Forgiveness

by Mark Sakamoto

  That afternoon, Major Pulas demanded that he be taken to Yokohama to meet with General McArthur.

  It was another week before the men left the camp. There were no goodbyes. They marched out as they had marched in. This time, each had a smile on his face and a swelled heart in his chest.

  At the train station, they began boarding for Yokohama. Ralph was near the back of the line. He heard a commotion, a voice. He knew who it was before he heard the words.

  “MacRane! MacRane!”

  How the tables had turned. Now Kato was just Kato. No commandant. No bowing. He weaved in and out among men whom a few weeks ago he would have beaten for not moving out of his way. He reeked of whisky. Having spotted Ralph in line, he rushed over. His bloodshot eyes were full of tears. He was wailing like a bull moose. He was defeated. He was scared.

  Ralph genuinely believed that, more than anything, the commandant was sorry.

  “MacRane.” His shaky hands held out his pipe. He looked at Ralph, clearly hoping he would accept the gift.

  “Here, here,” Kato said, as he pressed his tobacco pouch into Ralph’s hand. Then, Kato did something remarkable. He would have been killed for it if a Japanese officer had seen him. He ripped his rank stripes from the collar of his tunic. He placed them in Ralph’s hand, on top of the pipe and tobacco pouch, and bowed deeply.

  Ralph didn’t know whether to throw a punch or offer an outstretched hand. He did neither. He closed his fist around the gifts, and looked Kato long and hard in the eye. He said nothing. He remembered the words of Mark 11:25, nodded, and boarded the train.

  Thus ended four years and seven months of living under extreme duress—if you could call it living. Ralph had walked, slept, and eaten among the dead and dying. He had lost over half his body mass. He had been paralyzed twice, and blinded. His best friend had slipped through his fingers. He had been beaten and degraded. He had brushed up against his sanity on more than one occasion and stared down into the pit of death more times than he would care to talk about.

  So, where could he go from there? How on earth could he move on?

  The truth was, he already had.

  CHAPTER 10

  Amen

  Ralph MacLean got off the boat in Vancouver on the same dock from which he’d left. An islander buddy by the name of Sid Street met him. They had a night. Such a night! He boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway train two days later, still a little hungover.

  He took the same route Mitsue and Hideo had taken, across the Rockies, into the prairies. The train stopped in Calgary amid a throng of well-wishers. Among them was a young woman named Phyllis Dee. She was as shy as she was pretty. They didn’t speak long, but it was all Ralph needed. As the train pulled out of the station, he stared at the address she had written down on his notepad. He thought about her all the way across the Canadian Shield. He was thinking about her still when he returned to the Magdalen Islands.

  While his family smothered him with affection and he basked in it, he knew he could not stay. There was nothing there for him. The war had not changed that reality. He returned to Quebec City and was discharged on February 8, 1946. He wrote his mother and promised to send for her once he got himself set up out west. He was moving to Calgary.

  Ralph started work at the Cominco smelter plant. Phyllis’s father got him into the outfit. Ralph moved into Phyllis’s family home until they could marry and build their own house. It took two years. They married on May 14, 1948, and moved into their house on Victoria Crescent. Then Ralph brought his mother to live with them in Calgary.

  His younger brother, Ford, would visit, moving in and out of his home and his life. Ford was wild and always needed help. Ralph always obliged, until an incident happened that changed things.

  Ralph had not heard from Ford in months, when one day the phone rang. He knew something was wrong the moment he picked up the receiver. He could hear Ford gasping on the other end. “Ralphie—I’m in real trouble here,” he said Ford was in Regina, but he was on the run. He had been charged with rape. Ralph didn’t ask if it was true. He didn’t want to hear the words. He told his brother that he was sorry; this time, he just couldn’t help him. It broke his heart to hang up.

  Ford called once more, a week later. He told his older big brother that the girl he was accused of raping had been hit by a car and had died. The charges against him had been dropped.

  The brothers didn’t speak again for fifty years.

  Ralph broke down sometimes. All the men who had been in the war did.

  It was worst in the middle of the night, with his wife and three children asleep. He’d dream of electric feet, of poor Mortimer tied in the snow like an animal, of gunshots. He’d dream of Deighton. He’d see his friend’s hands reaching towards him in the night. Come morning, Ralph would have trouble making his way to work. The downtown towers would turn to soot. They’d look like the foundry. He was driving into the war. He’d turn the car around and go back to bed. He would cry into his pillow.

  Ralph’s night terrors got much worse before they got better. It took him time to recover. It took medication. His bible helped. But Ralph did most of the heavy lifting himself. He never let himself get too far away from the prayer he had offered in the camp. He kept forgiveness close. It was his amen.

  He worked at Cominco for forty years and twelve days.

  Mitsue and her family were in Medicine Hat, still dealing with dust, heat, cold, and, at times, humiliation, but they were together. Hideo and her three children were her everything. They were her amen.

  Until she too broke down, five years after the war’s end. The dust, the isolation, the poverty had worn her down. In a desperate fit, she dressed Glory in a warm winter jacket and boarded a train back to British Columbia. She cried harder returning to Vancouver than she had leaving.

  Being separated from her sons made her desperately unhappy, but she could not stay another night at the Golden Valley farm. She felt she had never left Coaldale, she still felt at war. She pleaded with Hideo to leave the farm. He promised he would. It took him two weeks to find and rent a house in Medicine Hat. The house, on 2nd Street, was tiny and old, but it was enough to get Mitsue to return. She never left again.

  PART 4

  The Gift

  CHAPTER 11

  The Gas City

  My hometown is Medicine Hat, Alberta. We hear it all the time: it’s a funny name. When government officials were first sent to the southeast corner of the Canadian prairies to determine its suitability for human life, they deemed it uninhabitable. It was altogether too hot, too barren, and too dusty to provide the basic needs of life.

  The people of Medicine Hat did not want to be a sideshow, a prairie joke. They needed branding advice. They sought out the best. They wrote to their distant friend—Sir Rudyard Kipling, the Empire’s poet. He was a man of the world. He understood the power of the word. He knew the industrious, the prosperous, people of import. From his vantage point in Sussex, surely Sir Kipling could tell them which alternate name was preferable: Leopoldville or Smithville. His expedited handwritten response shocked the council:

  To my mind, the name of Medicine Hat echoes the old Cree and Blackfoot tradition of red mystery and romance that once filled the prairies. Also it hints at the magic that underlies the city in the shape of your natural gas. Believe me, the very name is an asset, and as years go on will become more and more of an asset. It has no duplicate in the world; it makes men ask questions … and draws the feet of the young towards it; it has the qualities of uniqueness,individuality, assertion and power. Above all, it is the lawful, original, sweat and-dust-won name of the city and to change it would be to risk the luck of the city, to disgust and dishearten old-timers, not in the city alone, but the world over, and to advertise abroad the city’s lack of faith in itself.

  This remote outpost of the Dominion, wrote Sir Rudyard Kipling in 1908, “seems to have all hell for a basement, and the only trap door appears to be in Medicine Hat.” He was referring, of cou
rse, to the large reserves of natural gas that gave the city its nickname, Gas City. He was gone as quickly as he arrived, but was not forgotten.

  Medicine Hat it was. Medicine Hat it shall remain. It was the right call.

  In 1912, evidence of Medicine Hat’s growing economic prowess was erected to great fanfare. The town christened a large and imposing hotel, a four-storey, forty-six bedroom red-brick masterpiece across the street from the train station. Visitors were welcomed by a grand foyer, not unlike the one they would have just checked out of in the great hotels of Winnipeg. Every inch of the establishment was designed to exceed the expectations of the particular traveller. No expense was spared: lush carpets were laid on each floor, handsome brass bedsteads and chiffoniers were installed in each room. Guests could find a warm and welcoming dinner in the main floor dining room, which quickly won a culinary reputation second-to-none in western Canada. The men could retire with a cigar and a glass of imported scotch in the smoking room off the dining room. The proprietor, Mr. D. Broadfoot, a well-known hotel man, named his masterpiece Hotel Cecil. It was the town’s crown jewel.

  Hotel Cecil was a monument to Kipling’s confidence in Medicine Hat. And it would feature largely in my future.

  Forty-two years later, just down the road from the Cecil, on a crisp fall morning, Medicine Hat’s first baby of Japanese descent was born. It was my father, Stanley Gene Sakamoto.

  Medicine Hat was a kind town to my father. He did not have to fight his way through his childhood like his older brother Ron. If Ron inherited Mitsue’s steely grit, my dad inherited her empathy. It seems a well deep enough to quench any need.

  My dad is not of this time. Walking around Medicine Hat with him is like stepping into an episode of King of Kensington. It takes him an hour to go to the bank to make a simple deposit. He actually goes to the bank to speak to a teller. He does not have an Interac card. He has never used an ATM. Instead, he carries around enough cash in his fanny pack to buy a used car. Finally, as a caring family, we managed to convince Dad to limit his “walking around” money to a few hundred bucks, but the fanny pack is a bright red beacon. From his cold, dead hip shall we remove that fanny pack. We have tried our best to find him chic designs, but a fanny pack is still a fanny pack. He giggles as he clips it on in the foyer every afternoon.

  In a strange way, he is also ahead of his time. Night after night throughout the early ‘90s, Dad would fall asleep with technology magazines forming a tent across his face. He knew about BlackBerrys and voice-recognition back when the technologies were still sometime off in the future, but he stubbornly refuses to relinquish his Motorola dumb phone for a smartphone. Instead, he carries around an actual phone book.

  He usually puts three or four boxes of files into his Honda CRV for the day instead of using a laptop or an iPad. He does have a computer, but he uses it primarily for accessing Google Maps, where he can soar far above the clouds and wonder at it all. He has been able to bend and shape his world to suit his quirky ways. He goes to bed at 4 a.m. He wakes at noon. He is nocturnally nomadic, sleeping in various spots throughout the house, rarely returning to the same bed as the previous night. He giggles. A lot. A remnant of his time spent in the South Pacific, no doubt, his preferred wave is a Hawaii Five-0–style “hang loose.” In Medicine Hat.

  He is terrible, absolutely terrible, with names. His go-to names when he’s in a jam are “big guy” or “shooter,” whether it’s a man or a woman. I have never seen him kiss anyone on both cheeks—that is too chichi. He does shake hands, but he prefers to thump the chest of the person he is greeting, just below the neck, with an open hand. Two or three thumps usually does the trick. Again, man or woman. It is the weirdest way I have ever seen a human being greet another. It is like he is in the wilds.

  Dad plays in two hockey leagues: one where he is fifteen years older than everyone, one where he is the young buck at sixty-two. In both leagues, they call him Stan “Hackamoto” because he is the dirtiest player on the ice. He loves it. He taunts his opponents and hacks at the back of their legs if they get past him. He calls them unrepeatable names as they scramble for the puck in the corner. He giggles all the way down the handshake line after each game.

  He has let his hair grow out and there is a lot of silver in it now. His face is getting rounder. He is looking more like his mom. I love calling him out of the blue, hoping to catch him when he is out and about. That’s the best time. If he’s on the road, he’s all honks and waves. I know he has the phone cradled into his shoulder so as to not impede his ability to dish the “hang loose.” If he’s in a meeting, he always recounts the purpose in real time, as if I’m taking minutes. He ends those calls by telling me something interesting about the person he is meeting with: an upcoming event, a milestone reached, a granddaughter born. And that’s it. That’s why it takes my dad an hour to make a routine five-minute bank deposit. That’s why people love to receive a “big guy,” a “hang loose,” a thump on the chest or a slash to the shins. That’s why it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know the names of most of the people he connects with on any given day. Because he actually connects.

  When my dad speaks to you—in a bank lineup, a car wash, a restaurant—he is genuine in his desire to know about you. He doesn’t give a shit about the weather. He knows it will change. He doesn’t care to grumble about the latest political scandal. He knows that won’t change. He wants to know about you. What is on your horizon, what you are proud of, excited for, fearful of. He collects intent and roots down to find the nugget of positive. He comes out of each mine with something. He is instinctively positive. He floats.

  My parents met at a dance at McCoy High School in the fall of 1967. McCoy was—and still is—the town’s one Catholic school. Even in my day, out of the dances of the three high schools, the McCoy dance was the one not to be missed. There was always a lot of repenting to be done the following Sunday.

  Diane, my mom, had been cajoled to come down from Calgary for the dance by her cousin Darlene. She wore a green dress. They danced the night away to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Her parents didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll, but they took in the comfort fact that the records coming through the front door were from their homeland.

  My mom was cute. She had a light to her. Not a soft light—a hard light, like when a match is struck. Stan and Diane’s romance flared. He was soon riding his 250cc motorbike north on Highway 1 to visit her in Calgary.

  Diane MacLean and Stan Sakamoto in Calgary, Summer 1968

  Darlene watched closely as Stan moved into her cousin’s life. Everyone wondered how her father, Ralph, would react. The young man who was frequently sitting at his dining table, praying with him and passing him mashed potatoes, looked exactly like his tormentors of over twenty years ago.

  Ralph watched Stan closely. He made sure he was polite. He made sure he treated his daughter—the apple of his eye—with respect and dignity. But remarkably, he never raised the issue of my father’s race. Not once. He deemed my father very suitable. He even thought Diane lucky for finding such an honourable and upstanding young man. He approved mightily.

  One day in the spring of 1968, Mitsue set the table. A special guest was coming. She brought out the good dishes. She guessed that the guest would begrudgingly have learned how to use chopsticks. But would he want to? For days she thought about what to serve. It kept her up at night. She had served many hakujins before, friends from the factory, neighbours, the kids’ school friends. But never someone who had been imprisoned by the Japanese army. She decided on chow mein, sweet and sour spare ribs, barbecued B.C. sockeye salmon, and white rice.

  She was scooping rice out of the Sanyo cooker when Ralph and Phyllis rang the doorbell. Hideo welcomed them in. Mitsue hurried into the living room, wiping her hands with a tea towel. They all shook hands and sat in the living room. Senbei crackers and almond chocolates were placed in a bowl on the oval living room table.

  Mitsue and Ralph became instant friends. There was an un
spoken understanding between them. They were both far too polite to state it, to address it. But they felt they knew each other. Deep down, they knew each other. They had both discarded the past, keeping only what they needed, leaving the rest behind. They did not compare hardships or measure injustices. They knew there was no merit to that.

  They sat down at the dinner table. Hideo gave a toast. Ralph offered a prayer. They laughed. They could do that now.

  Breaking down is the easy part. Anyone, at any time, can break down. The act of coming together again is what makes a hero. Moving on, with an open heart, seems, at times, impossible. But it’s not.

  (From left) Mitsue Sakamoto, Phyllis MacLean, Ralph MacLean, and Stan Sakamoto in Medicine Hat, Spring 1968

  I would not be born for another ten years, but that was the most important dinner of my life. Every story has two sides. My life depended on my sides coming together.

  Thirty-three years later, the forgiveness that was shared that night would give me my life.

  Dad graduated from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. He and my mom were married on December 29, 1973. His first job was as food and beverage manager at the Calgary Inn, and that is where the wedding, which included 150 guests, was held. Shortly after, Tom Brook, who was on the board of directors at the Inn and knew my dad, hired him as executive director at his new resort on Castaway Island in Fiji.

  When they returned to Medicine Hat a year later, they bought a small duplex on Division Avenue, a busy street that divides the town into east and west. Our back yard was to the side of the house, encased in a three-foot wooden fence painted white and green. For the next few years, my father worked on the family farm and helped my uncle Ron with his music business. But what he always wanted was to have his own restaurant. In the fall of 1980, along with a few business partners, he opened Maxwell’s. The restaurant featured a decidedly upscale menu. It was the first place in town where you could buy lobster. The waiters would trot out the Caesar salad carts and make the dish for you right at the table. The tablecloths were white linen and each had a real flower in the centre. Enya was piped in over the stereo system. They had a La Cimbali espresso machine imported from Italy. When I ate there I felt that I was in a far-off metropolitan place like New York City or Los Angeles.