I was almost one of them. Papa stepped in just before my baptism day. If he had been there during those early months I probably would never have started spending time with the Maryknolls. He was always suspicious of organized religions. I think he had already tried to scare me away from Catholics. That was one of his prime methods of instruction: fear. On my way home from school each day in Ocean Park I would break into a run as I passed the local Catholic church. The nuns I glimpsed were robed and ghostly figures I wanted no part of.
Culturally we were like those Jews who observe certain traditions but never visit a synagogue. We kept a little Buddhist shrine in the house, and we celebrated a few Japanese holidays that were religiously connected—the way Christmas is. But we never said prayers. I had never been inside a Buddhist church. And as for Christianity, I had not heard the word God until we reached Terminal Island. I first heard about Jesus when the one friend I made there—another Japanese girl—took me to a Baptist Sunday School on the island, where a Caucasian teacher bewildered me with pictures of Iambs and donkeys and golden-domed pavilions.
For some reason these did not appeal to me nearly as much as the stories of the saints and martyrs I heard a few months later when I began to study catechism with the Maryknolls. Soon I was over there every afternoon and most of Sunday. With no regular school to attend and no home to spend time in, it’s no mystery that I should have been drawn to these two kind and generous women. They had organized a recreation program. They passed out candy. But what kept me coming back, once I started, were the tales of the unfortunate women like Saint Agatha, whose breasts were cut off when she refused to renounce her faith.
I had to walk nearly a mile to reach their chapel, and walk a mile back. That summer it was miserably hot, over one hundred degrees most days. Yet I made the trip gladly. A big homely girl about twenty years old who wore boys’ shoes and an Eisenhower jacket taught catechism to the younger kids. She loved to sit us down and fix us with the eye of a mother superior and tell us about Saint Agatha, or Saint Juliana, who was boiled alive, or Saint Marcella, who was whipped to death by the Goths.
I was fascinated with the miseries of women who had suffered and borne such afflictions. On my way home, I would hike past row upon row of black barracks, watching mountains waver through that desert heat, with the sun trying to dry up my very blood, and imagine in some childish way that I was among them, that I too was up there on the screen of history, in a white lace catechism dress, sweating and grimy, yet selflessly carrying my load.
I fulfilled this little fantasy one blistering afternoon when the heat finally got me. Sunstroke. While crossing one of the wide sandy firebreaks that separated some of the blocks, I passed out.
This put me in bed for a week. After I recovered, several months went by before I resumed my catechism. For one thing, Papa discouraged me. It was just before this happened that he had returned from Fort Lincoln. He was back among us, making decisions, giving commands. For a while it seemed we would almost be a family again. But it didn’t turn out that way. He was not the same man. Something terrible had happened to him in North Dakota.
He arrived at Manzanar on a Greyhound bus. We all went down to the main gate to meet him, everyone but Woody’s wife, Chizu, who was in the camp hospital. The previous day she’d given birth to Papa’s first grandson. She named him George, in honor of Papa’s return. Two of my sisters were pregnant at the time, and they were there at the gate in hot-weather smocks, along with Woody, who had left the hospital long enough to welcome Papa back, and Granny and Mama and the rest of the family, a dozen of us standing in the glare, excited, yet very reverent as the bus pulled in.
The door whished open, and the first thing we saw was a cane—I will never forget it—poking from the shaded interior into sunlight, a straight, polished maple limb spotted with dark lidded eyes where small knotholes had been stained and polished.
Then Papa stepped out, wearing a fedora hat and a wilted white shirt. This was September 1942. He had been gone nine months. He had aged ten years. He looked over sixty, gaunt, wilted as his shirt, underweight, leaning on that cane and favoring his right leg. He stood there surveying his clan, and nobody moved, not even Mama, waiting to see what he would do or say, waiting for some cue from him as to how we should deal with this.
I was the only one who approached him. I had not thought of him much at all after he was taken away. He was simply gone. Now I was so happy to see him that I ran up and threw my arms around his waist and buried my face in his belt. I thought I should be laughing and welcoming him home. But I started to cry. By this time everyone was crying. No one else had moved yet to touch him. It was as if the youngest, the least experienced, had been appointed to display what the others, held back by awe or fear, or some old-country notion of respect for the patriarch, could not. I hugged him tighter, wanting to be happy that my father had come back. Yet I hurt so inside I could only welcome him with convulsive tears.
six
Whatever He Did Had Flourish
THAT CANE PAPA BROUGHT BACK WITH HIM HE had carved and polished himself in North Dakota. When his limp went away he continued to use it. He didn’t need to. He liked it, as a kind of swagger stick, such as military officers sometimes use. When he was angry he would wield it like the flat of a sword, whacking out at his kids or his wife or his hallucinations. He kept that cane for years, and it served him well. I see it now as a sad, homemade version of the samurai sword his great-great-grandfather carried in the land around Hiroshima, at a time when such warriors weren’t much needed anymore, when their swords were both their virtue and their burden. It helps me understand how Papa’s life could end at a place like Manzanar. He didn’t die there, but things finished for him there, whereas for me it was like a birthplace. The camp was where our lifelines intersected.
He was the oldest son in a family that had for centuries been of the samurai class. He used to brag that they had owned more land than you could cross on horseback in a single day. By the time he was born, in 1887, they weren’t warriors any longer. Japan was in the throes of that rapid, confusing metamorphosis from a feudal to an industrial nation, which began when Commodore Perry’s black-hulled armada steamed into Tokyo Bay and forced the Japanese to open their ports and cities to western trade.
Papa’s grandfather was a judge, at one point a magistrate for the small, lovely island of Miya-jima. He had four children, including one son, Papa’s father. His three daughters were among the first women in Japan to receive university degrees. One daughter married an army general who for a time governed Formosa, and it was this uncle-general who encouraged Papa to enroll in a military school.
As far as everyone could see he was preparing for a career in the navy. Then, at seventeen, he abruptly dropped out. His favorite aunt lent him some money, and a short time later he bought passage on a ship bound for the Hawaiian Islands. That was the last anyone in Japan saw or heard of him.
In those days he was a headstrong idealist. He was spoiled, the ways eldest sons usually are in Japan, used to having his way, and he did not like what he saw happening to the family. Ironically, it foreshadowed just the sort of thing he himself would be faced with later on: too many children and not enough money. His fathers first wife bore five children. When she died, he remarried and four more came along. His father, who had been a public official, ended up running a “teahouse” in Hiroshima—something like a cabaret. It was a living, but Papa wanted no part of this. In the traditional Japanese class system, samurai ranked just below nobility; then came farmers and those who worked the land. Merchants ranked fourth, below the farmers. For Papa, at seventeen, it made no difference that times were hard; the idea of a teahouse was an insult to the family name. What’s more, their finances were in such a state that even as eldest son there was almost nothing for him to look forward to. The entire area around Hiroshima, mainly devoted to agriculture, was suffering a severe depression. In 1886 Japan had for the first time allowed its citizens to emigrate, and
thousands from his district had already left the country in search of better opportunities. Papa followed them.
He reached Honolulu in 1904, with a letter of introduction to a cousin who taught school on Oahu. Papa used to tell the story of his first stroll through town, just off the boat and wanting to stretch his legs before looking up his relatives. He came across a sign outside a building that said in three languages WORKERS WANTED. Proud that he could read the English as well as the Japanese, he figured he’d have an edge over anyone else applying. He was feeling cocky anyway on this first day in the new world, seventeen years old and a little money burning in his pocket. He stepped into a men’s shop a few doors down and bought himself a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, a new hat—everything he’d seen the most prosperous men along the street wearing. He changed clothes in the store, then went to see about that job.
He followed arrows from the sign to the back of the building, where he found a yard full of half-dressed Chinese and Japanese field hands waiting in line to apply for work in the sugar cane. His disdain for them was met with laughter. They looked at him as if he were a maniac, pointing with derision at his dandy’s outfit. He rushed back to the street, cursing, dismayed, humiliated, heading for the safety of his cousin’s.
A few weeks later he was introduced to a vacationing American, a lawyer from Idaho who offered to pay his passage to the states and provide room and board in exchange for three years’ work as a houseboy. Papa accepted. It looked better than sweating in the fields, which was how most of his countrymen were making their new start. And one imagines that the American mainland glittered for him the way it did for all those entrepreneurs and pilgrims and runaways and adventurers who crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific hoping to carve out a piece of it for themselves.
In Idaho he worked as a valet, a cook, a chauffeur, a mechanic, a general handyman. He learned to roast turkeys and to drive a Pierce-Arrow sedan, and he perfected the English he had begun to learn before he left Japan.
In all, he spent five years with this family. Then his patron helped him enter the University of Idaho as an undergraduate, aiming toward a law degree. Papa used to joke that if he hadn’t met Mama he might have ended up a senator.
“She was too pretty,” her brother Charlie once said. “Ko couldn’t leave her alone. She was the only Japanese girl in the whole northwest worth looking at. I think there were two others around in those days, and they were both so skinny they could hide behind cornstalks.”
Mama’s father came from a family of stonecutters around Niigata, on the inner coast of northern Japan. But she was born in Hawaii where her father had come to do the backbreaking work Papa luckily avoided—a three-year labor contract on a sugar-cane plantation, ten hours a day, six days a week, for twelve dollars and fifty cents a month. Completing that, he worked his way to the mainland and set out with his three sons to find a piece of land. They settled in the rich farm country around Spokane, in eastern Washington. In 1906 Mama and Granny joined them there. Granny was thirty then, Mama was ten. They sailed into San Francisco Bay on the morning after the earthquake and spent their first three days in America sitting offshore watching the city go up in flames.
Her family had high hopes for Mama. She was their only daughter. In those days Japanese women on the mainland were rare, one for every seven or eight Japanese men. Most men had to go back to Japan to find a woman, or take their chances on a “picture bride.” Mama was worth a lot, and before she finished high school they had promised her to the upright son of a well-to-do farmer in the territory.
She met Papa early one summer morning at a wholesale market where her family sold produce. Papa was unloading trucks and wagonloads of vegetables. She was seventeen, small, buxom, with a classically round face of a kind much admired among Japanese. He was twenty-five, a sometime law student who spent his summers working around Spokane. He liked to shoot pool in his spare time, he played cards and dressed like a man from a much flashier part of the country. He was also pitching for a semi-pro baseball team called Nippon. We have a picture of him down on one knee for the team photo, in the front row, his mitted left hand resting on the other knee, his thick hair loose, his eyes showing a cocky confidence. His lean jaw bulges slightly, as if holding a small plug of tobacco, in the manner of Ty Cobb, whose style was the one to imitate about that time.
Mamas parents were terrified when they saw him coming. He not only led what seemed to them a perilously fast life; he also borrowed money. The story goes that he once asked Mama to borrow as much as she could from Granny. All Granny had at the time was a five-dollar bill. She gave it to Mama, who passed it on to Papa, who then came stalking into the kitchen, stiff-backed, glaring scornfully at Granny. He was insulted. “It’s not enough,” he said. “Five dollars. I need more than five dollars. If that’s all you’ve got, I’d rather have nothing!” And he threw the bill into the fire.
The first time Mama ran away with him, her brothers came looking for her, brought her back to the family farm, and locked her in a second-story room. Mama was so desolate, her oldest brother Charlie couldn’t stand it. He leaned a ladder up to her window, forced the latch and let her out.
That time they got away, got married, and made it down to Salem, Oregon, where Papa cooked in a restaurant and she worked as a nurse and dietician until my oldest brother was born, in 1916.
After that she had a child about every two years, nine in the next eighteen, and Papa kept moving, looking for the job, or the piece of land, or the inspiration that would make him his fortune and give him the news he hoped all his life he would one day be able to send back to his relatives: Wakatsuki Ko made it big in America and has restored some honor to his family’s name.
Education mattered a great deal to him. In later years he would brag to us that he “went to law school” and imply that he held some kind of degree from a northern university. It’s true that everywhere he stopped he’d be helping a friend through one legal squabble or another—an immigration problem, a repossessed fishing boat. He worked for the government at one point, translating legal documents. But as badly as he wanted us to believe it, he never did finish law school. Who knows why? He was terribly proud, sometimes absurdly proud, and he refused to defer to any man. Maybe, in training for that profession in those years before the First World War, he saw ahead of him prejudices he refused to swallow, humiliations he refused to bear.
On the other hand, his schooling was like almost everything else he tried. For all his boasts and high intentions, he never quite finished anything he set out to do. Something always stopped him: bad luck, a racial barrier, a law, his own vanity or arrogance or fear of losing face.
For a couple of years he tried lumberjacking in Seattle. We have another old photo, this one from the twenties, that shows him standing on a railroad siding, with his boots spread wide, one hand in his jeans pocket and the other holding a wide-brim hat flung high in boisterous greeting—a Nipponese frontiersman with the pine forests rising behind him.
In Oregon he learned a little dentistry (a skill he later put to good use at Manzanar, where he made dozens of dentures free of charge). He tried farming there too. The alien land laws prevented him from owning property, but he could lease the land, or make a tenancy deal and work it.
A few years before I was born he had settled the family on a twenty-two-acre farm near Watsonville, California, raising apples, strawberries, and a few vegetable crops. He was making good money, living in a big Victorian house, and it looked as if he’d found his castle at last. But his luck didn’t hold. The well went dry. Thirty years after sailing away from a financial dead end and the remnants of a once-noble family in Japan, he found himself in the middle of America’s Depression and on the move again, with eight kids and a wife this time, working his way down the California coast picking prunes, peaches, Brussels sprouts, sending his children into the orchards like any migrant worker’s family, hoping their combined earnings would leave a little left over after everyone was fed and
the cars gassed up for the next day’s search for work.
Just before I was born he leased another piece of land, in Inglewood, outside Los Angeles, and farmed again, briefly. Then, deciding land was too risky for investing either time or money, he turned to the ocean, started fishing out of Santa Monica, and did well enough at it through the late thirties that by December of 1941 he had those two boats, The Waka and The Nereid, a lease on that beach house in Ocean Park, and a nearly new Studebaker he had made a down payment on two weeks before Pearl Harbor was attacked.
The start of World War II was not the climax to our life in Ocean Park. Pearl Harbor just snipped it off, stopped it from becoming whatever else lay ahead. Papa might have lost his business anyway—who knows—sunk his boat perhaps, the way Woody almost sank one off Santa Monica a few years later, when he motored into the largest school of mackerel he’d ever seen, got so excited hauling in the fish he let them pile up on deck, and didn’t notice water slipping through the gunwale slits and into the hold until the bow went under.
If any single event climaxed those prewar years, it was, for me at least, the silver wedding anniversary we celebrated in 1940. Papa was elegant that day, in a brand-new doublebreasted worsted suit, with vest and silk tie and stickpin. He was still the dude, always the dude, no matter what, spending more money on his clothes than on anything else. Mama wore a long, crocheted, rose-colored dress. And I see them standing by our round dining room table, this time heaped not with food but with silver gifts—flatware, tureens, platters, trays, gravy bowls, and brandy snifters. The food was spread along a much larger table, buffet style, in glistening abundance-chicken teriyaki, pickled vegetables, egg rolls, cucumber and abalone salad, the seaweed-wrapped rice balls called sushi, shrimp, prawns, fresh lobster, and finally, taking up what seemed like half the tablecloth, a great gleaming roast pig with a bright red apple in its mouth.
Farewell to Manzanar Page 4
