The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  * * *

  There are no accounts of physical resistance recorded among captives at the time of deportation. But there was defiance. Men ran to avoid capture, like Dr. Makoto Tsuneshige and the father of the Naganuma brothers. When Victor Maoki was taken, he stood stoically with other prisoners in the back of the truck, as if they wanted to leave unbowed. “They said ‘Banzai,’” an all-purpose cheer meant to lift spirits, said Libia. “And they began to sing.” In the southern city of Ica, friendly police warned Seiichi Higashide of possible arrest by agents from the capital, and he spent six months entombed in a room he excavated under a floor of his house, a six-by-nine-foot secret living space equipped with only a tatami mat to sleep on, a shortwave radio, a desk, and a chair.

  Higashide, a teacher who had come to own a high-end dry goods shop and presided over a businessmen’s association, emerged from his hiding place when there was no more news of arrests and he thought the danger was over. But on the evening of January, 6, 1944, after a lakeside Sunday picnic with his family where they went sand skiing among the dunes, five armed men entered his house. What the thirty-five-year-old immigrant from Hokkaido had spent fifteen years building in his adopted country was about to be destroyed.

  In a 1993 memoir, Adios to Tears, Higashide wrote that he was held at Ica police headquarters overnight but refused to be transferred to Lima in a filthy paddy wagon. He was allowed to hire a taxi—with a police detective as passenger—for the journey to the capital three hundred miles north. He stopped at a photographer’s studio en route for a portrait to send to his family if he should not return. In the picture, a handsome, sad-faced man in suit and tie stares into the camera. Later, when American soldiers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets ordered him to strip naked for inspection, Higashide held on to one thought: he had committed no crime.

  * * *

  Most of those captured from Latin America traveled by sea, often in old civilian workhorse ships taken over by the U.S. Army. From Peru, voyages began in Callao or the oil-exporting port of Talara, the westernmost point on the South American continent.

  Talara was important for a reason beyond its port; the British International Petroleum Company (later BP Oil) had been operating there for decades, extracting crude from nearby fields. In an agreement between Washington and Lima, engineers had just expanded facilities around the company airstrip to base U.S. aircraft. Deportees transiting at Talara witnessed the busy comings and goings of ships and aircraft, a welcome sight to Higashide’s group of frightened, exhausted captives, who had traveled the six hundred miles from Lima over two and a half days in the back of an open truck, “like simple freight under the blazing desert sun.” Rumor had it that they were being taken to a mountainous area where they would be massacred. “Matters were so confused by that time, it would not have been strange if that had actually happened,” Higashide wrote. “The procedures and discipline of the Peruvian authorities had deteriorated to that point.” Another captive said U.S. soldiers pushed his group onto the ship at the point of bayonets.

  Nevertheless, some remember moments of grace at Talara. After a journey during which guards failed to provide sufficient food, Augusto Kage’s father told him that ambulant vendors on the dock gave captives fruit from their trays. Kashiro Hayashi told his son Thomas that a U.S. soldier noticed he was limping oddly and ordered him to halt. The soldier discovered the contraband pen Hayashi had hidden in his shoe. “Please let me keep it,” Hayashi pleaded. “I must write to my family.” He kept the pen.

  On the voyages out of Peru, forbidden from leaving the dank, stinking holds of the ships in which they rocked, prisoners assumed they were headed north toward the United States. But without sight of the sun or stars they could not know for sure. Higashide’s ship slowed and stopped too soon. Hot air entered the hold, and speculation ran rampant. Where were they?

  When the steel hatch lifted, the captives climbed a metal ladder and walked weak-kneed from confinement onto the deck. Disoriented by the light, Higashide made out a blur of palms. “It must be Panama!” he said.

  We are the hostages

  Damn it, take us any place …

  Bear it, bear it, the raindrops whisper

  —AREQUIPA MERCHANT TAIJIRO TOCHIO, “SONG OF FAREWELL”

  The first captives to arrive in the U.S. Canal Zone, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, were met by jeering U.S. soldiers waving rifles. On shore, they received orders to construct their own toilet facilities. They cleared trees and brush in the tropical forest, providing free labor for construction of a U.S. military camp. They were forbidden to pause or ask for water; guards sometimes beat or kicked them, or jabbed them with bayonets.

  When Seiichi Higashide’s ship docked on February 1, 1944, things had not changed much. A U.S. officer dictated a list of rules in fluent Spanish and warned of severe punishment for infractions. Awakened at 5:00 a.m. every day, the men from Peru dressed in double time and ran out to formation, where they stood at attention to watch the Stars and Stripes go up and recite as ordered, as well as they could, the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Bewildered and unaccustomed to the heat, insects, and rain, Higashide and his twenty-eight companions, including at least five naturalized Peruvians and two persons born in Peru, cleared underbrush all day with hatchets and machetes. The task was alien to most like Higashide, who “had handled only a pen or abacus in my work.” The captives wore ill-fitting army-issue boots and fatigues that were too big for them. “I wished that the F.B.I. chief, who often spoke of the Japanese fifth column, could see this sad sight,” Higashide wrote. It was “pitiful” to watch the older men strain at their work. Painful blisters bubbled on everyone’s hands, and “when those broke and settled, new blisters again grew back over those barely healed blisters.”

  Their uncompensated labor violated the Geneva Conventions, the internationally accepted rules regarding noncombatants during armed conflict. But the captives were unaware of their rights, and the Americans were unwilling to tender them.

  Higashide recorded the thoughts he had at night when he returned to the bunkhouse. From the time he was a small child, he had read “many books” about the United States. “I had felt that America was an ideal country that should be taken as a model for the whole world. Why, then, had that country moved to take such unacceptable measures? Where was the spirit of individual rights and justice that had filled the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?”

  A year after Victor Maoki was taken, his destitute wife Elena applied to the Spanish diplomatic mission that represented Japanese interests, begging to be reunited with her husband. “I heard that they did not want to use people residing in the United States for prisoner exchanges,” she told her daughters, referring to interned Japanese Americans. “Instead they wanted to use the people arrested in Peru.”

  U.S. authorities called the decision of wives to join their imprisoned husbands “voluntary.” But the conditions into which the kidnappings had thrust families, and the idea they might never see loved ones again, beg the question of just how much free will was involved.

  After his father was taken, Augusto Kage worked to help his siblings and his mother, who was not Japanese but Peruvian, until “we were begging like mendicants.” Agents who came to their isolated farm to arrest his father had said he posed a risk because they lived too close to the oil works at Talara, three days away by mule. Two years later his mother said, “If we’re going to suffer here alone, let’s go suffer there, and we will suffer together.” Without belongings to pack, they were taken with only the clothes they wore, to a bleak stretch of Texas desert named for artesian wells long gone dry.

  7.

  INMATES, A FAMILY AFFAIR

  When we were passing through the Panama Canal, we could not see outside because the windows were all blacked out.

  —KAMI KAMISATO, TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR RESIDENT OF PERU

  The transports from Latin America followed a pattern. As the captives boarded ships, officials d
emanded they turn over their passports, so they would land in the United States as undocumented aliens, subject to arrest. Men were held belowdecks, while women and children squeezed into shared cabins with bunk beds. Starr Gurcke, an American married to a German resident of Costa Rica, reached her cabin on the U.S. Army transport Pueblo with the couple’s two little girls in tow and found its bunks had been claimed. They spent the three-week trip on a stained bare mattress on the floor in the muggy air—opening portholes was forbidden. In close quarters passengers developed fevers and coughs or blistering sores that crusted dry and yellow.

  Sometimes women were charged with cleaning toilets and other facilities. On the first transport from Peru, which carried only men, U.S. guards ordered prisoners to launder the guards’ clothing; on landing, all had to sign papers attesting that they had been well treated afloat. Such forced labor violated international conventions meant to protect prisoners of war, but the only recorded objector—a man who refused to wash a guard’s clothing—was sent to the brig.

  Ships sailing through the Panama Canal to New Orleans braved waters where German U-boats prowled. The Naganuma brothers remember evacuation drills against possible submarine attacks; no attacks took place, but for children, any break in the confinement and routine was welcome. Mixed with relief at the drills, nevertheless, was the frightening memory of “soldiers with Tommy guns” on guard around the clock.

  Mothers scrambled full-time to keep a semblance of order and comfort for the children at sea. When Starr Gurcke realized she had lost her purse, she futilely searched the decks for a comb she might buy to comb her children’s hair. A sailor stopped and challenged her; she tearfully explained, and the sailor gave her the comb from his pocket. Overwhelmed by the generous gesture, she retreated crying back to the cabin. Angelica Higashide watched in horror as American guards threw her baby’s milk overboard, can by can, and did not respond to her protests in Spanish; fortunately, a Filipino kitchen worker took pity and found her some milk every day for the rest of the trip.

  Whether ships landed at New Orleans or San Pedro, California, the FBI handled interrogations and officially informed the passengers that they were under arrest for traveling without proper documents. The maneuver was “contrived” and “Machiavellian,” wrote scholar Jerre Mangione. During the war, Mangione served as a special assistant to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) commissioner and as the Justice Department’s public relations director for the INS, and his brief included visiting inmates from Latin America at some twenty INS camps. One camp commander told him, “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skullduggery.”

  Captives and families were made to strip as attendants sprayed them with DDT. Adults were separated by gender, but children were not; the experience of shedding their clothes in front of strangers, then being covered with the white powder left females, especially, of all ages feeling humiliated. From San Pedro or New Orleans, trains departed for the trip to Crystal City, a center of the U.S. prisoner exchange program.

  * * *

  The train to Crystal City hurtled along as if it were traversing the wider world without being part of it, the windows of its cars blacked out. Inside, parents and children from Latin America huddled together, not knowing what might be next. Most were ethnic Japanese, but some were German, and some were neither, like the Peruvian mother of Augusto Kage, or Starr Gurcke, who had been born in California. Rumors had it that the passengers were destined for hard labor. Some feared worse.

  Isoka Naganuma, surrounded by her children in the train car, “thought that it was the end of the family.” Libia Maoki’s mother looked around at two daughters and a son, at an adopted older daughter and her husband and infant, and was “convinced our family was headed for its doom.”

  Passengers on the darkened trains were already unnerved in the aftermath of removals from their homes. When Werner Gurcke’s business appeared on the blacklist—he imported buttons, umbrellas, and Hamilton watches—his wife Starr put the shop in her name in a last-ditch attempt to save the family income. On the grounds of “several reports … from a source generally reliable,” according to the G-men’s notes on his case, Werner was thrown into a jail specially built for men the FBI called “dangerous.” Werner Gurcke didn’t belong to any party, but often such small businessmen were targeted on the basis of commercial, not ideological, activity. Both the FBI and the State Department were careful to make it appear as if the initiative for arrests came from local authorities.

  While Werner Gurcke was in prison, police arrested Starr one night in December 1942 as she was putting the girls to bed. She was only “a sort of American citizen,” said the notes on her case, and should be “sent to concentration camp with her husband.” Police took mother and daughters to a holding center at the German Club, which was filled with other dazed women and children. There in happier times Starr and Werner had dined and watched movies or played tennis. Now the once-crystalline swimming pool reeked with foul odor—it was the only place to rinse diapers. In January, at night so fewer eyes might see, Costa Rican guards took the women and children from the club and the men from the jail by bus and train to the Pacific port of Puntarenas. After hours of stomach-churning travel, attendants provided children with canned milk, which many promptly vomited up.

  At least after debarking from the SS Pueblo and being interrogated by the FBI in San Pedro, California, the Gurcke family was together on the train. Other women and children hoped to see husbands and fathers taken from them months or even years before. From camps in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from Kenedy and elsewhere, their men were on the way to join them, riding their own trains to Crystal City.

  NOTICE TO THE INTERNEES FROM LATIN AMERICA

  Question: By what authority am I being held in custody?

  Answer: You are being held in custody under the authority of the Alien Enemy Act (Sections 4067 4070 of the Revised Statutes of the United States) which gives the President of the United States power to confine and deport natives or citizens of an enemy country in time of war.

  —UNDATED TYPEWRITTEN MEMORANDUM POSTED TO BULLETIN BOARD, CRYSTAL CITY DETENTION STATION

  The trains squealed to a stop at a station 120 miles south of San Antonio, 30 miles from the Mexican border, where passengers boarded buses whose windows were not blacked out. The captives’ first sight of their surroundings might have seemed phantasmagorical, endless vistas of shrub and sand. In the small town of Crystal City (population six thousand), the self-styled “Spinach Capital of the World,” a life-sized statue of Popeye the Sailor Man stood, smoking a pipe, arm muscles bulging. More shrub, cactus. So lonely did the land appear to the first European to set eyes upon it, the sixteenth-century Spanish trader and faith healer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, that he called the place the “Desert of the Dead.” Five miles outside town, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had taken over a Farm Security Administration camp previously used to house Mexican migrant workers. The buses drove through a gate onto the 290-acre site, now surrounded by wire fencing ten feet high and marked with six looming guard towers.

  Sometimes the Japanese Peruvians already inside gathered to welcome new arrivals, singing, alleviating the fear of women like Elena Maoki. Families were separated by ethnicity and housed each in a section of the camp—Japanese, German, and Italian—in single-family bungalows, or duplexes and triplexes with shared showers. Visitors and inmates remarked on the better quality of housing for the Germans, but the Japanese did not complain. Elena Maoki said, “They gave us a place with a common bathroom with our neighbors, but I wasn’t worried, because they were all from Peru.”

  Opened in late 1942, Crystal City’s mostly wood-frame huts were set upon stretches of dirt that swirled viciously in the wind. Biting red ants and stinging scorpions were all around, and dwellings lacked insulation against sweltering summers and frigid winters. Nevertheless, the pleasant scent of sage in bloom or of orange and lemon trees might waft through the streets. One of the job
s for pay available to internees was construction work in the camp, and soon houses with newer materials appeared. Captives planted gardens and vegetable plots with seeds they ordered from Sears and Roebuck catalogues.

  As time passed, the place might have been mistaken for a suburban subdivision, except for the armed guards who walked the streets and manned the watchtowers. Every resident was aware that the penalty for attempting to escape was death. And strict regimentation meant that no one would confuse Crystal City for a settlement of free people. Whistles sounded three times a day for mandatory roll call. Censors read mail coming in and going out; inmates were limited to writing a maximum of two letters and one postcard a week, although as Christmas approached, cards from the War Prisoners Association with a picture of a Christmas tree were handed out for mailing.

  Once the Latin Americans came to Crystal City, they became prisoners of war. The U.S. Justice Department’s INS that ran the camp, the only one for Latin American families, was beholden to abide by international treaties meant to guarantee decent conditions: the First Geneva Convention of 1894 that established the principle of proper treatment for noncombatants during wartime and the 1907 Hague Convention stipulating the right to humane treatment, to sufficient food and medical care, and to keep personal effects. Prisoners, said the treaties, must not be treated as convicts or made to work on jobs of a military nature, and labor must be compensated.

  Even beyond international treaties however, the State Department’s Special War Problems Division had a very pragmatic reason for ensuring that a camp like Crystal City was decent and livable. The division in charge of the prisoner exchanges was convinced that imperial Japan would operate on the principle of “reciprocity.” Mistreatment of prisoners in the United States, including the Latin American “Japanese,” would be met with reprisals against U.S. prisoners in Japanese captivity, it was believed, and conversely, good treatment would help ensure the same for Americans in Japanese hands. “From the very beginning of the war until the final surrender, the Special Division operated on the theory that the Japanese government kept a score card of sorts and meted out reprisals for deemed injustices to Japanese nationals,” wrote P. Scott Corbett, a scholar of the prisoner exchanges.