The Sun Gods

by Jay Rubin

  “I have been sent with a list of names of individuals whom the Japanese government has specifically designated as acceptable for exchange with United States nationals presently being held in Japan. They and other Japanese citizens such as yourselves who care to apply for repatriation can return to your home country some time in the next few months.”

  Members of the audience groaned and shifted in their seats. Mitsuko felt challenged. He made it sound as simple as buying steamer tickets and packing a trunk.

  “Last June,” Captain Martín continued, “some fifteen hundred Japanese took the neutral Swedish ship Gripsholm from New York to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa, a mid-point between Japan and the United States. There the Gripsholm was met by a Japanese ship carrying Americans, and passengers were exchanged between the two ships. Anyone in Minidoka who would like to be considered for exchange should inform me now, and I will come back to camp later in the year to make final arrangements. Are there any questions?”

  Audience members looked at each other. When it became obvious that no one was going to speak, Mitsuko stood slowly and raised her hand. “Do we have to make a final decision now?”

  “Not at all,” said Captain Martín. “At the moment, I am collecting names of interested parties so that the Japanese government can see what kind of numbers might be involved. You would not be committing yourself to repatriation if you gave me your name now.”

  “What about the list you brought?” she asked.

  Captain Martín said that he had checked the list against the names of Minidoka residents and found only two living here, and they had already been contacted. He held up a small sheaf of papers that was lying on the table. “Please feel free to look at it after the meeting.”

  When Mitsuko sat down, one old woman stood to ask how long the roundabout journey to Japan required. She and several others sighed loudly when Captain Martín replied that it took three months all together. No one else rose to ask questions. Captain Martín pointed out a sign-up sheet on the table, and Mr. Stafford concluded the meeting.

  Mitsuko did not know what to do. Standing here in the same room with a man who could put her on a boat to Japan, she began to see images of home—the straw-thatched roofs, the cedar grove, the narrow mountain road winding with the river down to the sea, the soft roundness of her mother’s face: it was as though this Spanish officer had unlocked a treasure chest that she had stored somewhere in the recesses of her heart and nearly forgotten. How wonderful it would be if she could board a ship with her darling Billy and take him to the hills and streams she loved so much!

  Captain Martín had said that signing now would commit her to nothing, but even taking that tentative step would mean turning her back on her adopted home, the little son who might, somehow, be hers, and the sister with whom she had shared so much grief. And what if, as Goro had suggested, word were to spread throughout the camp that she had betrayed this country? The Niseis, so eager to prove their loyalty, would no doubt turn on her. What would it do to Billy? To Yoshiko and Goro? And she wondered, too, how Frank would take the news.

  Mitsuko approached the front table, where a dozen or more people were signing. Instead of joining the line, she picked up the list of preferred exchangees, leafed through it, and saw “Mitsuko Fukai.” She felt momentarily dizzy. Of course—to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, she was still a functionary of the Seattle consulate. It was as though the Japanese government refused to recognize her marriage to a man of impure blood. To them, her name would always be Fukai. She resented this government that rejected her marriage to a man who had rejected her himself. Whichever way she turned, she would face only unhappiness. Unless she was ready to take Billy and plunge into the desert, she would have to choose among the least of the evils that surely awaited her. Heart beating wildly, she stepped to the table and signed: “Mitsuko Fukai Morton.”

  Yoshiko and Goro were horrified. Mitsuko refused to talk about it and went to bed. But the flow of images from home kept her awake. She glided upstream, following every bend in the river deeper and deeper into the mountains. She swayed on the fragile rope bridge that was the village’s only connection with the outside world. And even as she saw the images in the darkness before her wide-open eyes, she was aware of the faint white presence of Billy’s hair on the nearby cot.

  She wanted to pray, to reach out to something in the darkness. But God, Tom’s God, had vanished from her heart. He had been her God, too. He was the God of Yoshiko and Goro, of Reverend Hanamori and of all those loving people in the congregation. But no god kind enough to have given her Billy could be cruel enough to take him away.

  She opened her eyes to find the night dissolving into softened gray. Already the voices were beginning to stir, and soon the desert’s vast emptiness would hum with the presence of humanity. As quietly as possible, she rose and dressed and stepped out into the freezing dawn. Past black, looming walls she hurried through the snow to the rear of the block, where the camp’s eastern edge gave way to unbroken spaces.

  The desert floor lay open to the glowing sky, as calm and trusting as a child in sleep. Mitsuko watched the sharp upper edge of the sun’s red disk cut through the horizon, and a shaft of light shot toward her across the rolling, snow-covered dunes. Her hands came together, but silently today in their heavy winter wrappings, and she bowed to the only certain source of light and life.

  23

  “QUESTION 27: ‘Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?’”

  Frank’s voice was shuddering with rage.

  “And listen to this. Question 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—’”

  “Come on, Frank, there’s nothing wrong with that,” interrupted Jerry Yamaguchi, the Irrigator’s cartoonist. “I would defend America from a Japanese attack.”

  “Wait. You haven’t heard the worst part: ‘Will you forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?”

  “The emperor can go to hell for all I care,” said Jerry. “Sure, I’d sign that.”

  “So you are loyal to the emperor now?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? What are you talking about?”

  “If you ‘forswear’ your allegiance to the Japanese emperor, that means you’ve been loyal to him up to now but you agree to turn your back on him. Don’t you see what those lousy bastards are doing to us? They want us to prove they’ve been right all along—that we are loyal to the emperor, that we’re all emperor-worshiping Japs.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Jerry.

  “He’s right,” interrupted the paper’s editor-in-chief, Kenny Kawachi. “What do you think this is going to do to our parents? How can they forswear loyalty to Japan? All these years, this country tells them they’re not good enough to become citizens, and now they’re supposed to throw away their Japanese citizenship. They won’t be citizens of any country!”

  “And why do they call this thing ‘Application for Leave Clearance?’” asked Frank. “It’s just a way of getting us into the Army so we can ‘faithfully defend’ the white man’s paradise. You know who’s going on leave, don’t you?—us, right straight into some kind of segregated combat unit. My friend Dunks Oshima was right: they must take us for idiots. First, they classify us 4-C as if we’re aliens who can’t be trusted to carry a rifle, then they run us out of town and lock us up, and now they tell us we can volunteer for their goddam suicide squad so we can go out and get killed to defend their goddam democracy. They’ve got brass balls, the whole bunch of them! (Sorry, ladies.) But it’s true: Roosevelt talks about the ‘right of every faithful citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the nation’s battle.’ We all know what that means: Jap boys now have the right to go out and get shot.”

  Mitsuko had never seen the Irrigator office in such
an uproar. And the commotion continued everywhere she went. In the dining hall, parents and children shouted at each other in public, the sons declaring that they wanted to prove their loyalty to the United States, the parents convinced that the government was simply trying to break up Japanese families. Once their sons were gone, the government would dump them onto the streets of Chicago or New York after having robbed them of their means of livelihood. Mothers with tear-stained cheeks went down on their knees, begging their children not to turn them into welfare cases, pleading with their sons not to commit suicide by joining the Army and destroying everything their parents had worked for in this country.

  “I thank God for once that he never gave us any children,” said Goro as they sat by the stove in the evening. “Until now, I had secretly questioned His divine wisdom where that was concerned, but now I see why He did it. Imagine what those poor families must be going through.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Yoshiko asked.

  “We’ll do whatever it takes to stay here. I’ve made my life in this country, and I am never going back to Japan. We will both answer ‘Yes.’”

  “Mit-chan, what will you do? I told you you shouldn’t have signed for repatriation.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  The quiet hours Mitsuko spent carving bitterbrush were more and more an escape from the camp’s turmoil and from her increasingly politicized work on the Irrigator. Near the end of February there was a big debate among the staff over whether or not to publish rumors about a mysterious experimental plane that had crashed into a meat packing plant near Boeing Field in Seattle, killing twenty or more employees. In the end, those who were afraid of the camp administration prevailed, and nothing appeared in print.

  Through the rest of February and into March, Japanese cordiality and cooperation disappeared as the Minidoka population became divided into warring factions. Rumors flew that it was no longer safe to go out alone at night: there were gangs roaming the blocks armed with sticks and baseball bats. Fights broke out in the shower rooms and the work places. Young men taunted each other as “traitors” or “cowards.” In the recreation halls, friendly games of go and poker and shuffleboard erupted into bloody brawls. Gradually, the population of young men began to dwindle. Those who were proud to serve their country and eager to prove the loyalty of the Nisei departed for Camp Shelby in Mississippi with noisy celebrating. Others, more ambivalent about Army service, slipped off quietly. News soon began to reach Minidoka of the rigors of training being undergone by the “Japanese-American Combat Unit,” as it was called.

  For Mitsuko, the greatest surprise came when Frank showed up at the Irrigator office one morning wearing a white hachimaki band around his temples emblazoned with a blood-red rising sun. He was now a “No-No Boy,” he explained, and his friends were calling themselves the Black Dragon Society and wearing the hachimaki. They had all taken the step of answering “no” to both Questions 27 and 28, and they damn well wanted people to be aware of it. No, he would not defend this lousy, God-forsaken country that had jailed him and his parents; no, he would not forswear his allegiance to the emperor: didn’t his yellow face prove that he was loyal to Japan?

  “But what if they deport you?” she asked. “Would you renounce your American citizenship? Would you go to Japan? You can hardly speak a word of the language. How would you live?”

  “I haven’t thought it out that far,” he said. “The important thing is to let the government know what it’s doing to its citizens.”

  Thanks to new outcries from Congress, the government decided that it was not doing enough to its citizens. Workmen came to electrify the fence at Minidoka and to begin construction on guard towers, the absence of which had helped to soothe inmates’ feelings. Gangs of all political persuasions united to sabotage that project, stealing lumber and tools at night, until a twenty-four-hour-a-day armed guard was posted at the construction sites. Then, in May, as if in grim celebration of a year wasted in the desert, an eighty-year-old Issei who had wakened from a dream and wandered out to the fence, calling the name of his long-dead wife, was shot and killed by a tower guard.

  This seemed to snap something inside of Mitsuko. Here was an opportunity to deal in some small way with the lingering guilt she felt regarding the death of old Mr. Abé, the wood carver. She resigned from the newspaper that day and presented herself at the hospital.

  Maxalyn Evans, the chief nurse, a blond woman in her early thirties, gave her a suspicious look and asked, “Have you ever done hospital work before?”

  “No,” said Mitsuko, “but I feel this is where I can do the most good. I want to take care of people, not fight with them.”

  Mrs. Evans softened a little. “A lot of what we do here is not very pleasant,” she said.

  “I especially want to work with the elders,” Mitsuko replied. “I tended my grandmother on her deathbed. I know what is involved.”

  Mrs. Evans smiled sadly and said, “All right, if you think you can handle it.” She showed her to the nurses’ station in Wing 12, where the hospital’s only other registered nurse, Mrs. Suzuki, took charge of her. Mrs. Suzuki gave her a white blouse and a striped pinafore with huge pockets. “This is what the aides wear,” she explained. “They’re mostly high school girls, but you can probably wear the same size they do.”

  It was true, Mitsuko realized. She must be several pounds lighter now than she had been when she left Seattle.

  The halls and wards of the hospital were painted a bright white, a nice break from the dull barracks. And despite the seemingly endless number of bedpans she had to empty, Mitsuko came to look forward to her duties.

  Soon the harsh Idaho winter gave way to the harsh Idaho summer. A year of living on the desert floor had toughened the people of Minidoka, and they did not collapse in defeat at the onslaught of the sun. A crew of resident volunteers cleared land and made a beach in the natural cove behind the warehouse area—a strip twenty feet wide and some two hundred feet long.

  On her days off from the hospital—when there were no sandstorms—Mitsuko brought Billy to swim. The water was up to nine feet deep, and the canal had a treacherous undercurrent, but residents patrolled the beach in “Minidoka Lifeguard” T-shirts. Frank Sano was one of these, and Mitsuko could not help admiring his handsome sternness as he patrolled the beach with his white hachimaki across his forehead.

  Toward the end of June, Billy found a new playmate at the beach. It was Brooks Andrews, the Reverend Emery Andrews’ little boy. The entire Andrews family had moved to nearby Twin Falls so that the reverend could see to the needs of his congregation, performing weddings and funerals, and running frequent errands for them to Seattle. They brought Brooks into the camp on weekends to play with his friends from the Japanese Baptist Church. He and Billy were almost exactly the same size and age, and when the two little blond boys got together, they were an unusual sight amid the Japanese population.

  Mitsuko carved some wooden boats for the boys to share, and she enjoyed chatting with Brooks’s big sister while they watched the boys running races in the shallows, splashing and making motorboat sounds. When the girl looked past her and fell silent at one point, Mitsuko turned to see that the current was slowly dragging the boys away from shore. They were so engrossed in their play, they had no idea what was happening to them. She leaped to her feet and started running toward the canal, but Frank had already spotted the problem. With the powerful strokes of a trained swimmer, he shot across the stream and lifted the boys up before they even noticed they were in trouble.

  Mitsuko felt all the more grateful to Frank when she heard later that day that an eleven-year-old boy from Block 24 had become the canal’s first victim. She walked across the road after dinner to tell Frank how much she appreciated what he had done, but only his parents were home. Mrs. Sano promised to convey the message to her son, but she seemed unusually curt, and Mitsuko wondered if she had offended them in some way.

  The Sanos’ strange behavior was still on
her mind as she was preparing for bed. The stillness of the night was broken by a knock on the door. Goro was away on his rounds, and Mitsuko and Yoshiko looked at each other uneasily.

  “Who is it?” called Yoshiko.

  “It’s me—Frank Sano.”

  Yoshiko slid open the wooden bolt that Goro had installed on the door.

  “Come in, Frank,” said Yoshiko, but he stood at the threshold, glancing uneasily from Yoshiko to Mitsuko and back again.

  “No, thanks,” he replied, looking at Mitsuko. “I just wanted to talk to your sister for a minute. Outside.”

  Mitsuko hesitated, but then she thought that Yoshiko was sure to be alerted by too obvious a show of indecision. Besides, nearly six months had gone by since that night in January.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to Yoshiko. She slipped on a shawl around her shoulders to ward off the chill of the desert night.

  “Just be careful, Mit-chan,” Yoshiko said.

  “Don’t worry,” Mitsuko replied, pulling the plank door shut as she stepped outside.

  Yoshiko slid the bolt into place with a loud clunk.

  They walked as far as the end of the barrack. “You’re not wearing your hachimaki,” Mitsuko observed.

  The desert sand was still releasing the heat it had stored during the day, but a cool breeze had picked up.

  “I can’t be angry all the time,” he said with a grudging smile. “My mother said you came to see me.”

  “I wondered if she would give you the message. She seemed a little cold.”

  Frank said nothing, but he gestured to the right, where the road led out past the ball field and the water tower to the residents’ farm acreage.