d settled in the state, sometimes several generations previously. FBI men came into the shops and groceries, going through vegetable bins and slitting open sealed cartons, tossing the back offices, looking for transmitters and secret communiques from the Land of the Rising Sun.
President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 had the putative purpose of directing the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” In practice, this was understood to mean excluding people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Usefully, Governor Chase Clark of Idaho suggested before a congressional committee at around this time that Japanese would be welcome in his state if they were confined to guarded concentration camps, thereby helping solve the problem of what, exactly, to do with all those “excluded.”
Thus in March the first of those so excluded began to arrive at “relocation centers,” such as the one at Manzanar, where Joan’s mother and father found themselves one morning after a long and uncomfortable bus ride. Dust flew at them, waves of sandy grit that stung the eyes and coated the baggage that had been dumped from the trucks that had been loaded with belongings of the evacuees (as they were called) at the embarkation points. Joan’s parents were assigned with two other childless couples to share a 320-square-foot compartment in a large barracks. So the first thing to do was to further partition this small space, hanging blankets and improvising with flattened cardboard boxes and the scrap wood remaining from the camp’s construction. Even so, as Joan’s mother later made clear despite her permeative reserve, it had been something of a surprise that they found the opportunity to conceive her.
Born a prisoner. Such was the weight she and her parents were required to pull, for the USA. The loyalty questionnaire asked:
27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
The answers were yes, yes. They had always been yes, yes. Joan’s father had tried to join the army after Pearl Harbor and been rejected. The Japanese emperor was typical royalty, the sort of mute and bloodless enigma both set above and emblematic of his nation that either fascinates or bores the hell out of Americans. Japan itself was a sentimental memory, at best an occasional dreamy riposte to the piston force of American life, which was the only kind of life either of Joan’s parents had any familiarity with. But there they were, in suspense, yoked to this old strange multitude across the ocean. Meanwhile Joan began to grow into the memories her parents tucked away and treasured for her. Inoculated in infancy against the sorts of diseases that flourished in overcrowded conditions, she developed a terrible case of the “Manzanar Runs,” nearly perishing from dehydration. That was one of the indistinct memories she was advised to hang on to: She had nearly died; nearly died living in an American concentration camp. It was the sort of unimpeachable, irreducible, immutable fact that some would turn into a lifetime free pass. But to Joan it didn’t represent some perversion of normal life; it actually was her normal life. “Nearly” died; close, but no cigar. In other words, keep on moving. She had faint memories of her own: the Sierras peaking in the distance, the total lack of privacy, the toilets in the latrine lined up in a row of six back-to-back pairs, the carefully raked rock gardens ornamented by stones the men carried in from the desert, the absurd noise of the mess halls, the carnival-like events regularly held in the firebreak set between the rows of barracks. The soothing regularity of camp life. She was very young indeed.
The camp closed, but there was no returning to the other California. The two Americans packed up their American daughter and went to Japan. Her father got a job working as a translator for the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, and the family settled on Eta Jima, off the coast of Hiroshima, former home of the Imperial Naval Academy. Here cadets had meditated upon the Five Reflections each evening:
1. Hast thou not gone against sincerity?
2. Hast thou not felt ashamed of thy words and deeds?
3. Hast thou not lacked vigor?
4. Hast thou exerted all possible efforts?
5. Hast thou not become slothful?
As a matter of policy, the BCOF encouraged the wives and families of servicemen to settle in Japan. Special schools and shops as well as separate housing were constructed for the occupiers. To sort of suggest that the feeling was mutual, Joan’s parents avoided occupation personnel outside work. Joan’s father took a dim view of the BCOF’s stated aim to enable the Japanese “to witness at first hand Western family life.” Most of the units were Australian, and he did not like the Australians: the condescension of the officers, the yahoo bigotry of the rank and file. The cloddish Perth housewives in their housedresses trying to turn everything into a knotted back alley they could holler across, snapping their fingers at him and yelling in his face. To them all he spoke in the clearest English, chiming with the open tones of the native Californian, and got back a guttural mess, totally untransformed by tongue, teeth, or palate in its journey from the throat. They would demonstrate to him “the democratic way of life”?
After BCOF headquarters was moved from Eta Jima to Kure, Joan’s father endured a brutal commute, taking a bus, a ferry, and another bus to get to work. This itself made him irritable, even as the work became less congenial; mostly he had been translating documents, but now that he found himself working often with the military police in Kure he regularly was called upon to interpret in the type of face-to-face situation that he found, in a word, embarrassing. Their pet Jap, pulling usable English sentences into shape for the Australians. What a job. One night the MPs picked up a man, a civilian, for possession of stolen goods. He’d been arrested near one of the many “roads, wharves, railway yards, local markets, villages, stores, or camp perimeters” that had been declared off-limits to civilians and servicemen alike. Your mere presence there got you a mandatory escort back to headquarters for a little chat. Fraternization was strictly out-of-bounds for servicemen, and the locals had to be watched to keep the booming black market under control. This guy was carrying sixty pounds of sugar in a pair of old Samsonite Streamlite suitcases.
Joan’s father spoke to the prisoner for an hour or more, attempting to urge forth helpful information. Helpful to them all, he suggested. The man called him an inu and mocked his
accent. Glancing at the clock, Joan’s father could see that he would miss the last ferry to Eta Jima. The MPs shared their headquarters with the Japanese police, so when the MP sergeant grew tired of waiting, he simply walked the prisoner down the corridor to his good Nip buddies and had Joan’s father explain the situation to them. The cops, who had been playing cards and drinking whiskey, were delighted with the diversion presented by the prisoner. They all headed for the motor pool, which was empty at that hour. Near the edge of the enclosure, by the chain-link fence, there was a concrete stanchion that had two eyebolts driven into it on opposite sides. The purpose of these became clear when one of the police, a plainclothesman, fed the chains manacling the prisoner’s hands through the bolts, securing him to the stanchion. He then took a gasoline can and, carefully pouring out its contents, circled the post. Done, the plainclothesman lit a Lucky Strike and assumed a posture that you might call thoughtful or reflective, standing back from the bound man as if evaluating at a distance, taking in the whole of a thing. Joan’s father noticed that the plainclothesman’s suit was soaked through with sweat between the shoulder blades. The cop took his hat off and then reseated it on his head, gripping the crown of the fedora where it was crimped and tilting his head back into the gesture so that the lank strands of hair falling across his forehead were swept under the crown. He then reached for his handkerchief, but what unfurled when he removed it from his breast pocket was a clean white sock. There was a still moment as everyone measured the extent of the plainclothesman’s discomfiture over the exposure of this improvisation. Rather artful, really. Everything everywhere was running short, why not a sock? The cop balled it up and put it in his trousers pocket. Until then Joan’s father had thought that the tying up, the circle of splashed gasoline were merely features of a type of performance. But the sock incident had put the plainclothesman on edge, tensed him up, and the balletic series of slow relaxed gestures came to an end, and after pulling the Lucky from his mouth and taking a last look at it, he tossed it without warning at the prisoner’s feet, where the immediate flames erupted so high that for an instant it was all Joan’s father could do to see the terrified shape within them.
Eta Jima itself was a beautiful place. Joan became Japanese there, something her parents felt pretty ambivalent about. She got friendly with a girl whose family had lived in Hiroshima. Akiko had a good story. She had been a baby when she was sent away to NijiMura a day or two before the bombing. Then the bombing had taken place, and that basically was the end of the story. The story did have clarifying footnotes, like: This cousin was never seen again, that sibling died of radiation sickness two months later, this uncle had no face, really. Akiko talked about it to Joan in a lively voice, passing on with great authoritativeness the secondhand information that had been instilled in her with the mesmerizing force of ritual. The story’s appeal came from its balancing unities, the simple serendipity of the girl’s having been sent away just before the singular holocaust and the horrorscience fascination of all the human burn and spatter that was its yield. It was the first time that Eta Jima’s proximity to the wrecked city on the other shore became central to Joan’s perception of the world.
The A-bombed city. The place did not seem as if it were quite there. There was the ghost of itself that stood just behind it. Tourists moved in search of the ghost. They strolled through the neat grid of streets taking pictures and more pictures of the blandly pleasant city that was there in the place of nothing. Beneath it all, seared like a pitiless brand, the trilobites of human indecency. The city had wholeheartedly embraced the industry of its own devastation—as if the 350 years of its history preceding the bombing had been consequential only insofar as they had led up to the incandescent moment—while rigorously reconstructing itself in a manner that exhibited an aloofness from the experience. Municipally, the legacy of total war became a mandate to celebrate and aspire to peace. It was all strangely flaccid, curiously devoid of rage, though this Joan was too young to notice. She picnicked in a Peace Park. After the city had been burned to a crisp, the official ambition of Hiroshima, according to an English-language pamphlet, was “to keep advocating to the world people that ‘Peace’ is more than the absence of war, and it signifies a state in which the world people live together without prejudice in a safe and amicable environment, where each person can live a dignified and worthy human life every where in the world, seeking to resolve the various problems confronting humanity … by cooperation and collaboration on a global scale aiming at the realization of everlasting world peace and prosperity of humankind.”
That, plus world-known Mazda passenger cars were produced there and distributed the world over.
Joan forgot her English. This was pretty hard to believe. The language was all over the place. But her parents had dropped the use of it at home, mostly for her benefit; Joan had her hands full just trying to be Japanese. Some schoolgirls told her that she had a wave in her hair; she must be part white. There was a certain impertinence to her that her teachers claimed to discern, chalking it up to some residual Americanness. But after a while she stopped being exotic, and to others she became just another kid with a funny way of talking who kept to herself. She got good at art. A light touch she had, delicate.
The language left her gradually, until what remained was her knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sort of simple expertise with which children flatter themselves. She was a Japanese girl. A Japanese girl. A Japanese girl.
She was basically happy. She had a few friends. She kept to herself. She had a cat named, in English, Bunny. A light touch that pleased her art teacher in school. Unusually precocious ability with watercolors. Basically happy.
The usual mixture of excitement and dismay when they moved. Her friends gave her a sendoff. She spent time recording the green peaks of Eta Jima in a sketchbook. They were going to a place called Fresno, which was supposed to be very flat, and she wanted to get these mountains down, these mountains that just came right up and joined you for breakfast. Trunks and suitcases were taken out of storage. Her parents made gifts of household goods to friends and neighbors, as mementos. Nothing too big or too practical, lest they be insulted. They just happened to be some of Joan’s favorite things. Joan came home one day to find that Bunny was gone. It was a big rush. Their home filled with boxes. The rooms echoed strangely. Her parents began speaking to each other in English again. They tried it out on Joan, but who knew what they were saying? Then the family was gone. It had been such a slow process, cumulative, but ultimately they reached the threshold, crossed it, and no longer were there. The difference was one inch, one door shut and locked for the last time, but it was all the difference that was needed. Joan’s equanimity crumbled. She sat on the bed her last night in Japan and cried. They were in a hotel near the airport, no place at all. Early the next morning they would begin their long journey to San Francisco. She cried.
Trance Page 25
