Letters to Memory

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Homer, you spoke about a one-substance world, a world in which mortals and deathless gods coexist, a rich Hellenic past, font of Western rationality. However, you argue, it is when that one-substance world is abolished, when the panoply of gods are sent packing for a one-god/two-substance split between the secular and spiritual, that a truly rational world is set in place. God may exist or not exist as an idea, as an abstraction, and there is no returning, I think, except by fiction, by imagination.

  The Iliad is a book of war. It’s a tale with mythic consequences embedded in the literature I love, but I’m embarrassed to have gotten this far without actually reading it. By the way, it’s a prize-winning translation. I lug the heavy volume onto a transcontinental flight, SFO to DCA, and crack the spine. I sip a Bloody Mary and order a seven dollar snack box of nuts, string cheese, and stick salami, and settle in for the duration. All right, so this is my life of O’Reilly. The guy next to me is reading a Tom Clancy novel on his Nookie. Surely Clancy has read the Iliad. It predates the Chinese Water Margin by centuries, and if you want splashing blood and erupting guts, move over Kurosawa, spaghetti Westerns, and Tarantino. I’ll need another Bloody Mary, please. The Nookie’s been turned off in favor of the sky-falling 007, but I cannot be pried away. I admit, perhaps like other unsuspecting readers, I turn the pages expecting to encounter the Trojan horse and Achilles’s heel. Fate, the inevitability of mortal death can only be tampered with. In a one-substance world, the important rules are the same for mortals and immortals. Inevitably, Troy will fall, despite the interventions of the gods—the manipulations of Queen Hera and Achilles’s mother Thetis, the rage of Athena sprung from the head of King Zeus, Aphrodite’s wicked love. The horse and the heel and even Helen are unimportant to this story about the terrible pride of two men, Achilles and Hector, fated to wage war and die in gruesome battle. In one transcontinental flight, the tragic fate of Troy is held aloft in the mind of the reader. Knowing Fate, do we secretly cheer for the winners, those great Achaeans? The legendary Troy with its great walls fortressing the House of Priam was located at the mouth of the Dardanelles connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara in what is now Turkey. I look up at the screen; somewhere in a stone chapel in a bleak Scottish countryside, 007 is cradling the dying M. Neither 007 nor M really believe in God, but they are still, you will say, the reckless consequences of the fall of Troy.

  If it can be dated, maybe thirty centuries after the Trojan War, you arrived in San Francisco from Northern Brittany via Jerusalem and walked from the Financial District through the Tenderloin to the Federal Building. Your epiphany, gazing upward into the great glass and steel structures of money and power and walking through littered streets among the impoverished, was that even you—a child of peasant farmers, tenants—sensed, as a white man, ownership. This feeling you defined as imperial. It was knowledge that perhaps only you as an outsider could know so directly. You saw all your experiences, embodied in a convergence of Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam, transformed. From that moment, perhaps you understood your responsibility to dismantle that worldview, to become, I believe, a gadfly at the gate of war.

  Of the Yamashita family, youngest son Tom, nephew Ted, and brother-in-law Min were drafted into the Army, but fortunately the war was ending, and their duties and placements were not in combat. Kimi’s son Ted joined military intelligence and served during the occupation years in Tokyo until 1952. Drafted around 1943, Tom was sent to Ohio State University to the army’s advanced engineering program, whose personnel fed the Army Corps of Engineers and the Manhattan Project. Apparently, very abruptly, Tom was released from the program, separated from his white colleagues, and sent to Fort Polk in Louisiana, spending the rest of the war, he said, pumping gas.

  Sus’s diary entry in New York: Tuesday, August 7: Clear . . . News of the atomic bombing of Japan on Monday, August 6 came today. And three days later: Friday, August 10: Clear-cool . . . One of the most memorable days in my life. Got the news of Japan’s proposing to surrender unconditionally late this afternoon . . . How glad our parents must be now that they are sure of seeing their sons coming home without even a single injury during their service!

  Throughout my growing years, I remember a sepia portrait of the handsome face of a young man with a pipe. This photograph always hung in John’s study. I think I was a troubled sleeper, and I would show up in the middle of night or early morning and find my dad pounding away at the typewriter or staring into his thoughts or at this photo, usually writing his Sunday sermon at the last moment. I suspect the pipe was a photographic affectation of the time; I now know the portrait was of Nobuo Kajiwara, John’s childhood buddy and classmate at Cal.

  Nobu had two sisters, Michi and Sachi. He was the only son. Like most of the Oakland folks, the Kajiwaras were shipped out to Topaz. John recalled that Nobu quarreled vehemently with his parents about his decision to enlist. In March 1943, Nobu wrote to his sisters who had then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska:

  I know this will shock you. I have volunteered to join the armed forces and will be part of the combat unit . . . A unit coming up spontaneously and not of duress (as in draft) will get far better publicity. Publicity organized and of the right kind, will be in favor of all Japanese sincerely wishing to remain in the U.S. And it is only by such positive action that the country will open up decent jobs for a decent living. Sounds idealist—I’d be the first to say that such a reformation of American public opinion will not come about overnight. It’ll take years but just consider the position of you and me and the rest of the nisei if no action were taken. I don’t like the set up any more than you do and there is the further discomforting thought that I may never come back. But to be honest with myself and to keep what self respect I do have . . .

  The Kajiwaras and the Yamashitas were both Christian families. They were not taught to hate the enemy, but pacifism would not be an option. Nobu enlisted in the Japanese American segregated unit, the 100th Battalion. On his way to Italy, he stopped in Chicago to see his old friend John one last time. John wrote, I can remember when I was told that Nobu was felled in that fight to cross the Rapido River just north of Rome. And his words stop there.

  In the Iliad’s poetic history, when the offended and brooding Achilles refuses to fight, his dearest friend, Patroclus, wearing Achilles’s armor, rallies the Achaeans and dies by the sword of Hector. Enraged, Achilles returns to battle and kills Hector. Hector’s death, like every other death in this book, is graphically described: one spot lay exposed, where the collarbones lift the neckbones off the shoulders, the open throat . . . Achilles drove his spear and the point went stabbing clean through the tender neck . . . But it is the pyre that Achilles creates to burn Patroclus’s corpse that amazes me. Sacrificed are droves of fat sheep and shambling crook-horned cattle whose fat is flayed to wrap the corpse. Then, two-handled jars of honey and oil, the bodies of four massive stallions, two dogs—throats slit, and a dozen brave sons of the proud Trojans hacked to pieces—all this atop timber stacked a hundred feet in length and breadth, and Achilles on a chariot, dragging Hector’s body to and fro. Somewhere in this pile of death is the body of Patroclus.

  I discover an interview with Ken Kaname Takemoto, who trained with Nobu at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and landed together at Anzio:

  [Nobu] was attacking a German position. The story I heard was that he was about to lob a grenade. He had pulled the pin—you know, a grenade has a safety pin attached to it, and once you pull the pin you have to hold the handle down so it won’t go off. If you release it, you have three seconds to get rid of it. You count “one, two, three,” and throw it. So he had pulled the pin, but before he could get rid of it, he was shot. His hand released the grip, and the grenade exploded. His own grenade. Blasted him . . . he didn’t die right away—he was in such pain that he ran around screaming until he collapsed and died. So it was a horrible death.

  There was another photograph that framed John in a ministerial gown behind a casket draped wi
th an American flag. In the photo also, I recognize Nobu’s sisters, Michi and Sachi, and their issei parents, a tableau in somber black. Homecoming, glory, honor, fate. Nobu’s death was all of this and none of this.

  Priam, king of Troy, sneaks through the battlefront with a wagonload of treasure, a king’s ransom, to kneel before Achilles and plead for Hector’s body. I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son. Priam has lost fifty sons to this war and now the great Hector. Achilles is moved to grieve for his own father’s glory and misery, manipulated by the whims of the gods. Priam boasted fifty sons, all dead. Achilles’s father sired one son, soon to die. Achilles weeps with Priam and returns the son to the father. The poet is careful; as you will remind me, it is not a moment of charity or reconciliation, but of pity and self-pity and exchange, but it is the saddest moment and the end of the book.

  Poverty, you explain, can be chosen. That is its power. It occurs to me now—Kay, John, Nobu—each chose poverty.

  Homer, forgive me as I have taken liberties, and I still do not understand.

  Dear Homer:

  You ask, even though you had from the very beginning suggested it, even though the body of your scholarship (as I interpret it) is given to this idea: why forgiveness? I puzzle over this, but sense that it is a question from which you cannot be released. I also appreciate that your query is Socratic and teacherly, an insistence to pursue my thinking, saying that, despite your guidance, I do not understand is a kind of understanding. Forgiveness, you offer, requires the confrontation of two parties, a meeting face-to-face between people who have the capacity to hurt each other, and thus, perhaps, to discover grace. This is to carry the idea into practice. You translate the request, please forgive us, to say: Please receive us in our fullness. But such encounters are impossible because all the players are dead—jailers and inmates, Chizu and Kay. And what about evil, you ask. This is a much larger question.

  As for history, you note the historian’s problem that writing about an event is not the same as living it. History is an inquiry, and there is an attempt here to, as you say, clear the ground with these letters, meaning perhaps to properly bury the dead. Yet even so, you say, we are rendered speechless, dumb, when it comes to the hearts. There are, you agree, things beyond history, which history may point to yet also obscure. Beyond or behind history are glimpses of what matters.

  You pause after the first section to note that what you recognize in this writing is a letter about letters, what you call an invocation.

  You requested a clarification about Chizu’s letter in which her words suggest Japanese Americans had a choice about their imprisonment; she describes people who have torn themselves from all living—sacrificing their life work, their homes, and their rights to live as other free people. Perhaps the words torn and sacrifice indicate free action, but no such freedom existed, even though this incarceration was called a wartime necessity. At the same time, it occurs to me now that Chizu’s way of describing this event was in itself a refusal to be a herded prisoner, a refusal to lose dignity.

  I am gratefully yours,

  LETTERS TO

  Modernity

  Dear Ishi:

  Nobody wants my brain. Even if my driver’s license were to indicate my willingness to have my body parts distributed, decidedly, nobody wants my brain. There are days, when it hurts, that even I do not want my brain. It may be, however, that the FBI might want my computer. Special Collections seems to want my books and all their related detritus. And connected to that, we’ll foist this family archive of letters and photographs and wartime materials on them. I asked Homer why he thought my family saved this stuff, and he responded with the historian’s view that they knew what was happening to them was significant and wrong, that justice might not happen in their lifetimes. What they saved shows that this is true, but we children thought that they were nostalgic packrats. Now we are old and nostalgic ourselves and comb through this business like we invented it. We pass PDFs and HTMLs over e-mail, google this and that—amateur historians, trying to compensate for the fact that as kids we were too distracted by the idea of this past to be actually immersed in it. Shame on us. Now they are all dead, and we didn’t save their brains either.

  But let’s be fair. To live like Walter Benjamin’s angel, swept into the future while staring into the past, is pretty horrific. I salute you and Homer for being willing to do so. But what to net in this storm of wreckage and debris? There is what has been salvaged, and there is what attracts our attention. You remind me that the museum gets organized and reorganized. Each of us covets a glass case of curiosities arranged particularly. When we are dead, what meaning will it have? When I’m dead, I suspect everything in my glass case can be burned and replaced by a USB flash drive. Who cares about my brain?

  But Homer’s work demonstrates the tedious precision of tracing the forensics of history, to uncover a question stone by stone. To have access to those stones at all; his eyes glow with wonder. You interpret Ishi to be the Yahi word for man, but I also translate from the Japanese meaning stone. Stone by stone. Forgive me; it is taboo to speak of the dead. But they are my dead, and I fear the reasons for which they saved these letters and how here I must necessarily fail. And yet, I ask for your indulgence, to attempt to overturn at least one stone.

  Independence Day, 1942. Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the nation would celebrate not in the fireworks of make-believe but in the death-dealing reality of tanks and planes and guns and ships. We celebrate it also by running without interruption the assembly lines, which turn out these weapons to be shipped to all the embattled points of the globe. Not to waste one hour, not to stop one shot, not to hold back one blow—that is the way to mark our great national holiday in this year of 1942. As he spoke, submarine USS Triton ejected two torpedoes from its payload, sinking the Japanese destroyer Nenohi in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska.

  While 188 sailors churned in icy death, presumably it was a warm summer day 3,000 miles south across the Pacific, a soft breeze lifting with white gulls across a blue bay, pleasant sunlight dappling the Mills College campus, gracious lawns and tree-lined paths sweeping toward stately buildings. Kay, still at large in Oakland, wrote to the family in Tanforan about a crowd that gathered that day on the lawn outside of Lisser Hall for an open discussion on race relations, convened by Leila Anderson, general secretary of the Cal Berkeley YWCA. The day was strategic, the discussions urgent—although as Kay admitted, she was the singular oriental face in a sea of educated white folks, one last Japanese, her temporary independence protected by a dedicated core of good guys in opposition to the recent evacuation of her people.

  The key organizer of this July 4th F.O.R. Day was a young man named Caleb Foote. Foote was a recent graduate of Harvard, former editor of the Harvard Crimson, and a pacifist, chosen by A. J. Muste to open a branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Northern California. Until his conviction for violation of military service, Foote would work relentlessly—researching, traveling, organizing, and writing on behalf of conscientious objectors and incarcerated Japanese Americans. Exchanging correspondence with Kay in camp, one tattered form letter has survived with Foote’s handwritten note at the bottom: Thanks loads for the Christmas greetings. I’d like to hear from you in detail on the points above. You have been one of my best informants. Caleb.

  Informants. Perhaps the cultural anthropologist in you raises your eyebrows, but then, you’ll sigh, this was 1943. I admit, unlike encountering gee, golly, swell, oh boy oh boy, or O’Reilly, I fidgeted over informant. But under these circumstances, who was going to write about or for us, if not those others?

  At the very same time that Kay was sipping Cokes with anxious academics and vociferous pacifists at Mills, sociologist and demographer Dorothy Swaine Thomas was organizing her cohort for a study of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement under the auspices of the Yamashita family alma mater, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the generosity of the Rockefe
ller, Columbia, and Giannini Foundations, and the cooperation of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), War Department, Western Defense Command, and Fourth Army, this study, known by its acronym JERS, produced two very informative volumes: The Spoilage and The Salvage, published by UC Press in 1946 and 1952. The Spoilage was coauthored with Richard Nishimoto, and The Salvage with the assistance of Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda. The authors make clear the difficulties of gathering information within any prison:

  Constant efforts had to be made to guard against betrayal of informants . . . To their fellow evacuees, “research” was synonymous with “inquisition” and the distinction between “informant” and “informer” was not appreciated. Consequently every one of our evacuee staff members was stigmatized, or in danger of being stigmatized . . .

  Despite the provocative conditions and limitations of this study, its three-year scope from 1942 to 1945 reveals a sense of immediate pain, not remembered but lived in deep frustration and contained anger. In 1945, the war was over and the study ended, and those lost years were irretrievable. Years later, we retrieve the irretrievable.

  Of course you recognize the slippery path between opportunity and advocacy. If a bad thing was going to happen anyway, why depend on only diaries or letters or mere memory to keep the truth? Why not gather and organize documentation as events transpired? Social science could analyze the data, unravel the consequences, dictate appropriate future policies. So many years later, I find these justifications preposterous; the most fascist regimes have been known to keep the most meticulous accounting of their crimes. And how creepy is it to request from the National Archives the War Relocation Authority files of the Yamashita siblings and then to receive several hundred pages of incarceration documents systematically saved? A precise record and evidence of injustice served. As for the JERS archive, it is stored in the UC Bancroft Library and consists of 379 reels of microfilm, 336 boxes, 84 cartons, 36 oversized volumes, 6 oversized folders—all for a total of 250.5 linear feet of stuff. Chronologically, the miles of barbed-wire fences that corralled my family preceded the 250.5 linear feet of paper, but something in my gut tells me that the logic of this is skewed, that the science of the social had long before measured and interred the cornerstones and the supporting stakes. The very possibility of corralling a people into some kind of single tribe was born in the idea of having discovered them in the first place.