Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  The Manzanar Free Press was silent on the subject, so Ruth went straight to the administration office and insisted on seeing the Project Director himself, Ralph Merritt. After ten minutes she was ushered into his office. “My father was one of those transferred to Tule Lake,” she explained, “and we haven’t heard from him in over a week. We’re very concerned for his safety, and according to the papers—”

  “Don’t believe the newspapers, Mrs. Harada,” Merritt told her. “Most of what they’ve printed about the incident is just hysterical nonsense. I spoke with WRA Director Dillon Myer about that mass demonstration the papers claim was violent and threatening, and he said that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Yes, there’s been some violence, but the internees didn’t take anyone hostage and no one tried to burn anything down.”

  “Then why did Mr. Best call in the Army to take over the camp?”

  “I’m not clear on that myself,” he said with a frown. “I can certainly call Colonel Austin and inquire about your father, though I can’t guarantee I’ll get a straight answer. But I can try.”

  “Thank you,” Ruth said. “I appreciate that.”

  “I remember your father’s case,” Merritt said sadly. “I didn’t want to send him to Tule, but he gave the board no choice. He seemed like a good man hamstrung by his own sense of honor. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  Taizo dreamt of his farm in Florin, the fields white with strawberry blossoms in the spring; but then, no, the white wasn’t blossoms, it was snow, and Taizo began shivering in his sleep. He woke to the bitter cold of a late November morning and was grateful when the breakfast bells rang, so he could go inside the heated mess hall and warm himself with food and hot coffee. As they were escorted to breakfast, Taizo noted that the Army had begun expanding the stockade by erecting a barbed-wire fence around five Army barracks. Apparently the soldiers in the barracks were being relocated and these buildings would house the ever-growing number of “detainees,” now approaching two hundred. Taizo longed for the day they would vacate the flimsy tents and sleep on real cots on a real floor surrounded by real walls.

  Days in the bullpen were tedious but tolerable—there was a weekly delivery of cigarettes and newspapers, something to read at least. Taizo was stunned to see the lurid lies they printed about Tule Lake while blissfully unaware of the bloody truth. Mail service also resumed, though outgoing mail was heavily censored; Taizo finally received the letters Etsuko and Ruth had been writing, as well as a note from Jiro, worried and frustrated because the Army refused to allow him to visit his own brother.

  He replied to Jiro first, saying that under no circumstances should he tell Etsuko her husband was a prisoner: he was deeply ashamed to be here and refused to have his family dishonored. Then Taizo wrote Etsuko, telling her not to worry; the stories about Tule Lake were overblown. He apologized for not replying sooner but he had a cold—true enough; he had begun coughing yesterday—and that all was well.

  * * *

  Ruth felt immense relief upon receiving the letter, but Etsuko fixated on Taizo’s cold and on a subtle unsteadiness in his handwriting. “He is still not well, I can tell. We should send him some cough syrup and lozenges.” Ruth agreed—it gave her mother something to do—and at the camp’s co-op store bought him cough medicine, Vicks VapoRub, and a pair of long underwear. They boxed it up and sent it with a long letter from Etsuko and two shorter ones from Peggy and Donnie that consisted of crayon drawings of Grandpa, a bright sun shining in a paper sky, and two valentine-red hearts.

  December arrived in Manzanar bearing an unexpected gift: snow. Manzanar’s children—many of whom had never seen the stuff before—bundled up in peacoats and happily jumped into snowdrifts, learning quickly how to pack and toss snowballs, construct snowmen, and use scraps of plywood as passably good sleds.

  December brought snow to Tule Lake as well, as well as a frigid mass of blustery air that kept people indoors during the day and at night seemed to rest on Taizo’s chest like a block of ice. His cold had worsened, his cough now a deep rattle in his chest, and the medicines from Etsuko did little to alleviate it. The long underwear made scant difference when those wintry gusts bellowed through the tent at night.

  Finally, at least, the prisoners were receiving proper medical attention. When Dr. Mason took Taizo’s temperature—103 degrees—and saw his blood-streaked sputum, he immediately had Taizo transferred to the camp hospital and put him on penicillin, though the new antibiotic was in short supply, as was much else. Due to the Army’s demonstrated inability to manage a camp the size of Tule Lake, there were now frequent shortages of medicine, milk, food, hot water, fuel—some children were even barefoot for lack of shoes.

  Inside a heated building, lying on a soft bed, Taizo was perversely grateful to the cold that brought him here. But Dr. Mason told him it wasn’t a cold but bacterial pneumonia (brought on, he neglected to mention, by the squalid, freezing conditions in the bullpen). The word “pneumonia” sent a shiver through Taizo as he recalled his six months abed with the “winter fever” when he was twelve.

  “Am I”—his shortness of breath punctuated the question—“allowed visitors?”

  “It depends on their age and health,” the doctor replied.

  In the end, there was only one person he could ask for.

  “Jiro,” Taizo said, chest rattling as he took another breath. “Brother.”

  The doctor allowed a short visit. When Jiro arrived the next morning, he paled to see Taizo in bed with the same illness that he, Jiro, had inflicted upon him fifty years ago. But his brother looked so much worse now.

  “Taizo,” he said softly. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” Taizo said. He took a breath. “Warmer.”

  “It is unconscionable what they did to you in that stockade,” Jiro said angrily. “Everyone in camp knows what they did. They are only putting prisoners in barracks now because they are afraid of being found out!”

  “What is done—” Taizo burst into a wracking cough, and Jiro flinched to see bloody spittle trickling out of his mouth.

  A Nisei nurse hurried over and wiped his chin with a towel. “Don’t make him talk too much,” she advised Jiro, who nodded.

  “Taizo, answer me with a nod or a shake of the head. Shall I tell Etsuko that you are sick, in the hospital?”

  At first Taizo shook his head, then thought better of it and nodded.

  “But I should not mention the stockade—how you fell sick?”

  Taizo shook his head vehemently. “Tell her,” he said, then, out of breath, waited for some more air and went on, “caught—outside. Must never—know—” He paused, then, summoning the strength and will to go on: “She would—blame herself. For not—being here. It would—haunt—her.”

  “I understand.”

  “Tell her I love her.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  Taizo nodded gratefully.

  Tears welled in Jiro’s eyes. “My brother. Twice I have brought this fever upon you. I would give up my own life to take back the letter I wrote, selfishly asking you to join me. I am not asking for your forgiveness; I don’t deserve that. I only ask that you believe me when I say: I am so sorry, Taizo.”

  Taizo was touched by Jiro’s contrition and by the obvious love in his eyes. It reminded him of something, an old proverb …

  He said, “Koi to seki to wa kakusarenu.”

  Jiro laughed. He knew the proverb:

  “Love and a cough cannot be hidden.”

  Taizo smiled and put his hand on Jiro’s, unafraid to show his own love. Nothing else mattered anymore.

  * * *

  When word of Taizo’s death arrived in that first week of January, it came as a cold, cruel shock after the sunny letter he had sent just weeks before. Had she not been given that false hope, Etsuko might have borne the news with some measure of composure; now she simply broke down, shudders of grief wracking her small body. Ruth had to rein in her own anguish to offer wh
at strength she could to her mother. That night she stayed again with Etsuko, though neither of them fell asleep for hours; they spoke of the man they had both loved, his strength, his kindness, his humor. Snowball seemed to sense their shared sorrow and kept her distance, curled up on a pillow on the floor. Finally Etsuko drifted to sleep, leaving Ruth still wide awake. Her grief was a storm, a driving rain falling too fast to be absorbed; but beneath the sodden earth roiled a core of fiery lava, her anger at the actions of the country that had taken everything from her father. The storm would pass, but the anger would continue to burn like lava within the hard mantle of her heart.

  Chapter 13

  1945

  Mitsuye Endo was a twenty-two-year-old Nisei woman fired in 1942 from her position as a clerk with the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento due only to her Japanese ancestry, then interned at Tule Lake and, later, Topaz War Relocation Center. She was an American citizen who had never been to Japan, did not speak Japanese, and had a brother in the United States Army. Civil rights attorneys James Purcell and Saburo Kido (then president of the Japanese American Citizens League) persuaded her to be a legal “test case” and filed on her behalf a writ of habeas corpus holding that as a loyal citizen, her evacuation and detention were unconstitutional.

  On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court issued their opinion that “whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have to detain other classes of citizens, it has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure.” The Roosevelt administration, given advance notice of the Court’s ruling, sought to preempt it by rescinding—the day before, December 17—the exclusion order for Japanese on the West Coast and announcing that all relocation centers would close by the end of 1945. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced the news on the radio that night, and the next evening, at Manzanar, meetings were held in every block to elaborate on the new policy and to answer any questions residents might have.

  Ruth, Frank, Horace, and Rose were among the skeptical populace gathered in their local mess hall, listening to a WRA official wearing hornrim glasses read a statement from Director Myer explaining that “all persons of Japanese ancestry, unless there are reasons in individual cases, can return to the West Coast effective after midnight, January 20, 1945.”

  Applause and cheers erupted from the crowd.

  The official went on to stress that the relocation centers will “remain in operation for several months” and that school “will be continued through the current school year. This will enable families with school-age children sufficient time to plan their relocation so that the pupils may reenter school in their new communities at the beginning of the fall term.” He noted that the lifting of exclusion came at an opportune time since “there is a good demand for workers in war plants, in civilian goods production, and on the farms.

  “Special funds have been provided by Congress for the assistance of needy people who have been displaced from their homes by restrictive governmental action…” He finished: “The WRA feels wholly confident that no evacuees will be deprived of adequate means of subsistence by reason of the closing of the homes. Signed, D. L. Myer, Director.”

  After further applause, the official opened the floor to questions.

  Ruth shot to her feet before anyone else and raised a hand.

  “Yes,” she said, “I have a question.”

  Something in her tone made Frank think: Uh oh.

  “Yes, ma’am, go ahead.”

  Ruth asked, “Is that all?”

  The official blinked like a startled owl. “Pardon me?”

  “I said, is that all?” she repeated. “No apology? No ‘We’re sorry we tore you from your homes and destroyed your businesses’? No ‘We’re sorry we put you in prison camps with machine guns pointed at you and your children twenty-four hours a day’? Or”—and here her voice broke—“‘we regret the death of your loved ones who would still be alive today had they not been brought to this godforsaken, goddamned pisshole in the middle of nowhere?”

  Her shouted words—and her use of profanity, quite indecorous for a Nisei woman—shocked and silenced everyone in the room.

  Frank took Ruth gently by the arm, saying quietly, “Okay. You’ve made your point. Let’s go home.”

  Moving like a sleepwalker, Ruth allowed herself to be escorted outside into the chill winter night. The frigid air quickly sobered her, bringing with it a cold draft of embarrassment. She started for their barrack, but only got as far as the latrine before she broke down weeping. Frank wrapped his arms around her, whispering softly, “It’s okay. You’ve had to hold it all in—for the sake of the kids, your mother—but you can let it go now.”

  Between sobs she said, “I—can never—let him go. Never!”

  Frank knew there was nothing he could say or do but to hold her. He felt the same grief—for Taizo, for Slugger, for their old lives left shattered at the side of a road none of them had ever expected to travel—but fought back his tears so he could remain strong for Ruth. He would cry those tears later, and knew that Ruth would be there to be strong for him.

  * * *

  The residents of Manzanar now found themselves unexpectedly free—but to do what? The war was still on, Japan had yet to be defeated, and anti-Japanese feeling still ran high, especially in California. This was luridly illustrated, in January of 1945, by newspaper accounts of one Sumio Doi, a young Nisei whose family was the first to return to California from Amache Relocation Center in Colorado. With two brothers in the U.S. Army, it was up to Sumio to ready the family farm in Auburn in time for harvest. Four men and three women—one himself a soldier, AWOL from the Army—attempted to burn down, then dynamite, the family’s property. Shots were also fired into the Doi home. The local sheriff posted a guard at the Doi farm, suspects were arrested—but despite signed confessions from all defendants, two juries, one state and one federal, chose to acquit them.

  Is it any wonder that many of the remaining internees at Manzanar actively resisted the idea of leaving the camp that had become a safe harbor?

  Among these were Ruth’s neighbors, the Arikawas. There was now a gold star above two blue stars on the white service flag that hung in their window: in July, Frank Arikawa had been killed in action on the Italian front, the first service casualty from Manzanar. Though they grieved for their son, Teru and Takeyoshi were proud he had died serving his country. Every day as Ruth passed their window, she thought of the courageous soldier in the photograph whose face she would never see in life. She also thought of Ralph, whose 442nd Regiment was distinguishing itself in battle—three months ago, in France, the 442nd had rescued more than two hundred members of the Texas “Lost Battalion”—but was paying for it with such a tragically high number of casualties that it was sometimes called “the Purple Heart Battalion.”

  Every day Ruth thought of this. Every day she repressed her dread. Now she asked Takeyoshi Arikawa about his family’s plans to relocate.

  “I would like to take my family home,” he admitted, “but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause this country any more trouble?”

  That response was so Japanese in its self-effacement that it almost made Ruth laugh. She herself did not give a damn about troubling a country that had exiled her family to a concentration camp.

  But Ruth and Frank did decide, for the kids’ sake, to wait until after the end of the school year in late May. Meanwhile they applied for “relocation subsistence grants”—twenty-five dollars per person, plus three bucks a day for travel expenses, and the WRA picked up the tab for transporting their personal property. It wasn’t much compared to all they had lost, but Frank and Horace had worked jobs at Tanforan and Manzanar at sixteen dollars a month and had saved about three hundred dollars apiece. Etsuko’s frozen assets in Sumitomo Bank would soon be wired to her too. And the men hoped to find employment as quickly as possible.

  Regrettably, there
would be two fewer friends to go home to; their one-time neighbors, Jim and Helen Russell, had moved to San Jose, California, where Jim had taken a new job. In a letter Jim offered to drive all the way to Sacramento to pick the Watanabes up at the train station there; Frank thanked him for his generosity but told him they would manage on their own.

  At the end of February, WRA Director Dillon Myer himself came to Manzanar to address a capacity crowd. Ruth promised Frank that she would absolutely, positively not swear at anyone. She was expecting only more of the same dry policy statements, but Myer surprised her with his candor about anti-Japanese prejudice in California:

  “These are the people who have been working against you for the past forty years,” he said bluntly. “They are the ones who are now occupying your homes, operating your farms and other types of business, and making plenty out of it. And they are the ones who fear your competition.” He said “race-baiters” like these were trying to intimidate evacuees into remaining in the camps and were hoping for “eventual deportation of all Japanese after the war.” He said such campaigns were just so much “bluffing” and encouraged the evacuees not to give in to their bullying.

  It was a very heartening talk for many, Ruth included, and it had its effect. In March of 1945, 158 people left Manzanar to relocate, while another 603 made plans to do so.

  It was in March, over lunch at the mess hall, that Horace unexpectedly brought up the possibility of leaving sooner rather than later.

  “It’s just that if we wait to leave until the end of May,” he pointed out, “the harvest season will be over. If we leave, say, in mid-April, I might stand a chance of finding harvest work, in Florin or elsewhere.”