Farewell to Manzanar

by James D Houston

  Even at ten, before I really knew what waited outside, the Japanese in me could not compete with that. It tried—in camp, and many times later, in one form or another. My visit to the old geisha who lived across the firebreak was a typical example of how those attempts turned out. She was offering lessons in the traditional dancing called odori. A lot of young girls studied this in order to take part in the big obon festival held every August, a festival honoring dead ancestors, asking them to bring good crops in the fall.

  She was about seventy, a tiny, aristocratic-looking woman. She took students in her barracks cubicle, which was fitted out like a little Buddhist shrine, with tatami mats on the floor. She would kneel in her kimono and speak very softly in Japanese, while her young assistant would gracefully swing closed knees or bend her swanlike neck to the old geishas instructions.

  I sat across the room from her for an hour trying to follow what was going on. It was all a mystery. I had never learned the language. And this woman was so old, even her dialect was foreign to me. She seemed an occult figure, more spirit than human. When she bowed to me from her knees at the end of the hour, I rushed out of there, back to more familiar surroundings.

  Something about her fascinated me though. For a while I tried to keep in contact with her lore via the reports of two girls from my class, Reiko and Mitsue, who had stayed on as students. Because they came from wealthy families and spoke and understood both English and Japanese, they had high opinions of themselves. Whenever I pressed them for details of what they’d learned, they would tease me.

  “A good dancer must have good skin,” Reiko would say. “In order to have good skin you must rub Rose Brilliantine Hair Tonic on your face and rub cold cream in your hair.”

  I went home and did this secretly, when no one else was around, and waited for my skin to become the skin of an odori dancer.

  “You have to think about your clothing,” Mitsue would tell me. “A good dancer is recognized by her clothing. You should wear your stockings inside out and never, never wear any underpants.”

  I did this too, on the sly, until Mama asked me why my socks were always inside out, and why I was wearing nothing underneath my dress. She was not amused when I explained it to her. She told me to stay away from those girls, they were just being mean, and if I wanted lessons from the old geisha woman, Mama herself would take me over there and arrange it. I shook my head and told her no, I didn’t want to do that right now. I had another kind of dancing in mind.

  This time it was ballet. I had never seen ballet. I’d only heard of it. But it sounded like something I would want to do. In Ocean Park I had taken tap-dancing lessons; my older brothers would coax me to perform for visitors, and it gained me a lot of attention. In camp I had already danced in a couple of talent shows. When the word came around that a woman was offering ballet lessons, I showed up, with three other young girls. It was a dusty day anyhow, and there wasn’t much you could do outside.

  The classroom was an abandoned barracks. No one had lived there for months. Light showed through the warped planking. It was almost like going back two years to the day we first arrived, except that a piano sat on the bare, splintered boards, and here was a thirtyish Japanese woman, with her hair pulled back in a chignon, wearing a pink tutu, a pair of pink toe-dancing shoes, and no tights.

  At the piano sat a young girl with glasses on, studying some sheet music in the not quite adequate light from a single overhead bulb. When we were all in the room and seated on the floor, she began to play, and the dancer began to dance as if she were the one trying out, not us. She twirled, and she leaped from wall to wall, flinging her arms. She had been a good dancer once, but now she was overweight, and sad to watch, even in the eyes of a ten-year-old who had never seen this kind of dancing.

  I was intrigued by her strange, flat-toed shoes, badly frayed, worn down by the boards. I stared too at her legs. I could not stop watching them while she spun, sidestepping knotholes. They were thick, white, blue-veined, tapering sharply from the quivering thighs, the kind of legs my older sisters would have called daikon ashi (daikon means horseradish; ashi is leg).

  She began to show us a few steps and tricks, beginning with the splits. She hoisted herself and reversed her torso and came down again with her legs spread. I winced, sure the planks would tear her skin. Then she got the four of us up to try first position, which I did mainly out of courtesy, in order not to hurt the feelings of this heavy woman with her daikon ashi and her shredded shoes.

  After showing us the first three ballet positions she sat down to rest. She took her shoes off. Her toes were showing blood. I noticed then the lines in her face, the traces of gray in her black hair. I felt so sorry for her I decided to go ahead and sign up for her course. But once I left that room, back out into the dusty, wind-flurried afternoon, I never did return. Ballet seemed then some terrible misuse of the body, and she was so anxious to please us, her very need to hold on to whatever she had been scared me away.

  Among my explorations during these months, there was one more, final venture into Catholicism. The Maryknoll chapel was just up the street now and easy to get to. I resumed my catechism. Once again I was listening with rapt terror to the lives of the saints and the martyrs, although that wasn’t really what attracted me this time. I had found another kind of inspiration, had seen another way the church might make me into something quite extraordinary.

  I had watched a girl my own age shining at the center of one of their elaborate ceremonies. It appealed to me tremendously. She happened to be an orphan, and I figured that if this much could befall an orphan, imagine how impressive I would look in such a role.

  I had long observed her from a distance, a slim and lovely girl, and always aloof, because of the way other kids treated orphans there, as if a lack of parents put you somehow beneath everyone else. I confess I felt that way myself. Orphans were in a class apart. In Block 28 we saw them often. “Childrens Village,” where Sister Suzanne and Sister Bernadette put in a good deal of time, was as near to us as their chapel—two blocks away in the opposite direction. Each day about a dozen of them, including this girl, would come trooping past our barracks on the way to a catechism lesson. On days I intended to go, I would wait till they were half a block ahead, so I wouldn’t be seen arriving in their midst.

  This girl had already been baptized. What I witnessed was her confirmation. She was dressed like a bride, in a white gown, white lace hood, and sheer veil, walking toward the altar, down the aisle of that converted barracks. Watching her from the pew I was pierced with envy for the position she had gained. At the same time I was filled with awe and with a startled wonder at the notion that this girl, this orphan, could become such a queen.

  A few days later I let it be known that I was going to be baptized into the church and confirmed as soon as the nuns thought I was ready. I announced this to the Sisters and they rejoiced. I announced it at home, and Papa exploded.

  “No,” he roared. “Absolutely not!”

  I just stood there, stunned, too scared to speak.

  “You’re too young!”

  I started to cry.

  “How are you going to get married?” he shouted. “If you get baptized a Catholic, you have to marry a Catholic. No Japanese boys are in the Catholic church. You get baptized now, how are you going to find a good Japanese boy to marry?”

  I ran to Mama, but she knew better than to argue with him about this. I ran to the chapel and told Sister Bernadette, and she came hurrying to the barracks. She and Papa had become pretty good friends over the months. Once every week or so she would visit, and while he sipped his apricot brandy they would talk about religion. But this time, when she came to the door and called “Wakatsuki-san?” he met her there shouting, “No! No baptism!”

  She raised her eyebrows, trying to stare him down.

  He rose to his full height, as if she, about the size of Mama, were the general of some invading army, and said, “Too young!”

  “Old
enough to know God!”

  “Who knows anything of God at ten?”

  This made her angry. At any other time they would have taken an hour hearing each other out. But now, when she opened her mouth to reply, his upheld flat palm stopped her. He was not going to argue. He wouldn’t even let her past the door.

  In exasperation she glared at him, then turned and walked away. I ran to my bunk, devastated, and wept, hating him. I was too ashamed to go back to catechism after that. I just hated Papa, for weeks, and dreamed of the white-gowned princess I might have become. Late afternoons, practicing my baton in the firebreak, angrily I would throw him into the air and watch him twirl, and catch him, and throw him high, again and again and again.

  fourteen

  In the Firebreak

  HE WAS RIGHT, OF COURSE. I DID NOT KNOW what I was getting myself into. Years later I silently thanked him for forcing me to postpone such decisions until I was old enough to think for myself. But at the time it was unforgivable. And it was typical of his behavior during those days. He had no boat crew to command, no income to manage, no trips to plan, not even a dining table to preside over. He would putter blandly along, then suddenly, unexpectedly, as if to remind himself he was still in charge of something, he would burst out like that, his intentions right, but his manner stubborn and relentless, forcing distances between us.

  As his youngest child I had grown up blessed with special attentions. Now, more and more I found myself cut off from him. When I needed reassurance I would get it from Woody or Chizu, or from Mama, who had more of herself to give by this time. Then one afternoon there came a moment when I was cut off from both of them, Papa and Mama together. It wasn’t loneliness I felt, or isolation; they were still within reach. Rather, it was that first, brief flicker of total separateness. It could have occurred anywhere we might have been living; I had reached the age. This scene happened to be set in one of the firebreaks at Manzanar.

  My oldest sister Eleanor figures in it. She lay in the camp hospital, trying to give birth to a baby she had thought she’d be having in Reno, Nevada, where she and her husband Shig had relocated in 1943. Through friends they had found a house there, and Shig lined up a job in a restaurant. Early in 1944 the government decided that Nisei should be eligible for Selective Service, like all other American citizens. A few months later Shig was drafted. Eleanor, pregnant, could find neither work nor money enough to pay for having a baby. She couldn’t stay in Reno and she couldn’t go with Shig to the army’s training camp in Louisiana, so she voluntarily reentered camp.

  When she went into the hospital, it was a time of great anxiety in our family. Two of my other sisters had borne children there. They had both hemorrhaged badly, and blood plasma was in short supply, our needs being low on the wartime priority list. One sister might have died had not Woody provided blood by direct transfusion. In the case of a sister-in-law of ours, who had miscarried and hemorrhaged, no one was able to arrest it in time, and she just bled to death in her hospital bed.

  These memories were very much with us. Papa, in particular, was worried. Eleanor was his oldest daughter, and this was her first child. Her husband had gone to Germany with an infantry division, and now she was struggling through the second day of a difficult labor. He and Mama were taking turns sitting with her. And what I remember, late the second afternoon, is Mama running toward us from the other side of the firebreak. I was walking with Papa, as he started out for the hospital, and here she came, small, and running, all bundled up—it was December—shouting, “Ko! Ko!” making little puffs of frost in the icy air.

  I looked at Papa, and his face had filled with terror. He tried to run to meet her, but couldn’t, could barely keep his stride. His look filled me with terror too. I was sure Eleanor had died in the hospital. Our fear must have held back Mama’s progress. It seemed we watched her run for minutes across that stretch of cleared sand. There was room enough for a football game, or an entire parade. In my eyes then, it was a threatening openness, a no man’s land.

  We met her in the sand, Mama breathless, small in front of him, looking up, saying, “Ko! Ko, it’s a boy!”

  His face gave way. His eyes filled. “A boy!”

  “Yes!”

  “And Eleanor?”

  “Yes. Okay!”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re both okay.”

  His tears let go, unchecked. Mama was already crying. She began to talk excitedly, jabbering the details. As the news sunk in, my fear was replaced by an odd detachment. The burden fell away, leaving me afloat, and I was a spectator witnessing the nearest to a love scene I would ever see between them. My own perception removed me from it. I was more awed than aware, but I knew whatever I was watching was somehow both tender and profound, with an intimacy that made me invisible to them.

  Papa put an arm around her, needing her support. He was wearing the rust-colored turtleneck sweater he used to take on fishing trips, the one she had knitted for him before the war. Now, as she talked, the fingers of one hand played over its yarn, as if inspecting her own workmanship. While the late sun turned this rusty sweater dark shades of orange, they stood there in the great expanse of the firebreak, far out from the rows of barracks, weeping with relief and happiness, talking quietly, just the two of them.

  fifteen

  Departures

  IN THE MONTHS TO COME THEY WOULD DRAW together even more closely, just as I would hold to them—my moment of separateness a foreshadowing, but not yet a reality. Our family had begun to dwindle, along with the entire camp population. By the end of 1944 about 6,000 people remained, and those, for the most part, were the aging and the young. Whoever had prospects on the outside, and the energy to go, was leaving, relocating, or entering military service. No one could blame them. To most of the Nisei, anything looked better than remaining in camp. For many of their parents, just the opposite was true.

  Eleanor and Shig had been the first of my family to leave. A few months after she had her baby, she moved back to Reno to stay with friends there. The next to go was Woody who, in August 1944, had been drafted. When the notice came he showed it to Papa.

  “And now what will you do?” Papa said glumly.

  “I have to go.”

  “What if you refused to answer the letter.”

  “It’s my duty.”

  “What about those twenty-six boys from Tule Lake who refused to report? The judge in San Francisco ruled that they were right. It was in the papers. You can’t lock somebody up because he might be disloyal, and then make him join the army. That was the judge’s conclusion.”

  “Well, right now Tom Dobashi who used to live over in Block Nine is in jail in Los Angeles for refusing to report for his physical.”

  “He was already in jail.”

  Woody blinked, missing the point at first. Then, he grinned. “C’mon, Pop. It’s not that bad out here. Not anymore.”

  “Then why don’t you stay?”

  “I’m gonna stay. For a while. Until they call me up. They put me in the reserve unit in camp. It could be months. Maybe the war will be over by then.”

  His unit was called up in November. We all went down to see them off at the main gate—nineteen young men in their teens and twenties, some wearing suits and ties, some, like Woody, wearing overcoats and neck scarves against the cold, carrying satchels, traveling bags, shaving kits. They lined up two deep for a photo that ran later in the camp paper. Then we watched Woody join the shuffling line and climb aboard.

  For me it was almost like watching Papa leave again. I didn’t know where he was going or understand quite why. When his bus pulled out I only knew that if anything happened to him the world would probably be coming to an end, because nothing could happen to Woody. He had always been so solid. I hugged Mama while we watched his final wave through the window, his mustache lifting above that impish smile, as if we had all just pulled a fast one on the world.

  Chizu was with us, waving back. This made it almost like the day,
three years earlier, we had watched the boats sail out of San Pedro Harbor, except that Chizu had two children now, and instead of a handful of fishermen’s wives, there were 500 others with us here. They had turned out, like people in small towns all over the country, to watch their young men leave. The 442nd Combat Regiment was famous now, full of heroes, fighting in Europe to help the Allies win the war, and showing that Niseis too could be patriots. Woody was that kind of Nisei, anxious to prove to the world his loyalty, his manhood, something about his family honor. Climbing aboard he must have been thinking of those things, while Mama, no doubt, was thinking of the mother at Manzanar who had already received a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor on behalf of her son who’d been killed in Italy.

  In these ways it was a typical wartime departure, full of proud smiles and half-concealed worry. In other ways it was edged with unique uncertainties. Families were being further torn asunder, and those left behind knew no more about their own fate than they did of the loved ones moving on. Would we still be here after the war? Would we be living forever in the summer heat and winter wind of Owens Valley? And if not here, then where else?

  The answers to these questions, when they came, only added to our insecurity.

  sixteen

  Free to Go

  THE ANSWERS BEGAN WITH A SUPREME COURT ruling that December, in the case called Ex Parte Endo. It was the last of three key cases heard since the camps had opened.

  In the first, Gordon Hirabayashi, a Nisei student from the University of Washington, challenged the evacuation order. He had also violated the army’s curfew, imposed early in 1942 on all West Coast Japanese. He challenged the racial bias of these actions and the abuse of his civil rights. The court avoided the issue of the evacuation itself by ruling on the curfew. It upheld the army’s decision to limit the movements of a racially select group of citizens. The reasoning: wartime necessity.