Obaachan had never met a millionaire, let alone worked for and lived on the property of one, and my grandfather’s story caught her attention. She had eaten in a restaurant only a handful of times, and that alone was a big deal to her. Back in Los Angeles, even though her family had never gone hungry, her mother planned their meals around what her father was able to bring home from his job at the produce market. The idea of deciding what you felt like eating, without giving a thought to the cost, and then having a person whose primary job was to buy your food and prepare it for you, was almost beyond her ability to imagine.
“The food was wonderful,” my grandfather said. “Delicious, elegant. I wish you could have seen the way they set up the table each night. Starched white linens, tall candlesticks with real silver holders, fine English china. I only hope I can live like that someday—that the two of us can, together—without having to think about money.” Ojichan chuckled and kicked at a heap of snow, and the two continued on their way.
I wonder if my grandfather’s taste for fine things—and his attraction to the power those fine things implied—began when he was working as a houseboy for that family. What I do know is that by the time he met my grandmother in 1942, his affection for fashionable clothing, expensive whiskey, and well-made shoes was already strong. In photographs taken at Heart Mountain, my grandfather is always dressed as though he’s heading to an afternoon at the races, or a polo match, or some high-society event. His thick hair is combed to the side, his shirt is stiff and tucked in, and his khakis show a neat crease down the middle of the leg. How he managed to look so dapper in the dust-laden bachelor barracks remains an eternal mystery.
Obaachan admits she was swept away by my grandfather’s good looks and fancy clothes. She was inspired, too, by the big dreams he had for himself, for his ambition and his belief that anything at all was possible in America, despite their situation. Because of his fondness for nice things, his plans for the future often involved making a lot of money. He was always coming up with schemes to make it big: creating new inventions that would fill some niche, or starting a shipping company. In San Francisco, he’d heard countless stories of people striking it rich, and he seemed convinced, even in the somber confines of the internment camp, that America was a land without limits, that this time of trouble would pass.
I slow the car and turn into Obaachan’s neighborhood. At the half-acre lake near the entrance to her development, I pull over so that we can take a quick look at the water. A blue heron spots us, spreads its wide wings, and flies off. Yesterday, on our way to the supermarket, we saw a young alligator in this pond, and we’re hoping to find it again. The alligator’s small enough—maybe three feet in length—to be interesting but not frightening.
“There,” Obaachan says, pointing. “Is that it?” She covers a yawn with her hand. Usually, she doesn’t grow tired until late afternoon, but radiation treatments, notorious for their enervating effect, make her sleepy, even before lunch.
I tell her I think what she sees is just a clump of leaves near the pond’s drain. We pull away slowly, still looking for it. Obaachan reaches for the garage door opener, which is tucked in the middle console.
“It didn’t take your grandfather long to start talking about marriage,” she says. “In fact, it became his primary topic of conversation.” She was willing to wait. Something deep inside of her was not yet ready to take that step. “Maybe I felt too young. Or it simply could have been that I was still overwhelmed by all the changes I’d experienced in such a short time.” She doesn’t remember specifically what made her hesitate to say yes to him—he was, after all, handsome, smart, and interesting—and yet she held back.
“I was not the type of girl who’d spent her childhood believing that once I got married, my life would be complete. Many women thought that way back then. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be married; I hoped that I would someday have a family. It’s just that I was in no rush.”
My grandfather, on the other hand, was very ready. Having left his homeland and his family as a teenager, he was desperate for a family in America, and tired of living alone. Shortly after Ojichan had arrived in San Francisco, he’d learned that his father had passed away. He’d decided even before the war broke out that he would never return to Japan. More than anything, he wanted to be a husband and a father, and he went to great measures to let my grandmother know he was serious.
“He could be very convincing,” Obaachan says, turning to look out the window.
I remember this about my grandfather. When we were children, he would persuade us to join him in silly games with magic tricks—pretending he could pull off the upper half of his thumb was a favorite of his—and ugly masks he picked up at costume stores, chasing us around the house, roaring like a monster. At the same time, he had enough of an edge that we knew we shouldn’t push our luck by mouthing off or being disrespectful. My mother had warned us not to cross the line with him.
Even as a young man, my grandfather had been persistent, and he had a way of commanding Obaachan’s attention and, sometimes, of captaining her very will. He could so convincingly present an argument, even about something meaningless like the best way to cook fish, that she often found herself struggling to come up with a response. “He was much better with words than I ever was,” Obaachan says as we pull into the driveway.
Depending on the day, my grandfather would alter his approach to getting her to marry him. Sometimes, he would press his hand into hers and look at her, his dark eyes dancing. It was time, he would say with tenderness. They knew each other well. They got along. They would be a good match; he promised. He was ready, and she was, too. She just didn’t realize it. Besides, what was the point in waiting? Other times, when he grew frustrated, he would shrug his shoulders and kick the dust. Perhaps this was all a waste of his energy, he would say. Maybe she wasn’t serious about him; maybe she was only biding time until someone better came along. The accusations would mount.
But the tactic that weighed most heavily on my grandmother’s imagination was one that seemed the product of sheer desperation. Ojichan’s most compelling approach was to play with her fears: there’s a war going on, he would say, staring intently into her eyes, sad and serious. Who knows what will happen? In many respects, he was right.
By the fall of 1942, the war was no longer just a series of reports people listened to on their radios or watched on the newsreels at the movie theatres. For many, dim-out regulations, scrap-metal drives, air-raid alerts, and radio silence had become a part of everyday life. Automobiles, typewriters, sugar, rubber, gasoline, and fuel oil were all rationed. In the Pacific, the Battle of Guadalcanal had been raging since early August. Then, in October, the Germans and British began fighting at El Alamein in North Africa. In November, the rest of the Allies invaded North Africa in Operation Torch. Clearly, the war was growing, stretching its territory, swallowing more continents, countries, and lives. No end was in sight.
Obaachan steps out of the car. She sighs and shakes her head. “I think he knew he could get me to bend on that one. Of course I knew there was a war, and I was all too aware that my future, like everybody else’s, was precarious.” At the time, she worried that she might never leave Heart Mountain, that her room there might be her final one, that the image of the plains and that solitary mountain in the distance, seen through the holes of the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp, would be the last view she’d ever know.
Along with the uncertainty of her future, my grandmother worried as well that she might not find another person who would love her and want to marry her, like my grandfather did. She might end up alone, and many years later, wish she’d taken her chances with him. It was true that at the time, she wasn’t sure that she loved him, but she knew that she cared about him, that she admired him, that she found him attractive. But was that love? She wasn’t sure. What she was sure about, though, was that he loved her.
“I think that’s why I said yes, in the end,” Obaachan s
ays as she walks toward the house. “I knew that he loved me. That he really, really loved me.”
I remember my grandmother saying it just that way before. I suspect there was more to her decision to marry Ojichan than this—that it was not only the assurance that he loved her that led her to say yes to him. Fear about the war and the uncertainty of her future must have played a bigger role than she lets on. It strikes me as strange, too, that my grandmother does not mention her love for Ojichan when we talk about her marriage, but I don’t know how to bring up this detail without somehow sounding accusatory, or worse yet, disrespectful.
By the time my grandparents would marry, on December 12, 1942, a little over a year would have passed since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. During that year, my grandmother had dropped out of college, been forced from the only home she’d ever known, lived in a whitewashed stall of a fairground barn, and resettled in a Wyoming concentration camp. I think I can understand the long shadow so much uncertainty would have cast on her, and her desire to solidify at least one small element of a life that seemed to be spinning unbearably out of her control.
Chapter 8
THE TRADITIONAL JAPANESE SYSTEM FOR ARRANGING A marriage was complicated, so my grandmother’s decision to say yes to my grandfather was only the first in a series of steps leading to a wedding. First, both of my grandparents had to choose a representative, someone who could attest to their good character and respectability. Obaachan selected an older couple from Los Angeles, folks who had known her all her life and who were also interned at Heart Mountain. The couple paid a formal visit to my grandfather and assured him that Obaachan was a moral person from a solid family. Had Ojichan’s parents been around, they would have been part of the conversation. Likewise, my grandfather found someone at the camp who was willing to speak to Obaachan and her parents on his behalf. He asked John Tamura, who was a “block manager” and an esteemed person at Heart Mountain, to serve as his representative. John Tamura was older, closer to Obaachan’s parents in age, and his broad shoulders and straight back gave the impression of someone with dignity and authority. Also, Obaachan’s parents had known him back in Los Angeles, which gave him that much more credibility in their eyes. They knew he was not simply some guy whom my grandfather had paid to speak on his behalf. They trusted Tamura’s judgment. After Ojichan had been formally represented by Tamura, he had to approach Obaachan’s parents himself and ask for their blessing.
Obaachan explains this system to me as we stand outside her house, in the courtyard, right after her radiation appointment. She pauses to inspect the two tomato plants she bought a few weeks earlier, kneeling and running her fingers along the slender branches and over the soft, furry leaves. A few tomatoes, still green, have grown to the size of golf balls. She pulls the planter a foot farther away from the house, out of the morning shade and into the direct sunlight. She squints, whispering to herself—she does this sometimes, to organize her thoughts, I think, but maybe also because she has lived alone now for over a decade and has learned to fill the silence with her own voice. After a moment she stands up, pulls her keys from her pocket, and walks to the front door.
“So you’d really only known Ojichan for, what, four or five months before you two were married?” I say as we step inside. I slip out of my shoes and place my purse on the floor beside me. My eyes slowly adjust to the dim lighting inside. To minimize the cost of air conditioning, Obaachan keeps the blinds closed, so it’s dark in the house compared to outside in the courtyard.
She removes her red-and-tan Easy Spirit shoes in the foyer, shuffles into the kitchen, and flips on the light. “I’m not sure. Maybe seven months, maybe eight,” she calls to me.
I can imagine how my own parents would have responded if, at twenty-one, I had announced I was going to marry someone I’d only known for a few months. I want to ask Obaachan whether her parents thought it was too soon, or whether they felt they didn’t know my grandfather well enough to grant their blessing, or if they worried that he was too flashy and self-confident, but I realize I must handle this situation with delicacy. I don’t want to offend my grandmother by asking a question she would consider inappropriate. “How did your parents feel about it?” I say carefully. “I mean, did they think it was a good idea?”
Obaachan steps out of the kitchen to look at me and sets her glass on the table in the foyer. She feels the undertones of the question. “Well,” she says, “as I told you before, they liked him well enough. I know in your mind, seven months is not a very long time. And looking back, I suppose the two of us hardly knew each other. But so much had happened to us. So much was happening.” She shrugs her shoulders and runs her finger along the rim of her glass. “Things are different during a war, Kimi. I guess that’s the best way for you to think about it. You have to remember that the whole world was at war.”
During November and December of 1942, as my grandparents followed the customary stages of an engagement as closely as they could, thousands of miles away, the Guadalcanal Campaign thundered on in the Solomons. The fighting would continue until February 9, 1943, when American troops at last took control. One of the most vicious battles of the war, the Naval Battles of Guadalcanal I and II, occurred November 12 through 15, when Japan attempted to send in reinforcements. Around four thousand of the ten thousand Japanese troops made it to the island; the others never set foot on Guadalcanal. The Americans lost nine ships; Japan lost five. Later, the Allies’ victory in the Solomons would be considered the turning point in the war in the Pacific.
As battle after battle unfolded in the Pacific, and in Northern Africa and Europe, the United States continued its efforts on an altogether new and different type of weapon. In late November, the government selected Los Alamos, New Mexico, as the site for a lab that would focus on the construction of the atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, ten days before my grandparents’ wedding, two University of Chicago physicists, Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton, achieved the first nuclear chain reaction. A little over three years after this discovery, the United States would drop its first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
My grandparents would have kept up to date on much of the war through the newsreels the authorities showed prior to movies. In these fuzzy clips, an excited male voice narrated while bomber planes flashed across the screen, the wings dipping toward the ocean, the engines bellowing. Soldiers waved triumphantly and stood over rows of kneeling Japanese or German prisoners. And smoke poured from lush green jungles as infantry marched past, sunburned and weary.
But even within the barbed-wire confines of Heart Mountain, far away from the gunfire and sinking ships, where people were cut off, in large part, from the world, the war demanded difficult answers. A few weeks before my grandparents’ wedding, in November, the authorities distributed a questionnaire—to all prisoners, both male and female—called an Application for Leave Clearance. The main purpose of this application was to determine individuals’ loyalty, should any of them choose to volunteer in the war effort. Obaachan frowns as she remembers this process. “They told us to be ‘as truthful as possible,’” she says, “which struck me as a strange way of putting it.”
At the Heart Mountain Community Center, Obaachan sat in one of the stiff wooden chairs at a long table, reading through each question of the application carefully. She gripped the yellow pencil in her fingers, squinted at the words, and tapped the eraser lightly on the table. A guard passed by, peering over her shoulder to check on her progress. She watched him out of the corner of her eye but made sure not to turn her head.
The distribution of these questionnaires in the camps created uproar, mostly because of questions 27 and 28. Question 27 asked: “Are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States, in combat duty, wherever ordered?” Although thirty-three thousand Japanese Americans did end up serving in the US military during World War II, some people, mostly Nisei, or those of the second generation, found Question 27 to be offensive and unfair. Farther down the table
from Obaachan, one angry young man hissed: “Why should I go put my life on the line for this country?”
“Yeah, it’s like they’re asking you to trade prison for a death sentence,” muttered another, loudly rustling his papers.
These audacious young men made Obaachan nervous. She leaned forward, pretending to be absorbed in her survey, pressing her elbows into the table and focusing on the paper in front of her. She remembered her father’s advice about following all the rules and attempting to be compliant. In two weeks, she was getting married. She didn’t want to be associated with any rebels in case there was trouble. And a small part of her disapproved of their rebellious behavior—both of her brothers, after all, had jumped at the opportunity to enlist.
Question 28 created more of a stir for the Issei, who had been born in Japan but lived in America. Obaachan’s parents were both Issei. It asked: “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, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor or any other foreign government, power, or organization?” The question was a thorny one. Its very nature put the Issei in an impossible situation. Like Mama and Papa, most felt loyal to the United States and considered it their home. However, despite that loyalty, they were still citizens of Japan. Forbidden by law to become US citizens—they would not, in fact, legally be permitted to become American citizens until 1954—they technically could not call the United States their own country. Thus, the question asked them to renounce their only citizenship, to Japan, while not offering anything in return. Though they realized there might be consequences for refusing to renounce their Japanese citizenship, many also feared that if they did, after the war they would become people without a country.
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