by Jay Rubin
Mitsuko was enjoying Frank’s passion.
“Just think about it,” Frank went on. “Santa Claus is an ingenious invention. People encourage their children to believe in him wholeheartedly when they’re little so that, when they learn the truth, they can feel proud of graduating to belief in the ‘real’ God, the adults’ God. But of course, God is just as make-believe as Santa Claus.”
“Now, wait a minute,” protested Jerry Yamaguchi, who was not smiling anymore. “Now you’re going too damn far.”
“See what I mean?” cried Frank. “I’m in taboo territory now. You don’t want to graduate from your ‘real’ God. And President Roosevelt doesn’t want you to either. He wants you to be good. To behave yourself. To do what the ‘real’ grownups like him and General DeWitt tell you to do. They want you to leave your homes and belongings behind? Fine! They want you to waste your life away in the desert with blizzards blowing all around you? Fine! You’re a good, well-behaved little Jap! And why? Because ‘He’s makin’ a list, checkin’ it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice. Santa Claus is coming to town!’”
“Man!” shouted Kenny Kawachi. “I have never heard such a total crock of—”
“Hey,” interjected May Eto, a petite young woman who did most of the paper’s typing. “Don’t forget there are ladies present.”
May smiled at Mitsuko, who nodded back to her in halfhearted affirmation. But Frank’s bombast had struck a chord with her.
Frank had another opportunity to sound off three days later when the Irrigator received the results of the most recent Gallup Poll on attitudes in the five westernmost states toward the evacuated Japanese. Asked, “Do you think that the Japanese who were moved from the Pacific Coast should be allowed to return after the war is over?”, only twenty-nine percent said they were willing to see all Japanese return to their homes. Twenty-four percent said they would allow only American citizens, and thirty-one percent thought that none should be allowed to return, with sixteen percent undecided. Those opposed to allowing the Japanese to return were asked, “What should be done with them?”, to which more than two-thirds responded that they should be sent “back” to Japan, while the rest thought they should be kept in the inland areas where they were now interned. Altogether, ninety-seven percent agreed that the Army had done the right thing in evacuating the Japanese, while only two percent disapproved and one percent were undecided.
“God-damned racists!” bellowed Frank when the piece was read aloud to the gathered staff. “Do they think we’re animals to be put in cages? Let them try to lock me up in this place after the war is over and they’ll have a rebellion on their hands!”
Another blast of wind rattled the flimsy siding that enclosed the editorial office, and, even seated by a burning hot stove, Mitsuko felt a chill go through her at the prospect of spending the rest of her days here in the desert. For her, the thought of returning to a defeated Japan was far preferable to dragging out her existence here—especially if she was destined to lose Billy in any case. But when she looked at the grim faces of the Nisei staff who were trying to digest this overwhelming rejection by their own countrymen, she felt her heart go out to them.
Mitsuko told Goro and Yoshiko about the Gallup Poll report that night after Billy was asleep.
“Ninety-seven percent against us,” said Goro. “They really hate us, don’t they? Maybe we should go back to Japan.”
“I hardly remember what Japan looks like,” said Yoshiko. “What is left there for us?”
Goro said, “True. I would never really go back. But if they tried to keep us locked up here after the war …”
“They could never do that,” declared Yoshiko.
“Not to the Niseis, perhaps,” observed Mitsuko, “but what about us?”
“Why not the Niseis?” Goro asked. “They were so sure of their constitutional rights as American citizens, and what did it get them?”
Mitsuko said, “I remember once, Yoshiko, you said we didn’t have to worry, that they would treat us all alike. I’m afraid you were right. We’re all the same to them: Japs. We’re all as guilty as the ones who dropped the bombs on Pearl Harbor. It’s just as Frank said—racism, pure and simple.”
“Young Frank Sano?” Yoshiko asked.
“Yes, you should have heard him sounding off at the Irrigator office,” Mitsuko said with a laugh. She recalled the fire in his eyes, and she found herself admiring him in many ways.
22
SCHOOL STARTED AGAIN on January 4, and another bone-piercing wind was blowing. Billy announced to Mitsuko that he wanted to walk home alone. She tried to convince him that there would be plenty of time later in the year for him to show what a big boy he was. “Pleeease!” he begged with his cutest smile.
“Really, Mit-chan,” argued Yoshiko. “The traffic patrol system is working fine. The other parents are satisfied. Why can’t you be?”
“Fifth- and sixth graders? You call that a system? We may have a fence around us, but there are 10,000 people inside this place.”
“It’s true,” Goro said. “You can’t tell one tar-paper shack from another, and kids are getting lost all the time.”
“Please, Mommy,” Billy started in again. She finally gave in, but just before school ended, she left the newspaper office and secretly followed him until she saw him enter their barrack door. When she arrived home an hour later, he leaped into her arms and boasted, “I came home all by myself!”
“Good boy,” she said. Still, she kept up the routine for the rest of the week.
The following Monday, Mitsuko watched as the clock moved past school dismissal time. She told herself that Billy would be all right. Besides, this issue of the Irrigator had to be out by tomorrow and she had to translate and edit job listings, lost and found items, and George Nakashima’s endless commentary on some vaguely defined world spiritual crisis. It was nearly six o’clock before she finished squeezing all the articles onto two mimeograph masters.
“Mitsuko, wait a minute, I’m just finishing up here,” Frank called to her as she was putting on her coat. He hurriedly straightened the papers on his desk and followed her out into the cold.
Hard crystals of snow jabbed at her face as she hurried through the darkness. Frank was grumbling about the latest Gallup Poll figures. She paid little attention to his remarks, but it was good to have him to walk with through the dark alleys of this government-built slum. If his words were of little interest to her at the moment, the deep rumble of his voice was comforting. By the time they passed the darkened schoolhouse at the bend in the road, however, she realized that the only sound was of the hard-packed snow crunching beneath their feet.
Frank stopped. “Mitsuko,” he said, his voice now strangely thick.
She knew she must not stop.
“Let’s hurry, Frank,” she said, but her pace slowed.
“Mitsuko,” he said again, and this time she stopped and turned to face him. No longer did she feel the piercing cold of the wind. With a few swift strides, he was standing before her. He wrapped his strong arms around her and brought his face to hers. How simple it would be to let him hold her, to let him kiss her. But there was Billy, and there was Frank himself to think about, this young American scarcely out of boyhood. She struggled to avoid his lips, but his hot breath grazed her throat and sent a thrill coursing through her body.
“Frank,” she said, “I’m ten years older than you. I’m a married woman.”
She wrenched herself away and began to run. For a moment, his footsteps were just behind her, but they stopped, and she was running alone. She looked over her shoulder to see Frank’s silhouette under the bare bulb of the street lamp at the bend in the road. She slowed to a walk, her breath coming now in labored gasps, the freezing air cutting deep into her lungs.
Nearing Block 39, she saw that there was no light leaking around the edges of the door to their cubicle. She started to panic and then chided herself for being such a mother hen—everyone was in the dining hall
.
She washed off quickly at the lavatory and plunged into the noisy swirl of the large, brightly lighted dining hall. More interested in Billy’s whereabouts than food, she bypassed the line and nearly bumped into a waitress holding a steel pitcher of hot tea. The roar of conversation was deafening. She saw Yoshiko at their usual table, and Goro was with her—but not Billy. Yoshiko waved to her, smiling, and formed the words on her lips, “Why so late?”
“Is Billy with you?” Mitsuko asked silently across the black sea of heads.
Yoshiko nudged Goro’s shoulder and he turned away from the man with whom he was talking. The two of them left their seats, hurrying to where Mitsuko stood.
“I thought he was with you,” Yoshiko said.
“You know I let him start walking home alone last week.”
“But you were watching him.”
“I know, but—”
“Never mind that now,” interrupted Goro. “We’ve got to find him.” He forced his way through the crowd to the head of the dining hall and, pounding on the bell, he brought the crowd to silence.
“Billy! Billy Morton! Are you here? Has anyone seen Billy?”
Three of Billy’s classmates said they had seen him at school. The silence began to disintegrate, and Mitsuko caught a few sniggering references to “blondie.”
Goro asked for help and a few men and women stood and volunteered to join a search. Goro wanted each person to run to as many dining halls as possible, and they would meet back here, in exactly one hour, at 7:30. Yoshiko, he said, should wait in their apartment in case Billy showed up. Goro would go to the security office.
“Will you be all right?” Yoshiko asked her husband anxiously. He was even more emaciated than he had been upon his return from Montana, and he tired easily. He gave her only one brief look of annoyance.
Mitsuko said she would retrace Billy’s route home and check all the places she knew he was familiar with. Running toward Block 32, she barely noticed the freezing cold and snow. No one was outside in this weather, and she found the school barrack locked. She pounded on the doors and windows, calling for Billy, but there was no response to her frantic cries.
Suddenly, she heard a woman calling, “Mrs. Morton! Mrs. Morton!” and she ran out to the road. The shadowy figure introduced herself as Mrs. Tonoyama and began apologizing for her son without ever saying what it was he had done. Mitsuko stood listening impatiently until, at last, it became clear that Mrs. Tonoyama’s boy and three other fifth graders had been picking on Billy after school today. They had chased him into one of the blocks between school and home and had not seen him since.
“Which block was it?” Mitsuko demanded, but the woman did not know, and she said her son did not remember, but it was probably somewhere between the school and Block 42, where the Tonoyamas lived.
“All right,” said Mitsuko. “You start looking in Block 42 and I’ll start from here, and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“But I can’t. I have to get back to my children …”
“Your children? Your son is the one who started all this! Now, do as I say!”
“What gives you the right to order people around? If you hadn’t brought that little white devil in here to begin with—”
Before she knew what she was doing, Mitsuko raised her hand and slapped the woman’s face. Mrs. Tonoyama screamed and ran away.
Mitsuko hurried to the middle of the block, where there were laundry rooms and toilets where Billy might have hidden. The smell of the women’s latrine was suffocating, and she imagined Billy lying in a dark corner somewhere, overcome by the fumes.
She called out for him at the entrance to the men’s latrine, and when there was no answer she dashed inside. There was an old man squatting above a toilet, his feet resting on some kind of homemade boxes he had placed on either side. He grabbed his dangling private parts and shouted at her to “Get the hell out!” but she did so only after making a circuit of the place.
She ran to the recreation hall. Billy was not among the children playing there.
In the next block she repeated her search—laundry room, latrines, recreation hall—with the same results. Just as she was racing across the road to Block 35, she heard Frank calling her name. Her first thought was to avoid him, but he might be helping with the search.
“Here, Frank!” she called, but the huge, cold night swallowed her voice. She called again. A moment later, a dark figure came running toward her down the road, trailing clouds of steaming breath.
“We found him,” Frank said, halting at a discreet distance. “He was hiding at my place.”
“Is he all right?” she asked.
“He’s fine. I left him with your sister.”
There was an awkward moment of silence.
“I’m sorry for what happened before,” he said. “I promise, nothing like that will happen again. I don’t know what got into me.”
Mitsuko could only mutter, “Never mind, it’s all right.”
He saw her as far as the barrack door.
She stepped inside, and Billy ran into her arms. She undressed him by the stove and examined him from head to foot. The worst he had to show for his ordeal was a bruised shin. But he still looked frightened.
Both for Billy, and to prevent any repetition of the incident with Frank, Mitsuko decided to leave her job on the newspaper. The next morning, she told Yoshiko and Goro of her decision.
“You can’t,” said Yoshiko. “It’s the best thing that’s happened to you since—” She glanced at Billy.
“I know,” answered Mitsuko. She had made it clear that she didn’t want anyone tearing down Billy’s father in his presence. “But I saw this coming. People are turning ugly here, and it’s working its way out through the children. I should have known better.”
“It is not your fault,” Goro said. “Nobody has time for children anymore. The families are being torn apart. Do you know how many juvenile delinquents I have to deal with every day now? When did Japanese children ever misbehave before they locked us up?”
“I am not going to let Billy be a victim. I’ll camp outside the school if I have to.”
“Be reasonable, Mit-chan,” said Yoshiko. “We all need something to do in this place. Goro has his police work, and I am busy with the church. We both have the Sunday school as before. You need something, too. You have been in such good spirits since you started to work. How would it be if I promised absolutely that I will pick Billy up every day after school?”
“That’s it,” chimed in Goro. “I’ll help, too. We’ll make up the Billy Morton Security Force.”
Mitsuko knew that waiting for Billy all day would drive her mad. Even if she quit the paper because of Frank, she would have to find another job. “All right,” she said at length, “I’ll have to make sure I don’t work late anymore. But I would still like you to come to school, Yoshiko. Both of us will walk him home.”
Yoshiko said, “I think you’re overdoing it, but I will meet you there.”
Frank did not come for Mitsuko and Billy in the morning. She guessed that he had gone on ahead to the Irrigator office, but Billy kept asking for him and looking around nervously for the “mean boys” as they trudged through the snow. On the way to the office, the sight of the hospital smokestack reminded her of caring for the sick and elderly, but she arrived still not knowing what to do. When she saw that Frank was keeping busy with his work, she began to think that perhaps nothing had to change as long as Billy was safe.
Mitsuko spent the next week trying to sort out her feelings, with little success. She found it frustrating to realize that “sorting” her feelings meant finding a ranking system for the objects of her anger. Who deserved to occupy the head position? Tom? God? White Americans? General Tojo? The emperor? General DeWitt? President Roosevelt? Japanese-American parents who taught their children to hate? And what of her own friends and family in Japan? Did they exult at the news of Pearl Harbor? Were they praying for their sacred Imperial troops to annihil
ate this country and all the white devils who lived within its borders—or were they being forced to mouth such prayers by the threat of prison and torture?
Toward the end of the week, word came of an opportunity for Mitsuko to find out where she stood. Japanese nationals in camp were being called to meet with an emissary from the Japanese government. She told Yoshiko and Goro that she was planning to attend the meeting on Saturday.
“It would be suicide,” cautioned Goro. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with the Japanese government. The authorities are just trying to test our loyalty. And if other camp residents found out about it, there’s no telling what they might do to you.”
“I’m simply not ready to cut myself off from Japan,” Mitsuko insisted, and nothing they said could make her change her mind.
On the evening of January 16, Mitsuko went to the dining hall of Block 23 near the center of camp expecting to see a Japanese official. Seated behind a table with Mr. Stafford, the project director, were a sandy-haired man and a mustachioed individual in an unfamiliar uniform. Perhaps a hundred camp residents had gathered by the time the meeting started.
Wearing his usual gray business suit, and grinning in that sheepish way he had, eyes set wide apart behind rimless glasses, Stafford introduced a Mr. Bernard Gaffler of the State Department. He in turn introduced the man in the uniform, Captain Antonio R. Martín, who had come from the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C. as an official representative of Imperial Japanese Government interests in the United States.
Captain Martín stood, his epaulets shimmering in the dining hall light, his moustache a black bar across his olive-complected face. He was slight of build and not much taller than Goro. First he conveyed official greetings from the Imperial Diet to all Japanese nationals being held in enemy territory, but when he announced the nature of his mission, Mitsuko felt her face grow hot.