by Dean Hughes
“You know what he would say. But from what I know, she isn’t doing anything bad.”
“Is she kissing those boys? Are they touching her? How do I know? It may be worse than that. I think you know what’s happened to the Fuji girl. Her mother’s heart is broken.”
“May isn’t like that. She—”
“I don’t know what she is, and now you want to leave me and let me figure out everything for myself. We won’t have your money, Yukus. You’ve gone out and worked, and that bought clothes for your brother and sisters and helped us get a little furniture. What now?”
“Mick can work. He should have been working all along.”
Mother looked back toward the barracks as a family walked out. She bowed her head and greeted them, wished them a pleasant Sunday. Yuki knew she was afraid of their noticing that the two were arguing, but Yuki didn’t care nearly so much about that. “Mom, I know this is hard. I’m not saying that it won’t be. But you told those FBI agents back in California that they shouldn’t arrest Father because we’re Americans. Do you remember that? How can you expect me to stay out of the war? We can’t have it both ways. I’m an American, and I’m going to prove it. White families are saying good-bye to their sons, and they don’t have a choice.”
“And what did those agents say about us? We’re ‘slant-eyed little Japs.’ How can we be Americans when people think of us that way?”
“There’s a better question than that, Mother. What will make them change their minds? That’s what I intend to do, starting tomorrow morning.” Mother looked doubtful, but she didn’t respond. “Think about this,” Yuki said. “All my life, Father has taught me never to shame my family, to be a man of honor. He doesn’t want me to leave you now, but what would he have done if the emperor had called him as a young man to fight for Japan?”
“You know what he would have done. He would have served. But everything is different here. No one called him names in Japan, and no one put him in prison.”
“That’s why some things have to change. But I still have to serve my country. It’s a matter of honor. Father ought to understand that better than anyone.”
Mother was finally looking down, no longer taking him on with her eyes. “I understand, Yukus. You must follow your own sense of duty. But must it be now? We have no idea whether your father will ever be released. We have no farm to go back to. What will I do if I don’t have your help when we finally get out of this place?”
“Mick has to grow up. That’s all. When the war is over, I’ll come back to you and we’ll go back to California.”
“Yes. And what if you don’t come back? How will I . . .”
She broke down. Yuki had seen her weep before, but never in a place like this, out where people might walk by. Sobs were breaking from deep inside her.
“Mother, I won’t take chances. I promise you that.”
“You can’t promise any such thing. War is chance. And all you talk about is coming home a hero, showing how brave you are. You’ll be killed, Yukus, and you are my firstborn son.”
She was still sobbing, and Yuki took her into his arms. “It’s a war we have to win, Mother. And I have to help fight it. Can’t you be proud of me for that?”
“Pride is a bad thing, Yukus. It’s an American idea that it’s good.”
“I still think you’re proud of me.”
Mother looked into his eyes, the tears streaming down her face. “Yes,” she finally said. “I am an American. And I am proud of you. I’m just very, very frightened.”
“I know. I am too. But we’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.”
CHAPTER 4
Yuki met with the recruiter the next morning—he and Shig—and they signed their enlistment papers. Shig had also had a long talk with his mother and father, and they had approved his decision. Shig didn’t tell Yuki exactly what he had said, but Yuki assumed he had told them the same kinds of things that Yuki had told his mother.
A week later, Yuki and Shig, along with a couple dozen other Nisei, readied themselves to board a bus and travel to Salt Lake City to undergo physical examinations. If they passed, they would be inducted into the United States Army. Shig had admitted to Yuki that he was nervous about that, since he knew he might be rejected for being too short.
Yuki had only laughed. “Don’t worry, I’ll stretch you before we go in,” Yuki told him. “And you can comb your hair up high.”
Shig grinned. “I wrote five foot two on the papers we filled out. Maybe they’ll just take my word for it.”
“And what color did you say your eyes were? Blue?”
“Yeah. And my name’s O’Moora. I’m Irish. Didn’t you know that?”
“Don’t worry about any of that stuff. You’re getting in. If they try to turn you down, I’ll beat up on somebody.”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
But now, as the recruits prepared to board the bus and all the families gathered around their sons, there was not much laughter—just lots of quiet talk and some tears. Yuki had spent time with Mick the night before, told him that he had to take on more responsibility, protect his sisters, support his mother. Mick had solemnly promised that he would do his best. He had always held his emotions inside, and he didn’t have much to say as the bus started its engine—but when Yuki said “I guess it’s time to go,” Mick grabbed his big brother, embraced him, and cried. Yuki had always wondered whether Mick even liked him, but he understood what the boy was thinking now. The moment felt like an ending. Yuki had assured his family over and over that he would come back, but it wasn’t something he could actually promise. The same thought was surely in everyone’s mind: This might be the last time we’ll see each other.
Yuki clung to Mick, told him that everything would be all right, but tears were running down his cheeks as he said the words, and he knew that even if he did come home, nothing would ever be the same.
May was more like Mother than she would ever admit. She didn’t like to cry in front of people, and even though she usually talked incessantly, she didn’t know what to say now. “Where do you think they will send you, Yuki?” she asked, as though she didn’t want to say anything that would make her cry.
“I don’t know,” Yuki said. He took hold of both her shoulders and looked into her face. “I’ll be in training for quite a while, and then, who knows? Most people think we’ll go to Europe, so we don’t have to fight the Japanese.”
She nodded. “Be careful, okay?”
“Sure. Don’t worry.”
“But I do worry,” she said, and then all her emotions came pouring out. She wrapped her arms around Yuki and cried hard.
Kay joined the two of them. Her head only came up to May’s shoulder, but she wrapped her arms around both Yuki and May as far as she could reach. “Please don’t go,” she kept saying, over and over.
There was nothing Yuki could tell her, and he could no longer speak anyway. He finally stepped away from May’s arms and bent and hugged Kay. He managed to say “I’m sorry,” although he hardly knew what he meant.
Mother had done her crying, and she was in a public place now. The bus engine was grumbling and diesel exhaust was in the air. “Go ahead, Yukus. They’re calling for you,” she said.
“Tell Father good-bye for me. Tell him what I told you. About honor.”
She nodded.
Yuki took her in his arms, and he held her for a time. He felt as though he would simply disappear when he got on that bus, never be his mother’s boy again.
An army sergeant was calling out, “Come on, boys. We gotta get goin’.”
Yuki stepped to the door of the bus, but he looked back one last time. Standing well back, away from the crowd, was Keiko. She was too dressed up for a weekday, in a pretty red dress. When she saw him look toward her, she gave him a brief wave. He wanted to go to her, maybe kiss her good-bye. But he had never kissed her, and at lunch the day before, he had said only that he hoped he would see her again and he hoped she would write to him. He had w
anted to say that he was in love with her, and would miss her—wanted even to propose a future together—but that would have been too much, too early in her life, and he hadn’t wanted to saddle her with so many expectations. Still, he saw her reach her fingers to her face, whisk away tears from each eye, and his breath stopped. But he still didn’t go to her. He waved again, as did she, and then he walked up the steps into the bus.
Yuki found Shig halfway down the aisle, hidden away next to the window, sunk down in his seat. He looked like a little boy, his glasses off, tears on his face. Yuki sat down next to him. “You’ve got to help me through this,” Shig finally managed to say to Yuki.
“We’ll help each other. That’s the deal.”
Then Yuki glanced up to see that his family was still standing by the bus. They all waved when they saw him look at them. And in the distance, Keiko waved again. What he wanted to do, more than anything, was grab Shig and rush for the door. He had been telling himself all this last year that he was a grown-up, that he was ready to go prove himself, but he felt none of that now.
CHAPTER 5
Yuki and Shig, dressed in Class A uniforms, sat up in a train car for two days and two nights on their way to Camp Shelby, near the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. They were about to start their basic training. The new army recruits coming in from Salt Lake City had been told to keep their blinds down, so they didn’t see much of the nation, except in little peeks. But at the train station in Hattiesburg, Yuki could see why the Nisei recruits had been told not to raise the blinds. People stared at them, muttered to each other, and one man actually walked behind Yuki and said what others must have been thinking: “We don’t need no Japs to fight our wars for us.”
“That feller needs to work on his grammar,” Yuki told Shig, and they laughed. But Shig looked tired. He had admitted how homesick he was, and Yuki was feeling the same thing. They were out of their element—breathing water, it seemed—surrounded by a whole world of the unfamiliar. Part of that may have been because the air itself was full of water, steaming over Shig’s eyeglasses and causing Yuki to sweat from the slightest effort. And there were new sounds, as though insects had invaded all the trees and were screeching in unison. But mostly it was the grim looks, the accusing eyes. Yuki wanted to yell at people, “Hey, I’m on your side!” but instead he smiled at everyone he passed, wished them a good day. And his friendliness did seem to defuse some of the antagonism. Some nodded back, even smiled a little.
When Yuki and Shig arrived at the military base, they saw lots of soldiers with Asian facial traits and oversized uniforms like their own. The trouble was, the army hadn’t figured out how to dress a whole regiment of men—over three thousand soldiers—who were all close to the minimum size requirement. Back in Salt Lake City, Shig had cheated upward, standing almost on his toes, and in truth, Yuki thought the guy measuring him had let him get away with it—probably out of lack of interest more than anything.
The army had decided that white soldiers wouldn’t be willing to fight alongside Japanese, so the military high command had segregated the Nisei into a separate regiment and quickly tried to spruce up a broken-down military camp for their training. The officers and drill sergeants who processed the new recruits were all white, and they looked like linebackers stolen from football teams—most of them big, all of them loud. They barked and demanded and belittled. Maybe it was what they always did, but Yuki thought they seemed especially disdainful of men who averaged five foot four.
As soon as the recruits walked onto the base, they were commanded to line up and receive their uniforms and equipment. A supply sergeant took one look at Shig and said, “What are you doing here? Come back when you grow up.”
Shig was standing in front of a counter, and Yuki had to admit, he did look like a boy in the men’s clothing department. His head dropped, which only made him look smaller, but Yuki stepped up next to him. He laughed and put his arm around Shig’s shoulders. “I’ll tell you what, Sergeant. He’s quick as a cat. Don’t ever try to slap a ground ball past him, because he’ll throw you out at first every time. He’s going to be a great soldier.”
“Step back right now,” the sergeant told Yuki. “You mouth off to me again and you’ll be peeling potatoes the rest of the day.” Then he looked at Shig. “Now, what girls’ size can I get for you?”
Yuki and Shig had only the uniforms they had been provided in Utah. The sergeant now issued them helmets, fatigues, underwear, socks, jackets, combat boots, and various equipment. It was not hard to see that most of it wouldn’t fit. The boots Shig received must have been size 6 or 7, and at home he had still worn boys’ sizes. “You can stuff something in the toes,” Yuki whispered to Shig, but all of this was clearly humiliating to him.
Yuki was certainly no big guy, but at five foot six, he felt pretty good about himself. Even so, the sleeves of the shirt he was given were obviously going to hang over his hands. A lot of recruits had arrived ahead of the Salt Lake men, and the smallest sizes were already gone.
Yuki and Shig purposely stayed together through all of the processing, and that way the two ended up assigned to the same platoon: Second Platoon of Company F of Second Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Almost four thousand men were being trained for the combat team, so they considered themselves lucky to be in the same platoon of about thirty soldiers. They were also assigned to the same hutment, so they grabbed their duffel bags, which now weighed almost as much as they did, and trudged through rows of ugly, boxlike buildings. “Hey, this place reminds me of beautiful Topaz,” Yuki told Shig.
“Worse. These buildings are falling apart.” The barracks did seem to sag, and a new coat of white paint hadn’t covered up their poor condition.
On the shady side of one of the buildings, two soldiers who looked like AJA were sitting on the steps. One of them, a meaty guy, had no shirt on, and neither one was wearing boots. The bigger man was strumming a little stringed instrument and both were singing in some language that sounded half English and half something else.
One of the men—the one without a shirt—called out, “ ’Ey, you boys katonks?”
Yuki was only too happy to stop and put down his duffel. “Excuse me?” he said.
“Yeh. You katonks, awright. You talk like ’em.”
“I’m sorry,” Yuki said. “I didn’t quite catch what you’re—”
“Why you talk like dat?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the way I—”
“You babooz, dass what. I blow yo head. You wan dat?”
Yuki had no idea what was going on. He glanced at Shig and saw that he was just as perplexed. So Yuki merely said, “Listen, we have to get to our quarters. We’ll talk to you again sometime.”
But the man put down his instrument and walked straight to Yuki. “We no like katonks,” he said. “You t’ink you betta’n us.”
The man was bigger than Yuki, much heavier, and he kept coming until he was almost on top of him. Yuki said, as calmly as he could, “My name’s Yukus Nakahara. People call me Yuki. This is my friend Shig Omura. We’re actually from California, but we spent the last year in Utah. We just arrived here a couple of hours—”
“Don talk like dat. I blow yo head. I min it.”
“Listen, we’re all in the same army. We might as well—”
The man grabbed Yuki’s lapel and pulled him against his bare chest. But just then someone called out, “Shimuzu, let go of that man.”
The big fellow did let go. He looked past Yuki toward a soldier—a buck sergeant—walking toward them. But the sergeant was smiling, as though he saw something funny that Yuki didn’t see at all. “Don blow no heads, Muki. Dey talk like dat, but dey okay.”
“Dey t’ink dey betta’n us.”
“No. Dey on’y lolo. Wat can do?”
Muki laughed. “Okay. But tell ’em, stay way.” He turned and walked back to his spot in the shade.
“Come on, soldiers,” the sergeant said to Yuki and Shig. “I’l
l help you find your quarters. What unit are you assigned to?”
“F Company, Second Platoon.”
“That’s what I figured. I heard we were getting new men today. I’m in the same platoon.” Then he laughed. “You’ll be happy to know, Muki Shimuzu is also in our company. He’ll be your ‘brudda’ before long.” He picked up both duffels without any great effort. “You’re right down here.” As they walked along the road, he said, “I’m Sergeant Matsumoto.”
The name was certainly Japanese, but he looked almost Caucasian. He was quite tall, for one thing. His skin was a lighter tone than Yuki’s or Shig’s, and his eyes looked like a white guy’s.
“You didn’t know you were katonks, did you?”
“I don’t get all this,” Shig said. “What was that guy talking about?”
“He’s from Hawaii,” Sergeant Matsumoto said. “He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t like mainlanders. Hawaiians say that when they knock down a mainlander, his head makes the sound ‘katonk’—like an empty coconut. That’s what he was calling you. But the mainlanders call the Hawaiians ‘buddhaheads.’ It’s not really about Buddhism. ‘Buta’ means ‘pig’ in Hawaiian. It’s like calling a guy ‘pigheaded.’ ”
“But isn’t that Muki guy Japanese?”
“Sure. But he grew up in Hawaii. There are close to three thousand AJA from Hawaii on base already, and mainlanders have been coming in these last couple of weeks. It’s a clash of cultures like you can’t believe.”
“Where did you learn to speak like them?” Yuki asked.
“I’m from Hawaii, but I’ve been living in Wisconsin for a few years. I graduated from college up there. As you can probably guess, my mom is white, so I grew up hearing both dialects. I’ve always been able to speak like you lolo katonks.”
The sergeant stopped outside one of the dilapidated hutments.
“What’s ‘lolo’?” Yuki asked.
Matsumoto laughed. “It means ‘crazy.’ And I heard him call you ‘babooz.’ That means ‘stupid.’ Just don’t take that stuff too seriously.”
