Farewell to Manzanar

by James D Houston

  I was too young to witness any of it. Papa himself did not take part and he kept all of us with him in the barracks during the day and night it lasted. But I remember the deadly quiet in the camp the morning before it began, that heavy atmospheric threat of something about to burst. And I remember hearing the crowds rush past our block that night. Toward the end of it they were a lynch mob, swarming from one side of the camp to the other, from the hospital to the police station to the barracks of the men they were after, shouting slogans in English and Japanese.

  “Idiots,” Papa called them. “Bakatare. They want to go back to Japan.”

  “It is more than going back to Japan,” Mama said. “It is the sugar. It disappears so fast...”

  “What do they think they will find over there?”

  “Maybe they would be treated like human beings,” Mama said.

  “You be quiet. Listen to what I am saying. These idiots won’t even get to the front gate of this camp. You watch. Before this is over, somebody is going to be killed. I guarantee it. They might all be killed.”

  The man who emerged as leader of the rioters was Hawaiian-born Joe Kurihara. During the First World War he had served in the U.S. Army in France and in Germany, and he was so frustrated by his treatment at Manzanar he was ready to renounce his citizenship and sail to the old country. Kurihara’s group set up microphones and speakers near the cook’s barracks and began a round of crowd-stirring speeches, demanding his release, charging that Tayama and the administration had used this beating to cover up the sugar fraud and saying it was time to get the inus once and for all.

  That afternoon the authorities agreed to bring the young cook back into camp. But this wasn’t enough. By 6:00 P.M. 2,000 people were looking for blood. The Internal Security Force, made up of internees like the demonstrators, had evaporated in the face of such a mob. For a while they had the camp to themselves.

  They split into two groups, one heading for the police station to free the cook, the other heading for the hospital to finish off Tayama, who had been concealed under a hospital bed. A vigilante party searched the corridors. When they failed to find their man, this half of the crowd moved off in search of others on their “death list.”

  Meanwhile the mob heading for the police station had been met by a detachment of military police carrying sub-machine guns and M-Is. When an army captain asked them to disperse, they stoned him. Now they were hooting “Banzai!,” jeering threats at the MPs and singing songs in Japanese. The MPs started lobbing tear gas bombs, and then, with no announcement or command to shoot, while the mob swirled frantically to escape the gas, several soldiers opened fire.

  This instantly cleared the street, and the riot was over. Only the dead and the injured remained. Ten were treated in the hospital for gunshot wounds. One young man was killed on the spot. Another nineteen-year-old died five days later.

  What I recall vividly are the bells that began to toll late that night. After dispersing, some of the demonstrators organized shifts, and kept them tolling all over camp. With the bells and the MP jeeps patrolling up and down the streets, I was a long time getting to sleep. Against Papas orders I kept sneaking looks out the window, and I saw something I had only seen once before. The searchlights. They operated every night, but I never saw them because I went to bed so early and our block was well in from the perimeter. From the guard towers the lights scanned steadily, making shadows ebb and flow among the barracks like dark, square waves.

  The next morning I awoke long after sunup. The lights were gone. Shadows were sharp and fixed. But the bells were still ringing. It was the only sound in camp, the only sound in Owens Valley, the mess hall bells, their gongs echoing between the Inyo Range and the nearby Sierras, their furthest ripples soaking into dry sand. They rang till noon.

  ten

  The Reservoir Shack: An Aside

  My brother-in-law Kaz was foreman of a reservoir maintenance detail, the only crew permitted to work or to leave the camp limits the night of the riot. At the back gate they were issued four pickax handles, to protect themselves in case the inu-hunters found them “cooperating” at a time like this.

  They drove out there, checked the chlorine shed, toured the perimeter, then trooped into a little shack that had been set up with four cots. It was like a firemans watch. Each crew spent twenty-four hours on standby, making periodic checks, clearing the debris, doing whatever was necessary to keep the water moving into camp.

  The shack had one window, but when they turned off the light and stretched out on the cots, you could barely see its outline, the night was so dark. Kaz lay there trying to see the line between the dark inside and the dark outside the shack, and he thought he saw something pass across the window but called it his imagination and shut his eyes.

  A moment later the door crashed open. A flashlight was blinding him. He felt the sharp jut of a gunsight against his cheek.

  Someone yelled, “All right, you Japs, up against the wall!”

  He jumped out of bed and saw four MPs with Tommy guns, a sergeant and three privates. While Kaz backed to the wall to join his crew, that gun barrel stayed right against his cheek. The MPs kept yelling, “C’monjaps, move it. Move it!”

  Kaz finally found his voice. “Hey! What’s the matter with you guys?”

  The sergeant in charge was wild-eyed, scanning the room as he fanned the air with his Tommy gun, sure he had uncovered a nest of saboteurs. He was about the same age as Kaz, early twenties.

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” he yelled.

  “We’re the reservoir crew.”

  “Nobody’s supposed to leave the camp! You know that!”

  “Somebody’s gotta be out here all the time. Regulations.”

  The sergeant spotted the ax handles on the floor by each cot and kicked one with his boot.

  “What the hell are these for then?”

  “The rioters. If they found us here they’d throw us all in the reservoir.”

  The sergeant squinted suspiciously.

  Kaz said, “Go on back to the gate and check it out.”

  The sergeant kicked all the ax handles into a pile and scooped them up. “I’m taking these with me. Don't nobody move till I get back.”

  He left. The reservoir crew didn’t blink until he returned with the clearance half an hour later. They stood there watching the three jittery privates, who had backed up against the opposite wall, as fearful as these four Japs they had to guard as Kaz and his men were of the unsteady weapons they knew could go off at any moment.

  eleven

  Yes Yes No No

  27. Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

  _____(yes) _____(no)

  28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

  _____(yes) _____(no)

  —from the War Relocation Authority Application for Leave Clearance, 1943

  LATER IN DECEMBER THE ADMINISTRATION GAVE each family a Christmas tree hauled in from the Sierras. A new director had been appointed and this was his gesture of apology for all the difficulties that had led up to the riot, a promise of better treatment and better times to come.

  It was an honest gesture, but it wasn’t much of a Christmas that year. The presents were makeshift, the wind was roaring, Papa was drunk. Better times were a long way off, and the difficulties, it seemed, had just begun. Early in February the government’s Loyalty Oath appeared. Everyone seventeen and over was required to fill it out. This soon became the most divisive issue of all. It cut deeper than the riot, because no one could avoid it. Not even Papa. After five months of self-imposed isolation, this debate was what finally forced him out of the barracks and into circulation again.

  At the time, I was too young to
understand the problem. I only knew there was no peace in our cubicle for weeks. Block organizers would come to talk to Papa and my brothers. They would huddle over the table a while, muttering like conspirators, sipping tea or one of his concoctions. Their voices gradually would rise to shouts and threats. Mama would try to calm the men down. Papa would tell her to shut up, then Granny would interrupt and order him to quit disgracing Mama all the time. Once he just shoved Granny across the room, up against the far wall and back into her chair, where she sat sniffling while the arguments went on.

  If the organizers weren’t there, Papa would argue with Woody. Or rather, Woody would listen to Papa lecture him on true loyalty, pacing from bunk to bunk, waving his cane.

  “Listen to me, Woodrow. When a soldier goes into war he must go believing he is never coming back. This is why the Japanese are such courageous warriors. They are prepared to die. They expect nothing else. But to do that, you must believe in what you’re fighting for. If you do not believe, you will not be willing to die. If you are not willing to die, you won’t fight well. And if you don’t fight well you will probably be killed stupidly, for the wrong reason, and unheroically. So tell me, how can you think of going off to fight?”

  Woody always answered softly, respectfully, with a boyish and submissive smile.

  “I will fight well, Papa.”

  “In this war? How is it possible?”

  “I am an American citizen. America is at war.”

  “But look where they have put us!”

  “The more of us who go into the army, the sooner the war will be over, the sooner you and Mama will be out of here.”

  “Do you think I would risk losing a son for that?”

  “You want me to answer NO NO, Papa?”

  “Do you think that is what I’m telling you? Of course you cannot answer NO NO. If you say NO NO, you will be shipped back to Japan with all those other bakatare!”

  “But if I answer YES YES I will be drafted anyway, no matter how I feel about it. That is why they are giving us the oath to sign.”

  “No! That is not true! They are looking for volunteers. And only a fool would volunteer.”

  Papa stared hard at Woody, making this a challenge. Woody shrugged, still smiling his boyish smile, and did not argue. He knew that when the time came he would join the army, and he knew it was pointless to begin the argument again. It was a circle. His duty as a son was to sit and listen to Papa thrash his way around it and around it and around it.

  A circle, or you might have called it a corral, like Manzanar itself, with no exit save via three narrow gates. The first led into the infantry, the second back across the Pacific. The third, called relocation, was just opening up: interned citizens who could find a job and a sponsor somewhere inland, away from the West Coast, were beginning to trickle out of camp. But the program was bogged down in paperwork. It was taking months to process applications and security clearances. A loyalty statement required of everyone, it was hoped, might save some time and a lot of red tape. This, together with the search for “loyal” soldiers, had given rise to the ill-fated “oath.”

  Two weeks before the December Riot, JACL leaders met in Salt Lake City and passed a resolution pledging Nisei to volunteer out of the camps for military service.1 In January the government announced its plan to form an all-Nisei combat regiment. While recruiting for this unit and speeding up the relocation program, the government figured it could simultaneously weed out the ‘“disloyal” and thus get a clearer idea of exactly how many agents and Japanese sympathizers it actually had to deal with. This part of it would have been comical if the results were not so grotesque. No self-respecting espionage agent would willingly admit he was disloyal. Yet the very idea of the oath itself—appearing at the end of that first chaotic year—became the final goad that prodded many once-loyal citizens to turn militantly anti-American.

  From the beginning Papa knew his own answer would be YES YES. He agreed with Woody on this much, even though it meant swearing allegiance to the government that had sent him to Fort Lincoln and denying his connections with the one country in the world where he might still have the rights of a citizen. The alternative was worse. If he said NO NO, he could be sent to Tule Lake camp in northern California where all the “disloyal” were to be assembled for what most people believed would be eventual repatriation to Japan. Papa had no reason to return to Japan. He was too old to start over. He believed America would win the war, and he knew, even after all he’d endured, that if he had a future it still lay in this country. What’s more, a move to Tule Lake could mean a further splitting up of our family.

  This was a hard choice to make, and even harder to hold to. Anti-American feeling in camp ran stronger than ever. ProJapan forces were trying to organize a NO NO vote by blocks, in massive resistance. Others wanted to boycott the oath altogether in a show of noncooperation or through the mistaken fear that anyone who accepted the form would be shipped out of camp: the NO NOS back to Japan, the YES YESS into an American society full of wartime hostility and racial hate.

  A meeting to debate the matter was called in our mess hall. Papa knew that merely showing his face would draw stares and muttered comments, YES YES was just what they expected of an inu. But he had to speak his mind before the NO NO contingent carried the block. Saying NO NO as an individual was one thing, bullying the entire camp into it was quite another. At the very least he didn’t want to be sucked into such a decision without having his own opinion heard.

  Woody wanted to go with him, but Papa said it was a meeting for “heads of households” only and he insisted on going alone. From the time he heard about it he purposely drank nothing stronger than tea. He shaved and trimmed his mustache and put on a silk tie. His limp was nearly gone now, but he carried his cane and went swaggering off down the narrow walkway between the barracks, punching at the packed earth in front of him.

  About four o’clock I was playing hopscotch in the firebreak with three other girls. It was winter, the sun had already dropped behind Mount Whitney. Now a wind was rising, the kind of biting, steady wind that could bring an ocean of sand into camp at any moment with almost no warning. I was hurrying back to the barracks when I heard a great commotion inside the mess hall, men shouting wildly, as if a fire had broken out. The loudest voice was Papa’s, cursing.

  “Eta! (trash) Eta! Bakayaro! Bakayaro!”

  The door of the mess hall flew open and a short, beefy man came tearing out. He jumped off the porch, running as his feet hit the ground. He didn’t get far. Papa came through the doorway right behind him, in a flying leap, bellowing like a warrior, “Yaaaaaah!” He let go of his cane as he landed on the man’s back, and they both tumbled into the dirt. The wind was rising. Half the sky was dark with a tide of sand pouring toward us. The dust billowed and spun as they kicked and pummeled and thrashed each other.

  At the meeting, when Papa stood up to defend the YES YES position, murmurs of “Inu, inu began to circulate around the mess hall. This man then jumped up at the speaker’s table and made the charge aloud. Papa went for him. Now, outside in the dirt, Papa had him by the throat and would have strangled him, but some other men pulled them apart. I had never seen him so livid, yelling and out of his head with rage. While they pinned his arms, he kicked at the sand, sending windblown bursts of it toward the knot of men dragging his opponent out of reach.

  A few moments later the sandstorm hit. The sky turned black as night. Everyone ran for cover. Two men hustled Papa to our barracks. The fighting against the wind and sand to get there calmed him down some.

  Back inside he sat by the stove holding his teacup and didn’t speak for a long time. One cheekbone was raw where it had been mashed into the sand. Mama kept pouring him little trickles of tea. We listened to the wind howl. When the sand died down, the sky outside stayed black. The storm had knocked out the electricity all over the camp. It was a cold, lonely night, and we huddled around our oil stove while Mama and Woody and Chizu began to talk about th
e day.

  A young woman came in, a friend of Chizu’s, who lived across the way. She had studied in Japan for several years. About the time I went to bed she and Papa began to sing songs in Japanese, warming their hands on either side of the stove, facing each other in its glow. After a while Papa sang the first line of the Japanese national anthem, Kimi ga yo. Woody, Chizu, and Mama knew the tune, so they hummed along while Papa and the other woman sang the words. It can be a hearty or a plaintive tune, depending on your mood. From Papa, that night, it was a deep-throated lament. Almost invisible in the stove’s small glow, tears began running down his face.

  I had seen him cry a few times before. It only happened when he was singing or when someone else sang a song that moved him. He played the three-stringed samisen, which Kiyo and I called his “pinko-pinko.” We would laugh together when we heard him plucking it and whining out old Japanese melodies. We would hold our ears and giggle. It was always a great joke between us, except for those rare times when Papa began to weep at the lyrics. Then we would just stare quietly—as I did that night—from some hidden corner of the room. This was always mysterious and incomprehensible.

  The national anthem, I later learned, is what he had sung every morning as a schoolboy in Japan. They still sing it there, the way American kids pledge allegiance to the flag. It is not a martial song, or a victory song, the way many national anthems are. It is really a poem, whose words go back to the ninth century:

  Kimi ga yo wa chiyoni

  yachiyoni sa-za-re i-shi no i-wa-o to

  na-ri-te ko-ke no musu made.

  May thy peaceful reign last long.

  May it last for thousands of years,