“Do you think we’ll see any bears?” Obaachan asks my father.
He looks up from the pot of beef stew he is stirring and smiles. Their property borders three thousand acres of state forest, so their woods are crawling with all sorts of creatures: wild turkey, whitetail deer, grouse, and, yes, black bears. My father has an ongoing battle with these black bears, mostly in the spring and fall. They steal his bird feeders and stalk around his raspberry patch. Once, he turned on the porch light late at night and discovered a bear sorting through a stash of apples on his deck. Obaachan, through nightly phone calls with my mother, has heard of these encounters, and is intrigued.
“I doubt it,” my father says. “They’re hibernating now. Or at least they should be.” He walks over to where she is sitting and looks out. “You may see some turkeys, though. They come around sometimes. Are you comfortable there? Warm enough?”
Obaachan nods. “Oh, yes. Very comfortable.”
She likes sitting by the woodstove and observing the wildlife. When my brother and I were children, she and my grandfather would watch at their window for the tall gray and red sandhill cranes. My grandparents would huddle at the bay window in their kitchen, or watch through the blinds in the living room, snapping photos and watching the cranes’ careful path across the lawn. In his typical fashion, Ojichan decided to educate himself fully about the sandhill cranes, so that when we arrived one Christmas, he could teach us all about them. As children, we caught on to my grandparents’ excitement, and we really believed that these beautiful birds, though fairly common in central Florida, were rare, and that our sightings of them were extraordinary. On her refrigerator at home, Obaachan still has a photograph that my grandfather took of these cranes.
In Florida, my grandmother walks every single morning, almost two miles, but here the days are too cold for her, and the threat of slipping on an icy patch is too much of a risk. She seems content, though, to exchange her morning walks for afternoons of reading, watching for wildlife, and dozing off with a book in her lap.
I bring her a cup of steaming hot green tea, and she takes it and wraps her hands around the cup’s warm sides. Although the two of us talk on the phone sometimes since I began visiting, it has been over six months since we’ve seen each other, and I worry that during that time she has reverted to that reticent grandmother I knew as a child—the one who sat with hands folded in the corner, only speaking in response to questions.
She turns toward me and smiles. Her glasses are large and round. Although her hair is gray, my grandmother has very few wrinkles. (Hakujin are more prone to wrinkles than Japanese, she and my mother have explained. I shallowly hope that I have inherited their resistance to age.) “I know what you’re after, Kimi,” she says. “You want to know about Ojichan. Isn’t that right? I remember that last time, when we were picking grapefruit, I promised to tell you about him.”
She takes a sip of tea, slurping it a little bit in the Japanese way, and I recall that my grandfather used to sip miso soup just like that. The steam rolls off the tea.
“The first time I spoke to your grandfather,” Obaachan begins, “I was working at the mess hall. He walked right up to me and asked if I would meet him after my shift ‘to talk.’” He was finely dressed, she remembers, in clothes that seemed too fashionable and too clean for the dusty confines of the camp. He wore starched khakis and a collared white shirt, and his thick, curly hair was combed off to the side, in the style many American movie stars wore in those days. He was tall for a Japanese man, and broad shouldered.
“I had noticed him before, but I’d never talked to him,” Obaachan adds. She smiles. “The truth is, he was one of those people you couldn’t overlook.”
When Obaachan met my grandfather, he was gregarious and confident, much like the man I remember from my childhood. At Pomona, he seemed to know everyone, young and old, male and female. This sociable nature, and his tidy, stylish appearance, made my grandfather stick out. Plus, he had wavy hair, a rare characteristic for Japanese people. (This was a characteristic that he took to his grave—he died with a full head of thick, curly hair.)
Obaachan shakes her head, still impressed by these recollections. “He was the type of person who could talk to anyone,” she says, and then she adds softly, rubbing a finger along the mug’s rim, “and I was always so much the opposite.”
When my grandfather first approached Obaachan at the mess hall and asked her “to talk” after work, she was mortified. Her two cousins, Uncle Kisho’s stepdaughters, who lived in the same room with her family at Pomona, also worked with her. Whispering in Japanese, they giggled in the background. Obaachan’s cheeks reddened, and she seemed to have lost her voice. She has admitted once that she didn’t feel especially close to these cousins, and she resented their presence in this awkward moment. At last, she shook her head no, and went on with her work.
“I couldn’t even manage a ‘No, thank you,’” she tells me, laughing and leaning back in the rocking chair. “It was impolite of me, and you know, politeness is very important to Japanese. But I was so embarrassed I couldn’t help myself.”
My grandfather, however, was not easily deterred. He continued, day after day, to ask my grandmother to meet him after work. When most of the prisoners had cleared out of the mess hall, and only the workers remained, Ojichan would saunter over, lean against the counter, and make the same request, smiling and sure of himself, and without the slightest sign that he had been refused several times before.
“He kept on coming back and asking,” Obaachan says, shrugging her shoulders. She herself was—and still is—perplexed by his determination. “Deep down, I was flattered and impressed. Of course, I didn’t want him to know that, but finally, I said yes.”
By the time my grandfather met Obaachan at the Pomona Assembly Center, he’d been living in the United States for over five years, and during those five years he had become that self-assured and outgoing man my grandmother met on a sultry afternoon in the mess hall.
Before Ojichan had left Japan, his father had made arrangements with a family friend who had moved to the United States years earlier. According to their arrangement, the friend would be waiting for my grandfather at the San Francisco docks when his ship arrived. He would then help Ojichan through the immigration process, and provide him with a home until he could find a job and support himself.
However, the family friend was not there when my grandfather’s ship landed. As my grandfather stood there, searching the crowd, he pulled the letter from his shirt pocket and reread the instructions the friend had mailed his father. After two weeks of living below deck in the stuffy close quarters of third class, he was ready for fresh air, and he was also looking forward to seeing a friendly face. But no one was there. In a great horde of people, he was shuffled off the boat, and soon he found himself waiting in a long line. Even though he had studied English at his school in Japan, he did not understand a word the immigration officers spoke. He could only offer them a look of dismay and confusion. They spoke loudly and slowly, pointing to a sheet of paper, trying to signal with their hands, but my grandfather did not grasp a thing.
An old Japanese man stood nearby, arms folded, quietly observing the situation. Soon, he tossed the cigarette he was smoking to the ground, smashed it beneath his shiny shoes, and walked over to my grandfather. He placed a paternal hand on his shoulder, smiled, and asked him in Japanese if he might be of assistance. Relieved to see a welcoming face and hear his own language, my grandfather accepted the offer. The old man, fluent in both Japanese and English, helped Ojichan with the immigration procedures, translating the questions and answers. At the end, he reached out his hand and introduced himself.
“What are your plans, young man? Do you have work lined up? Family to meet?”
My grandfather scanned the crowds once more, hoping to catch sight of his father’s friend. Maybe the friend had been delayed by an emergency, or perhaps he had written the wrong date on his calendar.
The old man watched my grandfather’s eyes as they darted about the docks. “You are waiting for someone?” he asked.
Then again, maybe his father’s friend had changed his mind.
“My father had arranged for me to meet an acquaintance of his,” Ojichan told the old man at last, still looking around. “But it appears he is not here.”
“Ah,” the old man said, nodding his head. “It is a delicate situation,” he said. He rubbed the gray bristles on his chin, surveying the crowd, and then he shrugged. “But everyone in San Francisco knows when the ships arrive,” he said after a pause. “Your father’s friend would be here by now if he were coming. It’s a difficult time for many families right now. He has probably changed his mind and sent word to your father. You must have left before his letter arrived.”
Ojichan knew that mail traveled slowly across the Pacific.
“I don’t believe that we met by mere chance,” the man continued. “I own a hotel right here in San Francisco, and I’m always in need of help. You will come and work for me.”
Of course, in light of Ojichan’s situation, this option sounded appealing, but it was really not so simple. His mind toiled through the possibilities, imagining the outcome of each scenario. If he went with the old man and his father’s friend showed up, it would seem as though he had chosen to disregard the friend’s generous help. It would appear disrespectful and insolent, and above all, my grandfather did not wish to further disgrace his family. He had already brought enough haji upon them. Yet, here he was, completely alone, unable to communicate with people, jobless, and without a friend in the entire country. He could take his chances and wait for the family acquaintance, hoping he might show up soon, or he could follow the one person who had been kind enough to assist him.
The old man picked up my grandfather’s suitcase, making the decision for him. “Come along. Follow me. It’s not far.”
He set off on his short legs, swiftly carrying Ojichan’s suitcase through the bustling, noisy streets of San Francisco. The walk to the hotel was a long one. He maneuvered his way through the multitudes of people with the grace of a dancer, while my grandfather, trying to keep up, found the noises and sights overwhelming. The honking horns of sleek Fords. The imposing businessmen in their tweed suits and fedora hats. The buttery pierogies and sweet kielbasa sizzling in the stands of street vendors.
I remember my grandfather talking about these early days in America, and how he described being on a streetcar, and seeing for the first time someone with blonde hair.
“I was sitting behind this young woman with yellow hair,” he told us children. “I wanted so badly to touch it!” He wondered if it felt different from his own. In Japan, there was only one color of hair, black, so he wasn’t sure the woman’s yellow locks were real. Because I had grown up in Pennsylvania, and had seen people with all sorts of hair colors, this story used to strike me as strange. My father had light hair, and so did my best friend. But now, as I imagine my grandfather in those initial moments in America, I think I can understand that sensation of astonishment that he must have experienced in his first days here, and that impression that the only way to know a thing was real was to reach out and grab it.
Obaachan stands up, says that she is a little hungry, and heads to the refrigerator, where she finds one of her favorite treats: mochi, a sweet Japanese pastry. She places it in the toaster oven, turns the knob, shuffles over to the kitchen island, and slides herself onto one of the tall barstools. Because she is so short, her feet do not reach the floor. She settles them on the lowest rung.
“After I agreed to go on that first walk with your grandfather,” she says, kicking her legs out a little and examining the pair of furry slippers my mother has bought her for the visit, “he and I started meeting more often. He would wait for me after my shifts, and we would find somewhere to talk.”
The two of them would stroll around the dirt paths of the fairground, the light waning, the day still hot. Sometimes, they headed down toward the racetrack and leaned against the fence. Other days, they sat by the lagoon or circled around the old livestock barns. “We tried to make the best of the situation,” Obaachan explains, folding her hands together. “We couldn’t leave, so we did what we could.”
It is strange for me to think about my grandparents, both in their early twenties then, getting to know each other through evening walks around a prison. And it is even stranger for me to consider the irony of their situation, for while life for the two of them remained peaceful and perhaps even promising for those months at Pomona, beyond the barbed-wire fence, the world was at war. Even in other assembly centers, there were outbreaks of violence. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a Los Angeles gardener with a history of mental illness was shot to death by guards for trying to escape. At Lourdsburg, a farmer and a fisherman were also gunned down. Though the camp guards claimed they thought the two were trying to escape, it was later revealed that upon arrival at the camp, the men had been too sick after the long journey to walk from the train station to the gate, and were actually trying to make their way inside.
Furthermore, while my grandparents were prisoners at Pomona, that summer of 1942, the Nazis began gassing Jews at Auschwitz. Rommel ravaged North Africa and marched toward Cairo. And island by island, nation by nation, the little country of Japan was taking over the Pacific. They completed their capture of Burma and moved into India. In June, they invaded the Aleutian Islands. In July, New Guinea. At the height of its power, the empire of Japan controlled what was at the time the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, French Indochina, Siam, Malaysia, Korea, and part of China. In essence, they’d taken over every piece of land from Japan to Australia.
“At times, I would almost forget,” Obaachan admits, pulling her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders. “I would forget that the reason why we’d been sent away and were living this whole different life was because there was a war going on out there.” But then, there were startling reminders, people and words that pulled my grandmother back into reality. At the mess hall, she picked up bits and pieces of conversations as people moved through the line. “They’re going to kill us,” she heard one gray-haired man whisper to another. He shifted his eyes, watching to see who else might be listening. “I’ve heard they will send us by train to a place where they will kill all of us. Even the women and children …”
The man was not alone in his fears; lots of rumors about what their fate would be made their way around the camp. The oppressive heat, the feeling of being caged, and watched, were beginning to take their toll on the residents of Pomona. As the summer progressed, my grandmother sensed that tensions had increased. At the mess hall, children grew more rambunctious, tugging at their mothers’ skirts or dashing around the tables. Old folks became grumpier as they stood in line, demanding another serving of white rice or complaining that they’d been given less than the person in front of them. The prisoners were growing anxious.
In the toaster oven, the mochi begins to puff up to almost triple its original size, and Obaachan stands, removes it with a pair of wooden chopsticks, and places it onto a plate. When you first take mochi out of a refrigerator, it is small, hard, and pretty flat, similar to a cookie, but when you heat it, it grows larger, like a marshmallow over a campfire.
“Ojichan had so many stories,” my grandmother continues, thinking again of my grandfather as she walks gingerly to the table. “Do you remember that about him? That he liked to tell stories?”
I nod. Many of my childhood memories consist of my sitting at my grandfather’s feet, listening to him talk, watching his bushy eyebrows leap up and down.
“There was never a dull moment with him. I never felt bored,” she says as she sits down at the island again. When he told her about the man at the docks, she felt as though she, too, had stood in that immigration line. When he described his first bite of a donut, she tasted its powdered sugar on her tongue. He could bring life and excitement to any tale.
“I felt that I had expe
rienced so little,” Obaachan says. “We were the same age, and yet he had lived so much more than I had.”
While my grandfather had spent his early life in Japan and had moved as a young man to live on his own in a foreign country, my grandmother had lived a sheltered life with her parents, and had rarely left Los Angeles. While my grandfather was working at a San Francisco hotel and renting a room, my grandmother was still in the house on Pico Street, taking care of her invalid mother, dreaming of going to college one day. And while my grandmother remained close to her parents into her twenties, Ojichan never saw his family again after leaving Japan. Shortly after he had arrived in the United States, in 1938, he received a letter from his mother informing him that his father had died of stomach cancer.
“We were two very different people,” Obaachan says, “from two very different worlds.”
And yet there was something that drew her to him.
“I was always surprised that such an interesting person would want to be involved with someone so dull, like me,” Obaachan admits, smiling a little. “At first, I didn’t believe it could be true.”
I consider my collection of childhood memories of my grandparents. My grandfather was always the one who talked to us and played with us. And in nearly every memory, my grandmother was standing behind him, or off to the side, her lips pressed together. While my grandfather tickled us or told stories or played hide and seek, Obaachan washed brown rice in the sink, or shelled sweet peas at the table, with the two bowls in front of her, one for the pods and one for the peas. My sense is that my grandmother always lived in my grandfather’s shadow, regardless of whether or not they had visitors. He was clearly the dominant personality of the two of them. And, as my mother has told me, Ojichan was always the one in charge of their home.
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