by Karin Tanabe
There was far more good for Emi than Leo in 1940, especially after she turned eighteen and graduated from high school that spring, but when Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in September, Emi couldn’t help but write to Leo expressing her shame. He dismissed it as bad judgment on the part of the Japanese, and they tried to turn their correspondence back to their positive tone, but so much more was to come.
Pearl Harbor.
The attack on Hawaii in December 1941 changed the lives of every American with Japanese ancestry. But first, it was the Japanese diplomats who were zeroed in on for dismissal.
Emi was too distraught to write to Leo about what was happening to them, but he still wrote to her, knowing to send his letter to her father at the Japanese Embassy instead of to their home. In the last letter Emi received from Leo, he wrote, “You have nothing to do with them. To me, you are still the good that exists in the world.”
But the American people, especially President Roosevelt, did not agree. After Pearl Harbor, the diplomats’ families were shut inside their apartments, while the men were at the embassy trying to understand their new position, living and working in an enemy nation.
“They’ll treat us well,” Keiko assured Emi the first night they spent alone. Emi, stunned and nearly silent since the news of the attack broke, was sharing her mother’s bed, and trying to understand why Japan had made such a foolish choice. She knew quite a bit about Japan’s history with America, as her father talked about little else since moving to Washington. She knew the Americans did not approve of Japan’s recent occupation of southern Indochina, putting massive pressure on the Japanese to pull out. Japan had refused and the United States had frozen its oil exports. But Japan had not relented, moving deeper into Southeast Asia, occupying Saigon. Even with what she knew about the different power struggles, what she was most desperate to know was if her father had been aware in advance that the Japanese military was going to attack Pearl Harbor. Did he know before the bombs hit how much their lives—and the world—were about to change?
She could tell that her mother was thinking the same thing. “Try to get some sleep,” she said, holding Emi close to her, curled up like they used to years ago, before Emi was a head taller. “No one will hurt us. They have to treat us well. They want to get their American diplomats out of Japan—alive—as badly as they want to send us back.”
“What does a bomb do to you?” Emi asked, trying not to shake in her mother’s arms. “How do you die? Do you explode? Are you burned alive? Is it instant? Or does your body melt from the heat, your organs slowly giving out one by one?”
“I don’t know,” said Keiko, stroking Emi’s hand. “It can’t be good, however it is. Let’s just pray for the souls of the dead and hope that the Japanese are right. That there is an important reason behind the bombs and gunfire.”
Emi knew her mother would never say that the Japanese could be wrong, but nothing felt right about what was happening. She knew that the bombs and torpedoes had mostly killed military men, but the radio reports said civilians, too, had died. Emi imagined herself walking alone, peacefully, somewhere as beautiful as Hawaii, and suddenly being blasted to her death, burned alive. She reached for her mother, knowing sleep was not coming soon. They were both aware that the entire country was now incensed, with intense hatred toward Japan.
The women spent a week locked inside their apartment, and no contact with Norio was allowed. They left the building only for short walks in the company of an FBI agent named Mark Rhodes, who was assigned to guard them. As Keiko predicted, though their freedom was gone, they were treated very well by Rhodes, who liked to talk about his love of teriyaki chicken and his children who lived in the Florida Keys with their no-good mother.
After a long week, Emi and Keiko were transferred along with the other diplomats’ families to the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, a handsome Western-style stone building with a gold chrysanthemum adorning the front, where they were reunited with their husbands and fathers. The heavy steel gates were locked behind them as soon as the families were safely inside, since angry demonstrators had gathered nearby. The diplomats and their staff had not left the embassy since the news had broken.
“I’m in shock more than anything,” Norio said to his daughter when she was finally allowed to see him. He looked desperately in need of a shower and a change of clothes. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair, usually pushed back neatly with Brylcreem, and styled with a small wave on top, was falling across his forehead in every direction.
“But why did we attack Pearl Harbor?” asked Emi. “Did you know they were going to? The newspaper said over two thousand people died. Two thousand.”
“No, Emi. Not another word,” said Norio sternly, his white shirt stained and his custom-made suit wrinkled at every crease. His body, tall and straight like his daughter’s, was hunched with exhaustion. He repositioned his round metal glasses on his straight nose and repeated himself.
After a week in the embassy, living on top of each other and sleeping on makeshift beds, they were told that they’d be moving collectively to a luxury hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, a rural town in the western part of the state, and that they would stay there until they sailed back to Japan. “But that could be in months,” a State Department official warned.
“Months!” said Emi as she collected her things and tried to make her hair look less oily at the crown. Her mother gave her a small wool hat, and she pinned it on, and pinched a little life into her cheeks with her cold hands.
“They don’t know precisely what will happen yet. Don’t panic,” said Keiko as she helped her daughter.
“I know what will happen,” said Emi. “We are about to become the new face of public humiliation.” Outside, they could see that a crowd had again gathered on the busy street, waiting to watch the imminent Japanese exile from the city.
When the embassy assembled everyone to leave, transferring them to idling buses to head to the train station, the demonstrators, mostly men dressed nicely in handsome winter coats and hats, let out a few angry shouts as soon as the front doors opened. Their hateful tone threw Emi off, the jeers causing her to trip over her mother’s valise, but it was nothing like what they faced when they arrived at Union Station.
Emi had worn her nicest traveling dress and cashmere coat with a fur collar, the same one she had worn when she’d first set foot on the luxury steamer to the United States. Her hair was dirty but covered and her shoes were shined, the heels not scuffed at all.
But all the people watching them at Union Station seemed to care about was the shape of their eyes.
She could see kids pulling their eyes at the corners, making them thinner and then laughing hysterically while their parents did nothing, at best. At worst, they shouted angrily at the group, drowning out their children’s laughter, using slurs Emi had become familiar with in the past few weeks. Japanazi. Blast the Japs. Yellow peril. Emi heard them all, coming from people who looked like the girls she had gone to school with, or their parents. Behind her, her own parents walked next to each other, her father ignoring the jeers and commenting on the handsome gold and white coffered ceiling of the station. He even pointed out a few birds that had made their homes in the carved pockets of plaster.
The FBI agents hurried them through the large station, telling them to board the private train that would take them to the Homestead Hotel.
Exhausted from having to remain stoic in the face of such hate—something her parents excelled at and she did not—Emi closed her eyes once she was in her seat, imagining that she was the type of person who could have spit in her hecklers’ faces. As sleep almost caught her, the corners of her mouth went up slightly. Wasn’t she that person? A little bit? She thought back to 1938. To Vienna. She had been then. It was just that she would never do anything to harm her father’s position. When she was with her parents, in the presence of the ambassador, she knew to play the part of the obedient daughter. That’s what they expected of her and she un
derstood why. But in those moments where she was tried, and alone, she was the person who could slap someone right back.
Emi fell deeply asleep as the train whistled into Virginia, not waking up until the wheels slowed for their descent into Hot Springs.
“What a strange place,” Emi said as she looked out the window at the bare oak and maple trees, their branches frozen and unmoving against the gray sky. “Why would they put us out here? There’s nothing but trees.”
“I believe it’s called the countryside,” said her mother. “Not ‘nothing.’ ”
“They’d put us in a cave if they could,” she heard one of the wives say, an American with soft blond curls and a wonderful command of Japanese. “But then the American diplomats might get thrown into a ravine in Tokyo. So instead, we are here. You’ll see. It’s actually a very luxurious hotel. I stayed here with my parents as a girl.”
Her husband told her to stop gossiping, and before the train had come to a stop, the entire Japanese diplomatic community was on their feet, trying to ignore the fact that there were FBI agents and State Department employees hovering around them.
“I’m sorry to say,” the senior State Department official in charge announced before anyone had stepped off the train, “but we don’t have enough cars for all of you.” He ran his fingers through his gray hair nervously. “There are some people—people who live in town—who are waiting outside . . . who have come to watch all this. So for everyone’s safety, the men will walk together to the hotel and the women and children will take the cars.” They heard the train doors open and they were told that they could all disembark.
“The diplomats have to walk? Past all those people?” Emi asked her mother incredulously.
“Emiko, we are being interned! The Americans are not going to send Rolls-Royces for the men,” one of the Japanese wives said to Emi. She started to laugh until her eyes were watering, the tears moving straight down her face until they got trapped in her waxy red lipstick. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving her hand in front of her mouth. “I’m just very anxious. I don’t mean to bark at you.”
Her mother put her hand on Emi’s back reassuringly. “They’ll be fine,” she said, as they all tried to carry their luggage and themselves off the train.
As the women and children loaded into the cars, they could see a large group had indeed gathered to watch them, these far less sophisticated in appearance than the Washingtonians. They were in southern, rural America and that alone scared Emi. “Not again,” she grumbled to her mother as she waited to climb into a car with her. “The people in Washington already made it perfectly clear that it’s a miracle I can see out of the slits in my face. I don’t need to hear it twice.”
“Do not complain,” said her mother. “In fact, do not say another thing until we are locked in a room together inside the hotel. No sound at all.”
“The pretty ones are always obstinate,” said an older woman who was already in the backseat.
Emi looked at them both and frowned. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see another car idling with the back door open. The three oldest Shiga children were crammed inside. “I’ll ride with the Shigas,” Emi said turning around, squeezing herself into the backseat with them. Unlike Emi, the Shiga children had never lived in Japan before. Their mother was Canadian and they had spent most of their short lives following their father on postings or in Ottawa with their mother.
“You don’t fit, Emiko Kato,” said Mirai Shiga, the youngest, who had inherited her mother’s Canadian diction and curly hair.
Emi pulled her onto her lap, closed the door, and opened the window, resting Mirai’s arm on the ledge.
“Better now?” she asked the little girl.
“Better,” said Mirai, leaning back comfortably against Emi’s long frame.
The car was in a line, waiting for the others to start driving, and Mirai was starting to wiggle on Emi’s lap.
“You’re moving because you’re freezing,” her sister Anna said to her, pointing at the open window. “Close it before we all die.”
“No,” said Mirai stubbornly, letting her arm dangle out of it as the car finally roared off.
Emi and the Shiga children all looked straight ahead out of instinct as they drove close to the crowd of townspeople. Even though Mirai was just five years old, she was already trained to act with decorum when insults were being fired at you.
“Don’t worry,” said Emi as the car puttered slowly in line with the others. “They’re all staying quiet. Not like in Washington.”
But just as Emi finished her sentence, she felt something small and sharp hit her neck. She put her hand to it, wondering if something in the car had stabbed her, perhaps a piece of metal in the seat.
“Ow!” Mirai suddenly screamed, wrestling herself off Emi’s lap and falling on her older sister. Emi felt another sting and then another before she had the sense to roll the window up. Right next to her on the seat was a piece of gravel. Someone in the silent crowd was pelting them with it.
“What was that?” asked Anna, looking at her little sister.
“I don’t know,” said Emi, answering for her. “It’s the wild countryside out here. Just things flying through the air. Don’t worry. The window’s closed now.”
Mirai climbed back into Emi’s lap. A small red mark on her cheek started to show and she rubbed it against Emi’s coat. “I don’t like the countryside,” she said, putting her thumb in her mouth.
“Me neither,” said Emi, relaxing only when the crowd was far behind them.
“Are you scared to go to Japan?” Mirai asked Emi as the beautiful, sprawling brick hotel came into view. It had several buildings attached together, the largest a ten-story tower dotted with loggias, all brick with white accents, so thick and shiny that they looked frosted on. It looked far better than the prison Emi had imagined.
“No, not scared,” said Emi, hugging her. “It’s home to me. I just wish we were going back under different circumstances.”
“Are you Japanese? I thought you were an English like our auntie. You talk like an English,” said Mirai.
“And you speak like a Canadian. It’s the curse of the diplomat’s child,” said Emi, pointing to the hotel. “In Berlin I knew a Japanese woman who learned English in Australia and she sounded quite wild. So sounding British, or Canadian, isn’t so bad.”
“My Japanese is bad,” said Mirai.
“No it’s not,” said Emi, who had heard her speak Japanese when they’d been living in the embassy together. “And you’ll improve once we’re all over there.”
The Japanese diplomats and their families stayed at the Homestead for four months, eating well and living in peace. Though there was hardly any school for the children, and all their parents’ bank accounts were frozen, making money an eventual problem, they were allowed to move around the grounds with relative freedom. Emi and the other young people took advantage of their isolation and went on snowy hikes, explored the old halls, and went swimming in the enormous swimming pool as soon as it was warm enough. Emi was even allowed to play the hotel’s piano, something she did on a near-daily basis.
The first night she had played, Ambassador Nomura himself had sat to listen, swaying gently to the Debussy piece and then requesting some American jazz.
“You play incredibly well,” the ambassador had said when she was done. “No, that’s an understatement. You play like a professional musician.”
Emi thanked him politely before leaving him in the company of her father.
As Emi had hoped, her father had promised her that he, and even the ambassador, had not known that Japan was planning to attack Pearl Harbor before it happened. It came as an enormous shock to them, as Ambassador Nomura had been trying desperately to negotiate with the Americans, to keep the two countries from going to war with each other. “Sadly, diplomats do not have as much sway as we think,” said Norio to his relieved daughter.
After months of their Virginia hotel life, the dipl
omatic community was finally told that they had a sail date. They would leave for Japan on June 10, 1942. But before they did, they were all being moved to yet another luxury resort, where the German diplomatic community had been housed, the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
The hotel in West Virginia was much like the one in Virginia, sprawling, elegant, historic, and very isolated. High in the Allegheny Mountains, the resort, like the last one, originally beckoned visitors to its hot springs.
“Like onsen?” Emi had asked her mother when they arrived, imagining the beautiful Japanese baths in the mountain towns outside Tokyo.
“Not as nice,” said Keiko. “And you have to wear clothes. You know the Americans.”
But, they admitted, the hotel was beautiful. All white and built in the classical revival style with four wide columns out front and long wings on each side. Emi approached it with much less trepidation than she had the Homestead.
The Germans were very happy to have the Japanese there, and Emi felt that suddenly their luxurious prison became mostly cocktail parties with the German diplomats, which her parents occasionally let her attend, especially if she had been babysitting the Shiga children the night before. Emi was surprised that many of the American wives of German diplomats were terrified to go to Germany. Some had never set foot in the country and weren’t fluent in German. Other wives were very pro-Hitler, which surprised Emi less. Those she avoided entirely, though she did spill a champagne cocktail on one particularly anti-Semitic woman, who was so drunk that she didn’t even notice.
“Why did the government decide to ally themselves with the Germans, again?” the eldest Shiga daughter, Anna, asked the next day. Though only fifteen, she had been at the cocktail party the night before, too, and had heard the drunk German woman call Jews “as disposable as table scraps.”
