Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “This is bad,” he said gravely. “For us. For the Issei.”

  “What do you mean, Papa?” Ruth asked.

  “Not for the Nisei. You and Frank, your children, you are American citizens. But Okāsan and I—we are Japanese nationals. We are the enemy.”

  “Papa, that’s ridiculous. You’re a farmer, not a soldier.”

  “The government could deport us as—what is the word? Aliens.”

  “I think we could all use a stiff drink,” Frank suggested. “Why don’t I get us some sake while we—”

  Taizo stood up suddenly. “No. No. We need to go home. Okāsan?”

  Etsuko did not understand, but stood. Taizo made a small bow to his daughter and her husband. “Give our regrets to the children.”

  Taizo was silent on the drive home, where they found Jiro and the rest of the family—all but Stanley, who had taken an engineering job in Portland, Oregon—gathered around their own radio. Latest reports from Honolulu said bombs were falling not just on military targets but in parts of the city as well.

  Etsuko began to cry, thinking of distant friends on Kukui Street and the kind Franciscan sisters at Kapi'olani Home.

  Taizo declared, “We must burn everything Japanese in the house. What we cannot burn, we must bury.”

  Jiro said, “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “But Pop,” Ralph said, “is that really—”

  “Moyashi nasai!” Taizo snapped back: Burn it!

  The urgency in his voice silenced and propelled them into action. Horace and Ralph went into the fields to dig a deep hole while Jiro and Akira prepared a bonfire in the backyard. Rose took the children and kept them occupied as Nishi and Tamiko collected anything that hinted at loyalty, or even affection, for their native land: from blatantly suspicious items like an antique ceremonial sword to Japanese books, musical records, even origami “good luck” paper cranes. Tatami mats were rolled up; the Japanese scroll in the tokonoma alcove taken down; porcelain teacups, tableware, jars, no matter how beautiful or cherished, were gathered up.

  Horace and Ralph used spades to break through the layer of hardpan, digging a three-foot-deep hole in an irrigation ditch far from the house. Soon they were tossing in century-old family heirlooms. Even the small stone marker from Mayonaka’s gravesite was interred.

  With the bonfire ready, the tatami were thrown onto the pyre, the colorful straw mats quickly consumed by the flames. The tokonoma scroll incinerated instantly, as did the paper cranes, each barely making the fire flare. A beautiful bamboo basket used for flower arranging hissed and crackled as it died. The bonsai plants that Jiro had lovingly cultivated for twenty years were chopped into kindling and fed to the fire. Etsuko wept as she threw in family photos and a sheaf of letters, in kanji, from her mother in Japan.

  Once the ashes had cooled, they were scattered across the fields. The blackened dirt in the backyard was turned over to leave no trace.

  Exhausted, they shared a solemn supper. In the quiet normalcy of evening, Taizo began to wonder whether they had acted too precipitously.

  Then, a little after seven o’clock, Jiro answered a loud rapping at the door, and three hajukin men in dark business suits introduced themselves as agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Taizo’s heart pounded, but he stood, ready to join his brother for whatever fate awaited them.

  One of the FBI agents asked, “Is Akira Watanabe here?”

  Jiro and Taizo were taken aback. “Akira?” Jiro said. “My son?”

  “You’re Jiro Watanabe?” the agent said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is your son?”

  Hearing his name, Akira came to the door. “I’m Akira Watanabe.”

  “Mr. Watanabe, you are a dual citizen of Japan and the United States?”

  Akira replied politely, “Yes, but not by choice. The Japanese government grants all children of Japanese nationals the right of citizenship.”

  “And did you make a wire transfer of funds to the Japanese government in April of 1939?”

  Akira appeared baffled a moment, then said with a laugh, “Oh, that. Yes, I paid them money or else they would have drafted me into their army!”

  “So you admit you gave money to Japan’s armed forces?”

  “Yes, but that was the only way to avoid conscription.”

  The lead FBI man turned to a second one and said, “Escort Mr. Watanabe to the car. We’ll look for contraband.”

  Another agent started to take Akira by the arm when Tamiko came running up. “But he’s told you everything there is to tell!” she cried.

  “We’ll see, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be fine, honey,” Akira told his wife. He was barely able to kiss her on the cheek before the agent escorted him out.

  “What is going on!” Jiro shouted. “Where are you taking my son?”

  “Into custody, sir. For further questioning.”

  The remaining agents entered without the courtesy of removing their shoes and began ransacking the house. Jiro and Taizo could only watch as they opened closets, poked into cupboards, peeked under furniture. They blithely trespassed into bedrooms and pulled back sheets, searched inside pillowcases, rifled through wardrobe and underwear drawers. They confiscated Jiro’s shotgun, binoculars, and a Kodak Brownie camera. All of these, the agents told them, were now forbidden items for Japanese to own.

  The agents searched the barn and the backyard, and for a moment Taizo held his breath, afraid they might notice some faint revenant of the bonfire that had so recently blazed here. But they walked right over where the ashes had been, then walked back through the house, tracking in dirt as they did.

  “What is going to happen to my son?” Jiro demanded.

  “He’ll be questioned at a secure facility, sir. Thank you for your cooperation.” The G-man tipped his hat and the men left. Jiro and Taizo watched helplessly as they drove their black Packard—and Akira—away.

  Tamiko wept inconsolably as Rose held her.

  Horace and Ralph walked up, both looking stunned and guilty. “When we got that letter from Japan, we just ignored it,” Ralph admitted. “I thought, hey, let ’em come after me, what can they do?”

  “It seems they weren’t the ones we had to fear,” Horace said quietly.

  Tears were rolling down Jiro’s cheeks. “Why couldn’t they have taken me?” he said softly. “Why did they have to take my son?”

  * * *

  When Taizo called and told Ruth what had happened, the uncertainty and dread she had felt all day metabolized into fear, and she shivered violently. She heard her father say, “Get rid of any guns, cameras, binoculars, and anything Japanese,” but it all sounded like dialog from a radio play, the Martian invasion that had never happened. But this was happening, and as incredible as it seemed, they were the Martians.

  Frank received the news with a stunned look. “My God,” he said, softly so the children wouldn’t hear, “he was serious? Everything?”

  “Anything with kanji characters on it,” she said.

  Frank gathered a clutch of envelopes containing his parents’ letters to him and stoically burned them in a trash can with old photos of his parents and grandparents in traditional Japanese dress. Frank gave his camera to Jim Russell, who expressed his astonishment at what was happening.

  The next day the family learned that Akira was far from alone.

  Beginning on the afternoon of December 7, FBI men in dark suits swooped down like crows on Florin, as they did up and down the West Coast. Their targets were leaders of the Japanese American community: Buddhist priests, businessmen with ties to Japan, teachers at Japanese-language schools, writers and editors for Japanese-language newspapers. In Florin they arrested Mr. Tanikawa, founder of the town’s oldest general store, because he also acted as a go-between for arranged marriages and his frequent trips to Japan raised suspicions. Mr. Akiyama, owner of Akiyama’s Fish Market, was arrested because he was an enthusiast of kendo—stylized Japanese swo
rdplay, fought with bamboo sticks—and the FBI saw such games as “military training exercises.” Mr. Sasaki, a local tofu manufacturer, was rounded up because he also served as secretary of the local Japan Association, a kind of chamber of commerce. A farmer named Iwao Tsuji had also been taken away, though no one understood why—least of all his terrified wife and two adolescent children, who were left to somehow run their forty-acre farm.

  Frank walked to the diner at five A.M. as usual. The staff was as shaken as he was, but they buckled down and were ready to open by six. The breakfast crowd soon arrived, larger than usual—everyone wanted to talk about the attack and share whispered stories of FBI arrests. Later, Frank turned on the radio so everyone could hear President Roosevelt’s address to Congress at nine-thirty A.M. asking for a declaration of war against Japan, which was quickly approved. The United States was now officially at war with the Empire of Japan. Frank studied his customers’ rapt faces, only now realizing that all those faces were Japanese—there was not a single white face among them.

  Ruth went about her usual Monday morning grocery shipping, driving with the children up Stockton Boulevard to Sacramento. But as she entered the city, she was jolted by the sight of handmade signs that had sprouted like fungi on fences, store windows, and telephone poles:

  JAPS GET OUT!

  NO NIPS WANTED!

  ALL JAPS MUST GO!

  She was grateful that the kids couldn’t read and almost wished she couldn’t either.

  Shopping at the local Safeway, she was conscious of her Japanese features in a way she never had been before, flinching when a white customer merely glanced at her. She stocked up on toiletries, milk, bread, cereal, and meat, then worried, was she buying too much? Might it look as if she were hoarding food in advance of an impending attack? She took a deep breath and, in the candy aisle, when Donnie and Peggy begged for treats, Ruth surprised herself with her own whimsy and handed them each a Mars Bar.

  She quickly paid and drove white-knuckled all the way back to Florin.

  She stopped at her parents’ farm, where Etsuko was quick to take the children outside to play while Ruth embraced Aunt Nishi and Uncle Jiro. “I’m so sorry, Uncle. Have you heard anything from the FBI?”

  “No,” he said bleakly. “I called their office in Sacramento, but no one will say anything other than that Akira is still being questioned. And now we have learned that the government has frozen the assets of Sumitomo Bank and other Japanese-owned banks. We cannot touch our savings; all we can do is live day to day.” He blinked back tears. “Tamiko is beside herself with worry. She is taking the children and going to stay with her parents in Sacramento. She needs the comfort of her mother, and I cannot blame her.”

  At home, Ruth tried to hide her anxiety from the children. She knew she would eventually have to tell them what had happened, but they were so young and she wasn’t ready to burden them with that knowledge yet. Only one member of the household wasn’t fooled. As Ruth was cooking dinner, Slugger padded into the kitchen and stood by her side as if protecting her from unseen forces. He looked up, making a little whining noise of concern. She bent down and ruffled his fur. “You can always tell when I’m upset, can’t you, boy?” She reached up, picked up a slice of the carrot she had been chopping, and handed it to him. He wolfed it down, his tail wagging happily. “Fortunately,” she added fondly, “you are also highly susceptible to bribery.”

  * * *

  On December 11, the Western Defense Command declared the entire West Coast of the United States a “prohibited military area.” The following weeks saw hundreds more “enemy aliens” arrested amid unsubstantiated claims of a vast fifth column of “Jap” spies in the United States. There were fulminations of outrage from politicians and newspaper editorialists. Movie actor and Hearst columnist Henry McLemore wrote, “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it … I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

  Prejudice against the Japanese was nothing new—it had even been enshrined in law in the so-called Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924, which prohibited further immigration from Asian countries. But now Japanese Americans were being seen as an existential threat, even by respected figures like California Attorney General Earl Warren and columnist Walter Lippmann, who added their voices to the call for “confinement,” “removal,” or “evacuation.” Traditionally anti-Japanese organizations like the Associated Farmers lobbied for internment, as locally Joseph Dreesen once again opined to newspapers, “You can’t trust a Jap.”

  In Florin, every public pronouncement sparked new rumors and speculation. Would only Issei—Japanese nationals—be removed? Nisei feared for their parents, but surely the government wouldn’t do the same to them as American citizens? The very fact that the Farm Security Administration was encouraging Japanese farmers to continue working “for the war effort” indicated that the country needed them. To avoid appearing disloyal, the Japanese community enthusiastically embraced patriotic activities like selling war bonds and rolling bandages for the Red Cross.

  The FBI continued to search homes with impunity, and on February 18, agents interrogated a local farmer named Hisata Iwasa. Iwasa spoke imperfect English, was recovering from a stroke, and, after the men left, became so shamed and agitated—fearing he had said the wrong things and thrown suspicion on innocent friends—that he took poison and killed himself.

  The next day, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, “authorizing the Secretary of War to prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Soon it became clear that “all persons” meant “all Japanese” and that “exclusion” meant “exile”—to one of ten “relocation centers” outside the “military areas,” i.e., the entire West Coast of the United States.

  On February 25, the Navy informed the residents of Terminal Island near San Pedro—mainly fisherman—that they had forty-eight hours to leave the island. Bainbridge Island in Washington State followed. In Oregon, Stanley Watanabe, his wife, and their children were sent to a hastily constructed assembly center in North Portland.

  The mass evacuations had begun.

  * * *

  There was now a military curfew prohibiting anyone of Japanese ancestry from being on the streets between eight P.M. and six A.M. Vince had to open and close the diner because Frank couldn’t risk violating the curfew. A travel limit was also imposed: Japanese Americans could venture no farther than five miles from their homes. But most of the stores and physicians that residents of Florin depended on were ten miles away in Sacramento. Exceptions could be obtained only from the provost’s office in, of course, Sacramento. So in order to petition a waiver of the travel regulations, you first had to violate them.

  “How could FDR do this to us?” Ruth complained bitterly, the children safely in bed, Frank at home after the nightly curfew. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first and only president that Ruth had voted for in her twenty-five years, and she had been proud of that vote, proud of the man who had labored so mightily to lift the nation out of the Depression. But now she felt angry, and betrayed: “God damn it, we’re American citizens!”

  “So are Negroes,” Frank noted, “and what has it gotten them?”

  “Is that all it comes down to in this country? The color of your skin? The shape of your eyes?”

  “It won’t be like this forever. But this is the way it is now, and we have to live with it. We have to show these bastards that we’re loyal Americans and we will do our duty—and hope that someday they’ll see us that way too.”

  Ruth’s eyes filled with tears. “What about Donnie and Peggy? How many years will they be forced to spend in a … relocation center?”

  “We’ll be with them. That’s all that matters to them.”

  “And what about th
e diner? What are we going to do with it?”

  Frank winced. “Sell the inventory, I guess, and start all over again when we get back. That’s more than your parents will be able to do.”

  “Oh God,” she whispered, thinking of the farm, everything her father and mother had worked for since coming to California. “Poor Papa…”

  Frank took her in his arms and she rested her head on his shoulder. He was more familiar with the world’s injustices, the way people’s lives could be uprooted like trees in a hurricane. But to lose his home twice, through no fault of his own—that was a bitter draft, and he almost choked on it.

  * * *

  As the tidal wave of dispossession rolled into California’s inland valleys, the Florin area was one of the last to be evacuated. It wasn’t until late May that the grim heralds appeared, overnight, tacked up on telephone poles:

  Pursuant to the provisions of Civilian Exclusion Order No. 92, this Headquarters, dated May 23, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o’clock noon, P.W.T., Saturday, May 30, 1942.

  One week’s notice was standard. For supposed security reasons, the War Relocation Authority—or WRA—did not want news of which areas were to be evacuated to be made public more than seven days in advance.

  The inland sea around the Watanabes’ farmhouse had turned scarlet, the strawberry plants bursting with nearly ripe fruit. Bees buzzed amid the grapevines, like the sound of power lines on a quiet day—soothing, as long as you didn’t get too close. Taizo, Jiro, Horace, and Ralph were out in the fields preparing for the harvest when they heard a discordant, unwelcome voice:

  “Morning, Watanabe-san.”

  Joseph Dreesen—his hair as white as the document he held in his wrinkled hand—stood there smiling his wolfen smile, as Taizo knew he would be eventually.

  “Ah. Sheriff,” Taizo said. “Never one to waste time, are you?”