by Jay Rubin
“Taihen da!” he shouted, the round lenses of his spectacles shining in the kitchen light. “What awful news! The Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor this morning!”
Yoshiko clucked impatiently and proceeded to fold and cut the nori.
“Those poor natives,” said Mitsuko, shaking her head.
“Natives?! What are you talking about?” shrieked Goro. “Pearl Harbor’s in Hawaii! The Japanese are dropping bombs on America, you idiot! This means war! You should have heard the announcer. He must have been foaming at the mouth!”
Mitsuko looked at her brother-in-law crossly, more annoyed at the tone of voice he was using with her than struck by the news.
“It can’t be that bad,” said Yoshiko. “Some crazy person set off a bomb.”
“A fanatic,” said Mitsuko. “They’ll catch him.”
The women’s placid reaction had its effect on Goro, but he maintained—if now in a calmer tone of voice, between mouthfuls of o-nigiri—that they were underestimating the importance of the news.
The more Goro talked about war, the more vividly Mitsuko could imagine Tadamasa wielding his sword. She was glad when he and Yoshiko left shortly after the meal.
The Nomuras had been gone little more than ten minutes when the telephone rang. It was Yoshiko. “Mit-chan, we’ve been robbed! They tore the place to bits.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Yes, just now.”
“I’ll be right over,” said Mitsuko. “I’ll take a cab.”
She did not even finish putting away the leftovers, but more than fifteen minutes had gone by before she managed to ready herself, bundle Billy into his winter coat, and hurry down to the street. A cab came by immediately, but the driver looked at Mitsuko and sped away. They walked to Broadway, but most of the cabs were occupied, and yet another driver of an empty cab passed her by. Finally, one stopped for her, and more than three quarters of an hour after Yoshiko’s call, Mitsuko and Billy stepped out in front of the Nomuras’ small frame house on East Olive Street.
A stocky policeman stood in the doorway, night stick in hand.
“Where do you think you’re goin’?” he demanded as she approached the front door with Billy.
“I am Mrs. Nomura’s sister. She called me about the burglary.”
“Burglary? What burglary?”
“They were robbed. Isn’t that why you are here?”
“Look, little Jap lady, I don’t know nothin’ about no burglary. I’m just here to guard the place. Now, you better get goin’.”
“Guard? What do you mean? I want to see my sister.”
“She ain’t here, so get goin’ now before I have to arrest you.”
Mitsuko knew her sister was inside, but there was no point in arguing with him. She led Billy back down the front walk to the street, from which her cab had long since disappeared. A few cars drifted by, some of the drivers gawking at the policeman conspicuously stationed at the door.
Mitsuko turned to look at him again, and he waved her away with his night stick. All but dragging Billy, she hurried down the street and turned the corner. Down half a block, she came to the fence-lined back alley. At the rear of the Nomuras’, she peered through a crack in the fence. Just as she had feared, another policeman was stationed at the back door.
“Billy, let’s run!” He scurried after her to Madison, where she found a public telephone. Her breath clouded the glass of the phone booth. She dropped in a nickel and dialed Yoshiko’s number.
A man answered the phone, and when Mitsuko asked to speak to her sister, he would say only that the Nomuras were “indisposed” and could not come to the telephone. No amount of explaining seemed to budge him, and eventually he hung up.
She dialed home and Tom answered.
“Mitsuko, where are you?” he demanded. “I’ve never seen this place in such a mess. That Japanese food of yours is spread all over the place.”
“Tom, please.” She explained the situation and gave him the exact location of the phone booth. In the ten minutes it took him to drive there, she began to shiver.
They went to the Nomura house, where the policeman was now walking up and down and rapping his hand with his stick in an apparent effort to keep warm. Mitsuko hunched down in the car while Tom stepped out to speak with him. The policeman kept shaking his head. He eventually noticed Mitsuko, and the look on his pink face changed to a sneer.
“He wouldn’t tell me anything,” Tom growled when he was behind the wheel again. “Except it’s got something to do with the FBI.”
“What is that?”
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation. The national police.”
Mitsuko had heard horror stories involving the Japanese national police, the so-called Special Higher Police, who lurked in every corner of the nation and pounced on anyone who dared to whisper criticism of the emperor or the government.
“I didn’t think there was such a thing in America,” she said. “But why are they keeping my sister?”
“I don’t know,” Tom said, “but it must have something to do with Pearl Harbor.”
Back home, Mitsuko tried several times to reach Yoshiko by telephone, only to have the same man tell her that her sister was “indisposed.” Tom spent the afternoon by the radio. Finally, as the sun was going down, a call came from Yoshiko.
“They took Goro!” she wailed. “They’re gone. Please come over.”
“We’ll be right there,” Mitsuko assured her and hung up.
Reluctantly leaving his radio, Tom drove Mitsuko to Yoshiko’s, Billy singing to himself in the back seat.
Tom said, “The Treasury Department has impounded all Japanese investments. I wonder what this is going to do to Goro’s bank?”
In tears, Yoshiko greeted them at the door. Before they had their coats off, she started telling them what had happened. She and Goro had driven straight home after lunch and found that the house had been broken into. Assuming they had been burglarized, they had called the police, but found nothing missing. The police arrived a few minutes later along with a half dozen FBI men. It was the FBI, not burglars, who had broken into the house while the Nomuras were eating lunch with Mitsuko. Goro had asked indignantly if they had brought a search warrant with them, but they had acted as though they resented such a presumptuous question. A few minutes later, four of the FBI men had taken Goro away, leaving one man to answer the phone and another to prowl around while a policeman guarded each door.
“None of them would tell me what it was all about,” said Yoshiko, “but when I asked if it was connected with the bombing in Hawaii, they smiled in a nasty way.”
Tom telephoned the FBI, but no one would talk with him. He drove downtown to the FBI office, but he was turned away at the door. It was decided that Mitsuko would spend the night with Yoshiko, and after Mitsuko cooked a simple dinner for them, Tom took Billy home.
The two women were startled when a car pulled up at the house after eleven o’clock at night and the doorbell rang. It was Tom, holding Billy, who was in pajamas and wrapped in a blanket, his eyes red and teary. The boy had been screaming his lungs out for Mitsuko since bed time, Tom said. He thrust his son into Mitsuko’s arms and drove back home.
Yoshiko said she could not sleep, and Mitsuko kept her sister company well past midnight, but Yoshiko was up first thing in the morning to wait for the newspaper, and as soon as it came, she began reading the horrifying news to Mitsuko. They learned of the American ships sunk in Pearl Harbor and the loss of life, but it was when she turned to page three that Yoshiko began to whimper.
“My God, listen to this! Someone made a threatening phone call to the Japanese Baptist Women’s Home and now the police are standing guard. And someone threw stones through the windows of two Japanese grocery stores. And this is even worse: ‘Numerous calls were received by police from citizens who offered their services, some of them volunteers expressing a wish to help intern Japanese residents.’”
She looked grimly at Mitsuko.
“They’re going to lock us up,” she said.
“It must be some crazy people saying those things. The government wouldn’t—”
“Here it is!” Yoshiko cried before Mitsuko could finish. “This is about Goro: ‘Foreign-Born Japanese Rounded Up.’”
Yoshiko began reading silently.
“What does it say?” Mitsuko pressed her.
“Wait, wait,” she said, shaking her head and moaning. “Listen: ‘Japanese who have been kept under surveillance—’”
“Under what?”
“Under surveillance: being watched by the police.”
“Just like in Japan! But why would they be watching Goro?”
“‘Japanese who have been kept under surveillance were taken into custody by police for the FBI. They were taken directly to the immigration station—’ That must be where Goro is—’and their personal effects, cameras, Japanese documents, firearms and certain other possessions were held at police headquarters.’ His keys! They took his house keys, his car keys, his office keys, even his safety deposit box key.”
“I don’t understand. Is he at police headquarters?”
“No, it says the people’s personal effects are being held there and the people themselves in the immigration station. But why? What are they going to do with them? Send them back to Japan? Kill them in revenge for the men killed at Pearl Harbor? We’ve got to get him out of there.”
“I’ll call Tom. He’ll go,” said Mitsuko, though she was dismayed to find herself wondering if her own words were true.
On the phone, Tom’s initial reaction was reassuring. “Of course I’ll go,” he said. But then he asked, “Will this afternoon be soon enough? I have to go to a meeting of the Council of Churches. It’s an emergency meeting, to call for fair treatment of American-born Japanese.”
“But Yoshiko is going crazy. And what about Japanese who were not born in America? What about Goro? What about me?”
“Just stay put. I’m sure that everything is going to be all right. Do you have enough food?”
“I don’t know. There are plenty of stores nearby.”
“No, don’t go out. Stay home and listen to the radio. The President is about to speak.”
Yoshiko turned on the radio. If the attack on Pearl Harbor had seemed the isolated act of a madman, the intensity of President Roosevelt’s thin, sharp voice made it clear that something new and dreadful had begun:
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
“The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
“Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the secretary of state a formal reply to a recent American message.”
One after another, the President listed the treacherous attacks that Japan had launched throughout the Pacific. Yoshiko listened in silence, and Mitsuko brought a box of tissues from the bathroom.
Exhausted from last night’s crying jag, Billy was still asleep, but soon he was up and hungry. Hurrying back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, Mitsuko fed him and monitored the swift process by which Congress declared war on her homeland.
After his breakfast, Billy wanted to go outside to play, and Mitsuko had to find things for him to do while they listened to the radio and waited to hear from Tom. Yoshiko spent much of the day grabbing things from Billy’s hands and putting them up where they could not be broken. Billy seemed determined to touch the white porcelain cat on the mantelpiece. Once, when left alone, he dragged a chair to the fireplace and tried to reach it. Finally, with a nervous Yoshiko watching, Mitsuko put the cat on the floor for him and let him “pet” it.
“Say ‘neko,’ Billy. Nice neko.”
Billy touched the cat and pretended to shake its upraised paw until Yoshiko could no longer stand the threat to her prized figurine. She snatched it away and restored it to its honored position, which of course prompted tears from Billy and cries of “I want the neko!”
Tom’s first call of the day came at 4:30. He had been to the immigration station and argued with officials there for hours but could get no one to admit anything more than that “some Japs” were being held there. He called next from police headquarters, where he had been told that no one knew where any of the detainees’ personal possessions were kept.
“It’s after six,” Mitsuko said. “Yoshiko is making dinner.”
“Don’t wait for me. I’ll see what else I can do,” Tom replied.
“Are you sure? Where are you now?”
After some hesitation, Tom said, “I’m not downtown anymore. I had some other business to take care of. I’ll call you later.”
Before she could say anything, Tom cut the connection. After dinner, Mitsuko and Yoshiko switched on the radio, but it seemed to have gone dead. Tom finally called again after ten o’clock.
“Where are you?” she said. “Billy should have been in bed hours ago, and I need sleep, too.”
“I can’t get back there tonight. There’s a blackout going on. No lights, no driving after eleven o’clock. Everybody’s worried about a Japanese sneak attack here in Seattle. The radio stations went off the air, and the buses are going to stop running.”
“Can’t you get here before eleven? I wasn’t planning to spend the night here. I don’t have a change of clothes for Billy or myself. I haven’t even given him his bath because I didn’t want to take him out in the cold afterward. Where are you?”
“I’m up in Mountlake Terrace with some of the other ministers. I can’t make it back in time.”
“Are you sure?”
Tom sighed. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“All right,” she said vaguely and hung up. There was still a little time before the blackout was scheduled to go into effect.
“I’m going home by cab,” she announced to her sister, but Yoshiko pleaded with her to spend another night there. If Mitsuko needed fresh clothes, she could borrow some of hers.
Mitsuko pointed out that there were none for Billy. He also needed his own blanket and his stuffed animals. “I’ll catch a cab and run over to my apartment. I can be back in fifteen minutes.”
“But Tom said not to go out.”
“It can’t be that bad. There were interviews with Nisei in the newspapers. They’re going out.” Taking her coat and purse and a scarf, she left the house, ignoring Yoshiko’s pleas.
In the darkness, and with the scarf on her head, she was sure she would have no difficulty hailing a cab. She walked to Madison, and the first empty cab stopped for her. Hunching down in the shadows of the back seat, she gave the driver her address. He grunted and stepped on the gas, but he missed the turn and continued on toward downtown.
“Wait,” she cried, “you should have turned right on Summit.”
“You don’t want to go to Summit, lady,” he said.
“What are you talking about? Of course I do.”
“No, lady, you want to go to Tokyo.”
“Let me out of here. Stop the car now.”
But the man kept on driving.
“What’s the matter, lady? They’re havin’ a party in Tokyo just for you and all your Jap friends. Then they’re gonna come over here and drop some more bombs on us.”
She planned to leap out at the next stop light, but all the traffic signals were green, and when the light at Third Avenue started changing, the driver swerved wildly up Fourth. Now he was in heavy downtown traffic, and at last, near the corner of Pike, he had to apply the brakes.
Mitsuko jumped out even before the car came to a full stop, and she heard the driver yelling, “Go back to Tokyo, you lousy Jap!” She ducked between two parked cars and hurried along the sidewalk.
; As she passed a clothing store on the corner, the street was suddenly plunged into darkness. The blackout had started, but her eyes adjusted soon enough. The dark night became suffused with a strange green glow. All the people and storefronts and lampposts wore this morbid, new patina.
“Hey, turn it off!” a male voice called to her left.
“Yeah,” a woman’s screech chimed in, “this is war. Ya wanna show the Jap bastards where we live?”
For a moment, Mitsuko thought that everyone on the street was looking at her, but she realized their eyes were fixed above her on the source of the green light. She stepped to the curb and looked up. “Foreman and Clark,” read the huge, green neon sign. It was the only light in the intersection that had failed to go out at eleven o’clock.
Again the woman yelled, “This is war, ain’t it? What the hell do they think they’re doin’? Tryin’ to sell clothes to the Japs?”
This drew a few laughs. Gradually, the number of onlookers began to grow, and the remarks became more resentful and surly. With some difficulty, Mitsuko withdrew her gaze from the dazzling green loops and began to walk into the darkness. Three young, scruffy-looking men blocked her way.
“Hey, will you look at that,” exclaimed the one in the middle. “Jap tail!”
She stepped down into the gutter to go around them, but the next thing she knew, two of them had her by the elbows and the third thrust his hand beneath her chin. “It’s a Nip, all right,” he said. “Chinks’ eyes slant in the other direction.”
“Let me go,” she muttered.
“You speakee English, Miss Tojo?” laughed the one holding her left arm.
“I will scream,” she warned.
“Oh, yeah?” the greasy-haired one in front of her said. “Who’s gonna hear you? I don’t see any cops around. And anyway, right now, we’re the only ones who know you’re here. You don’t want all those other guys to find out, do you?”
“Come on,” said the greasy one, “Let’s have a little fun.” With him leading the way, they entered the dark edges of the crowd that was forming under the neon sign.