The Storm on Our Shores

by Mark Obmascik

  Classmates loved his wry sense of humor. While in a neighborhood Japanese grocery, his roommate found a bottle of soy sauce, at the time a rare ingredient for California cuisine, and called across the store to Tatsy: “Shall I get some of this beetle juice?” Stout had tried soy sauce once and hated it. Tatsuguchi’s tendency to add it onto so many different foods became a running joke between the roommates. Tatsuguchi responded in jest the next day by pouring the soy sauce into a glass-stoppered bottle usually reserved in the chemistry lab for nitric acid. Before placing the bottle on their tiny dining table, he added this label: SNAKE’S BLOOD.

  Tatsuguchi remained acutely aware that most Americans did not know anyone Japanese, and that his actions would sometimes be seen as representative of his entire native country. He convinced himself to put on a good show. When Tatsuguchi’s roommate brought home some papaya nectar, Tatsuguchi felt obligated to try it. Not a good idea. The taste was so disgustingly sweet that Tatsuguchi ran to the sink, spit it out, and spent much time at the faucet rinsing out his mouth. The roommate chided Tatsuguchi: That papaya nectar doesn’t taste nearly as bad as the other stuff you brought home from the Japanese grocery store. Replied Tatsuguchi: “Yes, I know, but that was Japanese stuff. You ate it. So I had to, too.” To Tatsuguchi, fair was fair.

  He kept in touch with life back home by subscribing to a Japanese newspaper and using his shortwave radio to tune in news broadcasts from Tokyo. He knew far more about world events than most of his classmates, who had little reason to focus on life outside the United States. Still, he genuinely enjoyed his fellow students and medical residents, who were open and friendly and helpful. They banded together in misery under the brutal around-the-clock hours of a medical residency that left little time for much outside the hospital. White Memorial was a hectic but comfortable cocoon. Dedicated to becoming the greatest possible surgeon, Tatsuguchi centered his life around his career. No one ever disputed his work ethic.

  Life outside the hospital was more complicated. Resentment of Asians in general, and the Japanese in particular, was building. Starting in 1913, fifteen Western and Midwestern states, including California, had enacted alien land laws, which banned Japanese immigrants and other Asians from owning real estate. (As a reflection of the prejudiced times, California continued enacting other anti-Japanese laws through the 1920s that, among other things, banned the leasing of farmland to Asian immigrants and even their American-born children.) In Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, race-baiting politicians warned of the rising Yellow Peril that would lower wages for whites and destroy the values of Western Civilization. Congress in 1917 had overridden President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which denied citizenship to “all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons”—and most Japanese (as well as most other Asians). That law was followed by a series of other anti-Asian laws, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the Cable Act of 1922, and the national origins quota of the Immigration Act of 1924. When a Berkeley, California, high school graduate named Takao Ozawa applied for U.S. citizenship by claiming he was as light-skinned as any white man, the United States Supreme Court disagreed, issuing an ugly ruling saying the man “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side.”

  The anti-Japanese laws were just a symptom of the racist sentiment in the street. Japanese Americans were routinely denied the ability to rent an apartment, shop in some stores, attend certain schools, join labor unions, and work some jobs. White mobs in Portland, Oregon, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, harassed and chased out Japanese railroad workers. Another mob in Toledo, Oregon, evicted thirty-five Japanese working at the Pacific Spruce Corporation. There were forced evictions of Asians in Tacoma, Seattle, and Rock Springs, Wyoming. The Anti-Alien Association railed against land ownership and citizenship for Asians. The San Francisco Labor Council organized a boycott against all Japanese-owned businesses.

  Many Americans did not distinguish between Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, or Filipinos. Popular books like The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu—“the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on the earth for centuries”—only reinforced the perception of Asians as crafty, shifty double-dealers bent on world domination.

  Tatsuguchi could not ignore the contradiction: Inside the hospital he saved the lives of white people with emergency surgery, but outside in the parking lot he was persecuted as a Jap. He was winning his career dream. He was struggling to win cultural acceptance.

  Many days Tatsuguchi felt like a lonely atoll in the Pacific, buffeted by conflicting winds from the east and west. He was an L.A. guy who shunned cars, a man who prized the modesty and dignity of Japan, but still craved the fun and energy of Southern California. He would never fit in perfectly in either the East or West, but he wondered who lived as more of an outsider—the Jap in America, or the gaijin in Nippon.

  He longed for someone who knew what he felt, a friend who loved the best of both countries, a confidante who could join him to chart a new, wonderful, blended life.

  What he longed for was a girl named Taeko Miyake.

  2

  * * *

  Love

  He hadn’t realized how much he had missed her—until he couldn’t see her. Paul was supposed to meet Taeko at her ship in Los Angeles. She had spent weeks sailing across the Pacific, from Tokyo to her new college and life in California, and Paul intended to meet her at the dock. But now Paul stood at the Port of Los Angeles, a long passenger liner stretching in front of him, and Taeko was nowhere to be seen.

  Paul worried that he wouldn’t recognize her. He had known her more than twenty years, when they were both schoolchildren in Japan, but since he had moved to the United States they had kept in touch only by letter. He certainly had changed during his years in America. He was more confident, more open, more accepting of new things. But what about Taeko? He knew she was no longer a girl. She was a woman, an excellent student, who was both thrilled and a little scared to be moving to a new country for classes. In the United States, Paul felt sure that he and Taeko would be friends. As he scanned the docks searching for her, though, he felt they might be something more. Where was she?

  Not at the port, it turned out. Taeko’s ship had arrived hours earlier. She had come and gone from the docks.

  Paul scrambled and found Taeko later that day at the home of a mutual friend. Paul apologized for missing her at the port. Taeko said she was just grateful that he found her. They started talking and did not stop. She was enrolling in a Seventh-day Adventist college, La Sierra Academy in Riverside, where she planned to study the Bible, English, and the violin. She was the daughter of a minister from Tokyo. He was the son of a Hiroshima dentist. Both families were dedicated to Jesus Christ and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

  They talked about old times and new, family and friends, hopes and dreams. And for the first time in a long time, he was overcome with a singular, fantastic realization: Taeko Miyake knew him.

  For starters, she didn’t call him Tatsy, the nickname all his classmates used. To Taeko, he was Paul, the apostolic name his parents had given him to signal the Tatsuguchi family’s deep faith. Like Paul, Taeko knew what it felt like to be outside the mainstream. They had both grown up Christian in a Japan dominated by Shinto and Buddhism, a country suspicious of most things Western. As part of a scorned religious minority, Paul’s parents, like Taeko’s, deemed it important to learn about life outside the Japanese cultural island. They had sent Paul years earlier to study for his undergraduate degree at Pacific Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Northern California.

  While he was away at college, however, both his parents died within a month of each other. Following Japanese tradition, the Tatsuguchi family inheritance went to the oldest son, not Paul.

  Taeko was the only person in the United States who knew just how devastating this turn of events had been to Paul. The Tatsuguchi family was extremely wealthy—so ri
ch that Paul and each of his five siblings had been assigned two servants. (The cooking, cleaning, and gardening was left for ten additional family servants.) Paul grew up with the best clothes, the best food, and the best tutors. His parents were major contributors to the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Japan and prime backers of a church tuberculosis sanitarium in Tokyo. His parents had shown him the good life as well as the Christian philanthropic obligations that came with it.

  The death of Paul’s parents meant the end of his financial support. Stranded on the other side of the Pacific Ocean with no clear way to pay for anything, Paul pleaded with his older brother for money to let him finish his medical studies at Loma Linda University. Weeks passed, and Paul grew more nervous. Would he be forced to return to Japan without a medical license? Could he even cover his current school bills? And what would happen to his younger brothers and sisters still home in Japan? Eventually the older brother agreed to give Paul the family house, which was sold quickly, at a cut-rate price, to pay for his medical school tuition, plus other expenses for his brothers and sisters.

  It was a testament to Paul’s own sense of dignity that his medical school roommate, Harold Stout, had never heard about his financial crisis. In the minds of Stout and other classmates, Tatsy was a quiet, sincere, and modest medical student. They never knew that he was rich, because he didn’t tell anyone, and they didn’t know that Tatsy was now poor, because he didn’t say anything about that, either. What they did know was this: Tatsy was a skilled surgeon who performed top-quality appendectomies faster than anyone. In the true American spirit, he was working harder to get ahead faster.

  Taeko, however, knew more. She knew all about Paul’s problems back home because her family had helped him through his money woes. Her parents were religious missionaries from Tokyo, now living in Hawaii, who had contributed a modest sum to help continue Paul’s schooling. Others in the church had donated as well. Seventh-day Adventists were all about community and sticking together during times of adversity. If the orphaned son of a church committee member needed help to pay for medical school in America, then the church would deliver that help. It was expected that Paul would pay back the favor someday.

  Paul liked that Taeko knew all this about him. America was invigorating, but it also could be lonely. He wanted someone to confide in. Yes, Taeko was an antidote to homesickness, a connection to the customs and culture of a native land far away. As they talked on their first evening together in a new country, she started to become something more. She understood his problems. She might even offer some solutions.

  Taeko soon learned there was no such thing as a simple date night with Paul. In the same way he memorized the McBurney, Lanz, and Pararectus incisions for surgeries, Paul also felt compelled to classify and categorize the natural world around him. A walk around the block turned into a quest to identify the moths fluttering at the streetlight. He prided himself on his ability to pick out constellations in the night sky; no evening stroll was complete without finding the Sagittarius tea pot in summer or Orion the hunter in winter. A lunch by a lake was more than just a picnic—Paul always collected water samples to examine later with a microscope for amoeba, paramecium, and other protozoa. Every finding was recorded with detailed notes. In Paul’s world, everything had a purpose, and he was determined to figure it all out. He was like a grown-up Huck Finn exploring a new land. There were exotic plants and birds and landscapes, and, especially, people.

  In Japan, so many people had the same background and beliefs. Southern California, by contrast, was a hodgepodge of races, religions, and economic class. It was both frightening and thrilling, and the more he explored with Taeko, the closer they grew.

  Paul was also deeply devoted to his faith. He did more than just attend their Seventh-day Adventist church on Saturdays. At home he pored over the scriptures and memorized many favorite verses. The margins of his personal Bible were filled with notes and interpretations. He worked hard to be virtuous and set a good example. In a letter home to her parents, Taeko wrote that she was impressed by Paul’s dedication to, as she put it, “living a good Christian life.” Paul clearly wasn’t going into medicine to build a fat bank account. He was doing it to help others. He was genuinely devoted to improving the lives of the less fortunate.

  Smart, enthusiastic, sincere—and a surgeon in the making—Paul was quite the catch for the marriage-minded coed, and he had attracted much notice on La Sierra’s Seventh-day Adventist campus. Still, Taeko never felt any competition. She genuinely enjoyed being around him. Yes, Paul was a little quirky, but he also was a man who took on hard challenges and persevered. Though Taeko’s botched arrival day at the Port of Los Angeles proved Paul could sometimes live in his own world, he still had a good heart.

  He also knew how to pick the right spots. On a long weekend, he had organized a trip to Yosemite National Park, one of the planet’s great cathedrals of nature, and one of the most beautiful places either he or Taeko had ever visited. She was taken by the vast waterfalls, and the granite domes, and the rolling green meadows. He was taken by her. In fact, he was so focused on her that he had neglected to dip into the Merced River for water samples.

  He looked at her and she at him. In Taeko, Paul could see a future together, a shared journey of children and church, and a life that balanced the best of the United States and Japan.

  In the shadow of Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome, Paul dropped to a knee and asked Taeko to marry him. She had a quick certain answer. She said yes.

  Their engagement was cause for celebration, but also fraught with complications. For starters, Taeko’s college did not allow married women. Though she had crossed the Pacific for an American undergraduate degree, Taeko would be forced as an engaged woman to leave school without a diploma. Still, she knew there were worse fates in life than becoming a surgeon’s wife.

  Planning the wedding was not straightforward. The fight over Tatsuguchi family money had left some hard feelings among Paul’s siblings. With both parents dead, Paul saw little reason to return to Japan for a marriage ceremony. Besides, Taeko’s mother and father had been living and working as missionaries in Hawaii, or, as Taeko put it, “on this side of the globe.” In 1938, less than a year after Taeko had arrived in California, the couple married in Los Angeles.

  There was little debate about what to do for a honeymoon. Paul and Taeko admired America, were fascinated by America, and wanted to see America. But how?

  They didn’t have enough money for plane or rail travel. And the truth was that the traumatized baby-delivery nurse at White Memorial Hospital had not exaggerated: Paul really was an awful driver. A car trip across the country with him at the wheel would not be a honeymoon. It would be a death wish.

  Luckily, Hollywood had just popularized another way to see America. In 1934, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert had rolled up the East Coast on a Greyhound bus for their blockbuster romantic comedy, It Happened One Night. It was the first film to have won all five major Academy Awards—best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay—and, even more amazingly, it made bus travel look fun. If Greyhound spelled love for Gable and Colbert, then why not also for the newlywed Tatsuguchis?

  And so Paul and Taeko set off on bus for their great adventure across America. They could not imagine sights more breathtaking. The ocean around Japan always inspired awe, but nothing prepared Paul and Taeko for the majestic open spaces of the Grand Canyon. A single place in Colorado, Rocky Mountain National Park, had forty peaks higher than Mount Fuji, the tallest mountain of their homeland. Rolling through the endless farmland of Nebraska and Iowa—two states that, combined, nearly matched the total area of all of Japan—made the Tatsuguchis realize that America should never go hungry. And it was hard to tell which man-made creation appeared more impressive: Chicago and the sprawling stockyards that made it the Hog Butcher for the World, or Detroit and the massive factories that turned out more automobiles in a year (3.3 million) than Japan’s second-largest city, Osaka, had pe
ople.

  The more the Tatsuguchis traveled, the more they fell in love, with each other and with their adopted country. On their honeymoon, they even traveled to the ultimate newlywed destination—Niagara Falls. When the vast cataract was illuminated at night, they had to ask: Could there be a more all-American honeymoon? In Japan, the Tatsuguchis had always felt safe and secure, but in the United States they felt exhilarated. Americans were not preoccupied with avoiding embarrassment or failure. They dodged conformity. They took risks. They were optimistic. They believed they could control their own destiny and even change it. Plus, for Paul, the United States had one other big advantage: excellent ice cream.

  On their grand cross-country honeymoon tour, no place left the Tatsuguchis as amazed as New York City. Paul stood at the base of the Empire State Building, at 1,250 feet the world’s tallest, and gaped upward until his neck hurt. The highest building in all of Japan stood one-tenth as tall. Manhattan was almost incomprehensible.

  Paul and Taeko Tatsuguchi were taken aback by the wealth of a country that could create such magnificent structures. They could not imagine how Japan could ever match such an economic colossus in either war or peace.

  They would soon find out.

  Sometime after their return to Los Angeles from their honeymoon, Paul and Taeko were confronted by a terrible turn in Paul’s family life in Japan.

  According to his family, Paul’s oldest brother had sold a sister into prostitution. Few details were clear to Paul. Suffering from a mix of shame and horror, family members were reluctant to discuss it. Paul could not understand how any human being, especially his own brother, could do such a thing. The sad truth, however, was that famine and economic hardship across rural Japan in the 1930s had led many families to sell daughters into the sex business. Still, Paul’s brother was neither poor nor a farmer. Why had he done it? The more Paul pressed his family for information, the less he learned. Adding to the frustration was the slow pace of communications. Paul’s letters took weeks to travel from California to Japan, and the family’s responses took weeks in return. The whole situation was so shrouded in shame and secrecy that, even decades later, the couple’s daughter, Laura Davis, was unable to learn much about it.