In the second case, the issue was the exclusion orders that removed us from our homes and sent us inland. Fred Korematsu, a young Nisei living in Oakland, had ignored the evacuation to stay with his Caucasian girlfriend. He had plastic surgery done on his face, he changed his name, and was posing as a Spanish Hawaiian when the FBI caught up with him. In court, the racial bias was challenged again. Why were no German Americans evacuated, it was asked, or Americans of Italian descent? Weren’t these nations our enemies too? Due process had been violated, Korematsu claimed, along with other constitutional rights. But the army’s decision to evacuate was also upheld by the Supreme Court.
The final case challenged the internment itself. Soon after she was evacuated, in April 1942, Mitsue Endo, a twenty-one-year-old Nisei and an employee of the California State Highway Commission, had filed a petition for habeus corpus, protesting her detention at Topaz Camp in central Utah. She spent two and a half years awaiting the high court’s decision, which was that she had been right: the government cannot detain loyal citizens against their will.
Anticipating this ruling, the army’s Western Defense Command had already announced that the mass exclusion orders of 1942 were being rescinded. Next it was announced that all the camps would be closed within the coming twelve months and that internees now had the right to return to their former homes.
In our family the response to this news was hardly joyful. For one thing we had no home to return to. Worse, the very thought of going back to the West Coast filled us with dread. What will they think of us, those who sent us here? How will they look at us? Three years of wartime propaganda—racist headlines, atrocity movies, hate slogans, and fright-mask posters—had turned the Japanese face into something despicable and grotesque. Mama and Papa knew this. They had been reading the papers. Even I knew this, although it was not until many years later that I realized how bad things actually were.
In addition to the traditionally racist organizations like the American Legion and The Native Sons of The Golden West, who had been agitating against the West Coast Japanese for decades, new groups had sprung up during the war, with the specific purpose of preventing anyone of Japanese descent from returning to the coast—groups like No Japs Incorporated in San Diego, The Home Front Commandoes in Sacramento, and The Pacific Coast Japanese Problem League in Los Angeles. Also, some growers’ associations, threatened by the return of interned farmers, had been using the war as a way to foment hostile feelings in the major farming areas.
What’s more, our years of isolation at Manzanar had widened the already spacious gap between the races, and it is not hard to understand why so many preferred to stay where they were. Before the war one of the standard charges made against the Japanese was their clannishness, their standoffishness, their refusal to assimilate. The camps had made this a reality in the extreme. After three years in our desert ghetto, at least we knew where we stood with our neighbors, could live more or less at ease with them.
Yet now the government was saying we not only were free to go; like the move out of Terminal Island, and the move to Owens Valley, we had to go. Definite dates were being fixed for the closing of the camp.
By January of ’45 a few determined internees were already trying to recover former homes and farmlands. Ominous reports of their reception began trickling back, to confirm our deepest fears. A Nisei man had been assaulted on the street in Seattle. A home was burned in San Jose. Nightriders carrying shotguns had opened fire on a farmhouse near Fresno, narrowly missing two sleeping children. Later on, in May, one of my sisters and her husband, leaving for the east, were escorted to the Southern Pacific depot in Los Angeles by armed guards, not because they were thought to be dangerous, but for their own protection.
Most of the Japanese returning to the coast resettled without suffering bodily harm. But gossip tends to thrive on bad news, not good. Stories such as these spread through the camp and grew in our minds like tumors. I remember hearing them discussed in our barracks, quietly, as if Ku Klux Klansmen lurked outside the window, the same way my brothers discussed our dilemma during the brief stay in Boyle Heights, before the evacuation.
I would listen to the stories and I would cringe. And this was both odd and confusing to me, because ever since we’d arrived, the outside world had loomed in my imagination as someplace inaccessible yet wonderfully desirable. I would recall our days in Ocean Park. I would flip through the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, dreaming of the dresses and boots and coats that were out there somewhere at the other end of the highway beyond the gate. All the truly good things, it often seemed, the things we couldn’t get, were outside, and had to be sent for, or shipped in. In this sense, God and the Sears, Roebuck catalogue were pretty much one and the same in my young mind.
Once, during a novena at the Maryknoll chapel, I had asked for something I desperately longed for and had never seen inside the camp. We were told to ask for something we really wanted. We were to write it on a piece of paper, pray devoutly for nine days, and if we’d prayed well it would be answered. The nuns expected us to ask for purity of soul, or a holy life. I asked God for some dried apricots. I wrote this on a piece of paper, dropped it into the prayer box, and began to fantasize about how they would arrive, in a package from Sears, Roebuck. I knew how they would taste, and feel in my hands. I said my rosary, thirty times a day, for nine days, and for nine more days after that I waited. The dried apricots never came. My faith in God and in the Catholic church slipped several notches at that time. But not my faith in the outside, where all such good things could be found. I went back to flipping through the catalogue.
Those images, of course, had come from my past. What I had to face now, a year later, was the future. I was old enough to imagine it, and also old enough to fear it. The physical violence didn’t trouble me. Somehow I didn’t quite believe that, or didn’t want to believe such things could happen to us. It was the humiliation. That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it. At ten I saw that coming, like a judge’s sentence, and I would have stayed inside the camp forever rather than step outside and face such a moment.
I shared this particular paralysis with Mama and Papa, but not with my older brothers and sisters. The hostility worried them. But their desire to be rid of Manzanar outweighed that worry. They were in their twenties and had their lives to lead. They decided to take a chance on the east coast. It was 3,000 miles away, with no history of anti-Asianism, in fact no Asian history at all. So few people of Asian ancestry had settled there, it was like heading for a neutral country.
Bill was the first to make that move, with Tomi and their baby boy. He had lined up a job with Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, a new frozen-food enterprise that offered work to many Nisei at the end of the war. A few weeks later Frances and her husband joined them, followed by Martha and Kaz, then Lillian, who was just finishing her junior year in high school, and Ray.
As each cluster of relatives departed we’d say, “See you in New Jersey. Find us all a big house back there.”
What we told each other was that Bill and Frances and the others would go on ahead, make sure things could be worked out, then they’d send for the rest of us. “See you in New Jersey,” we would wave, as the bus pulled out taking someone else to the train station in L.A. But they all knew, even as they said it, that Papa would never move back east. As bad as the West Coast sounded, it was still his home territory. He was too old to start over, too afraid of rejection in an unknown part of the world, too stubborn and too tired to travel that far, and finally too proud to do piecework on an assembly line. Like so many Issei, he had, for better or worse, run his own businesses, been his own man for too long to tolerate the idea of working for someone else.
The truth was, at this point Papa did not know which way to turn. In the gover
nment’s eyes a free man now, he sat, like those black slaves you hear about who, when they got word of their freedom at the end of the Civil War, just did not know where else to go or what else to do and ended up back on the plantation, rooted there out of habit or lethargy or fear.
seventeen
It’s All Starting Over
IN JUNE THE SCHOOLS WERE CLOSED FOR GOOD. After a final commencement exercise the teachers were dismissed. The high school produced a second yearbook, Valediction 1945, summing up its years in camp. The introduction shows a page-wide photo of a forearm and hand squeezing pliers around a length of taut barbed wire strung beneath one of the towers. Across the page runs the caption, “From Our World ... through these portals ... to new horizons.”
That summer the farm outside the fence gradually shut down. Cultivation stopped. Crops in the ground were harvested as they ripened. Nothing new was planted. They began to auction off the tractors, the trucks and tools.
Then the word went out that the entire camp would close without fail by December 1. Those who did not choose to leave voluntarily would be scheduled for resettlement in weekly quotas. Once you were scheduled, you could choose a place—a state, a city, a town—and the government would pay your way there. If you didn’t choose, they’d send you back to the community you lived in before you were evacuated.
Papa gave himself up to the schedule. The government had put him here, he reasoned, the government could arrange his departure. What could he lose by waiting? Outside he had no job to go back to. A California law passed in 1943 made it illegal now for Issei to hold commercial fishing licenses. And his boats and nets were gone, he knew—confiscated or stolen. Here in camp he had shelter. The women and children still with him had enough to eat. He decided to sit it out as long as he could.
That August, as usual, it was brutally hot. He would sit in the shade on our barracks steps in his undershirt, reading the papers, reading aloud sometimes, to Mama and Granny, as he had done for his fellow inmates at Fort Lincoln, filling them in on the state of the world. He would read about Japan’s losses during those final weeks of the Pacific war and claim he had predicted it. He would read about the Russians moving into Korea and grumble that if the Americans occupied Japan there’d be another war within ten years, maybe five. He would read about the housing shortage all along the West Coast, brought on by wartime population growth, and he would throw the paper down in disgust.
“Aaagghh!”
“Why do you read the papers?” Mama would say. “It always makes you go aaagghh.”
“They have been so busy building tanks and bombers, they have run out of houses for everyone to live in.”
“It’s the war,” Mama said.
“So where do they think they are going to put people like us?”
“I was in the washroom this morning, and Akiko told me it is just like nineteen forty-two all over again. She got a letter from her sister in Los Angeles. Japanese people coming back from the camps are being put into trailers and Quonset huts. We should have left here when there were still houses to live in.”
“You are the one who wanted to wait,” Papa snapped.
“I said for a while.”
“For a while.” He mimicked her.
“So did you.”
He raised his voice. “You said it would be too hard on the kids.”
“You said so yourself.”
He shouted, rearing back to challenge her. “Then don’t tell me we waited too long!”
Mama’s eyes closed, squinting tight, shutting off the conversation. Her face became a web of creases.
“Jeannie,” she said to me. “Come over here. Momo my back a little bit.”
I was out there with them, in the shade in my shorts and barefooted, waiting for what little coolness might come at us through the pear trees. Most of the recreation leaders were gone by this time. Since the school closed, I had been running loose, and yet not running very far at all, sticking closer to our barracks now than ever before. I stood up and started massaging her shoulders.
“Harder,” she said. “There’s a knot someplace. I can feel it all the way up my neck, all around behind my eyes.”
I started pounding with my fists, like little pistons. Sometimes Kiyo and I would take turns doing this, up and down her back. Today, even the fists wouldn’t satisfy.
Gruffly Papa said, “Hey! You move over, Jeannie! Get outta the way.” He swung a leg behind Mama and sat down on the step above, digging his thumbs into the thick flesh below her neck.
Breath hissed in through her teeth. She let out two tiny groans. “Unh. Unh.”
He asked her, “What did Doctor Matsui say?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“Where was he?”
“He was there, but it was too crowded. I’m going back later. The whole hallway was filled up. Everybody has a headache, or a stomach ache, or a backache that cannot be explained. Everybody is sick. Everything is like nineteen forty-two. It is all starting over.”
“Hey!” he ordered. “You want a back rub? Sit up straight!”
He ground his elbow into the base of her neck, pushing it down her spine. Her groans got louder.
“Ooh. Ooh. That’s it. That’s almost it.”
“Listen,” he said. “Maybe we will not have to leave so soon. Last night at the block leaders meeting it was definitely decided that the camp must remain open until everyone has a place to go back to.”
“What does the administration say?”
“The block leaders are preparing a statement to take to them.”
“Do you think it will do any good?”
Papa did not answer. He was dragging his elbow slowly up one spinal muscle and staring down the street, where the answer to her question was everywhere pathetically evident. Leaves and windfall pears had piled up beneath the trees. In the park nearby, grass creepers edged out into the graveled paths. Little clusters of debris were slowing down the waterways. All around, you saw these signals of neglect, as if the camp itself were slowly, deliberately disintegrating in order to comply with the administrations deadline. Every day another barracks or two would fall empty. The outer blocks had long been deserted, filling up with tumbleweeds and sand. Right next to our stairs, in Papa’s rock garden, the moss was dry, the sand needed raking. No one bothered with it.
Mama said, “Ko.”
No answer.
“Ko?”
“What?”
“What are we going to do?”
“Wait.”
“For what?” she asked.
“Listen to me. I have an idea. All these people who are waiting in the hall to see Doctor Matsui, they are worried about where they are going to live and how they are going to make money on the outside. Is that not so?”
“Yes.”
“Suppose we organize some kind of a cooperative. For Japanese people coming back from the camps. We will design a housing project, and all the men looking for work will build houses.”
“You have to have some land for that,” Mama said.
“Of course.”
“You have to have money.”
“We will get a loan from the government. At the block leaders meeting it was decided that they must provide low-interest loans for families returning from the camps. They cannot deprive us of our homes and our fishing boats and our automobiles and lock us up for three years and then just turn us loose into the cities again. They have to help us get a new start.”
“Is this too in the statement they are preparing?”
“Yes. They deliver it at noon today.”
“Do you think the government will do anything?”
Again, Papa did not answer. They both knew what it would be. This time his long pause slipped into pure silence. Without the answer he could continue dabbling with the dream. Mamas eyes squinted shut. His fingers worked below her shoulder blades. He had found the knot, the tension node, and he homed in on it with a practiced knuckle. Mama rolled her head from side to
side, pulling at the tendons in her neck, groaning loudly now, hissing with the painful pleasure of his cure.
The last hope that something might postpone our returning to the outside world was extinguished on August 6 when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. That ended the Second World War. America had won. Internment camps were undeniably a thing of the past.
I remember seeing the newspaper photos of the mushroom cloud that bloomed above the city and hearing the murmurs that rose ever so quietly from the stunned, almost reverent hush all over camp. The unbelievable horror of what had happened was not yet known. This was as strange, as awesome, as mysteriously unnerving as Pearl Harbor had been. And in the same way that the first attack finished off one period in our lives, so this appalling climax marked the end of another.
Nine days later, all over America people were dancing in the streets. At Manzanar I suppose there was some rejoicing too. At least we were no longer the enemy. But the atomic bombing, if anything, just sharpened our worry. I still see Papa sitting on our steps for long hours, smoking cigarettes in his ivory holder, staring into the mountains he went to with his eyes whenever he needed sustenance. Here he sat, a man without prospects, perhaps now without even a family in Japan to confirm his own history, fifty-eight years old, and his children scattered across the land: Woody in the army at Fort Douglas, Utah; Eleanor in Reno; her husband in Germany with the occupation troops; Bill and Martha and Frances and Lillian in New Jersey; Ray now in the Coast Guard, the only service that would take him at the age of seventeen.
Papa read the papers and studied the changeless peaks, while all around us other families were moving out, forcing our name ever higher on the list. Every day busloads left from the main gate, heading south with their quotas, filled with Mamas and Papas and Grannies who had postponed movement as long as possible, and soldiers’ wives like Chizu, and children like Kiyo and May and me, too young yet to be out on our own. Some of the older folks resisted leaving right up to the end and had to have their bags packed for them and be physically lifted and shoved onto the buses. When our day finally arrived, in early October, there were maybe 2,000 people still living out there, waiting their turn and hoping it wouldn’t come.
Farewell to Manzanar Page 9
