Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 2
Tori and Kisaburo Shiosaki at work in the Hillyard Laundry.
It was Fred, her seventeen-year-old son, who had turned the radio on. He was listening to The World Today, a CBS news show, when, at 11:30 a.m., an agitated voice interrupted the broadcast: “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi, by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.”
Startled, Fred called to his father in the next room. “Hey, Pop! The Japanese have attacked Hawaiʻi!”[7]
Fred’s parents and his siblings gathered around the radio. His parents looked pale and tense. Fred sat stunned, as hateful words poured out of the radio, sounding more and more venomous each time.
“The Japs.”
“The dirty Japs.”
“The dirty yellow Japs.”
This time, the word “Jap” wasn’t coming from where Fred usually heard it—out of the mouths of teenage bullies at school or on the streets of Hillyard. It was coming from adults, from news announcers, military officials, figures of respect and authority. It seemed to be coming from the heart of America itself.
For Fred’s parents, the word, and the tone, came as no surprise. Since arriving in America, they had been mistreated often enough, had heard the word hurled at them often enough, to know that as friendly as their customers might be, much of the country had long since hardened its heart against people who looked like them.
In the first few hours, Americans’ reactions ran the gamut from rage to fear to relief. Many young men, particularly those already in uniform, saw their futures as suddenly more interesting, with the possibility of glory awaiting them in a war that was now just over the western horizon. A soldier on leave in Atlanta crowed, “Oh boy, this is it!” Another, in Portland, Oregon, turned to a friend, smiled, and said, “We’d better polish up our shootin’ irons.”
Most Americans were, unsurprisingly, just plain angry—and raring to do something about it. In St. Louis, Missouri, Sunday worshippers agreed that “they ought to blow the Japanese navy out of the water.”[8] In Kansas City, a newsboy yelled, “Gotta whip those Japs!”[9] His customers nodded, handed him coins, and took their papers.
On Monday morning, Fred stayed home from school and remained indoors all day. He was deeply anxious, his stomach in a knot. He knew he could scrap with the best, one-on-one, but he was one of only a few Japanese American students at his high school, and he wasn’t at all sure the whole school wouldn’t jump him the moment he walked into the building.
At the laundry, the day did not go well. His parents opened at the usual time—7:00 a.m.—but by midmorning no customers had come in. Kisaburo drove over to the home of Will Simpson—the editor of the Hillyard News and a longtime friend—to pick up Simpson’s laundry, as he did every Monday morning.
For more than twenty years, Simpson had been Kisaburo’s mentor and an important ally. Now when Kisaburo appeared at his back door, Simpson held up the front page of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, containing the first horrifying casualty figures from Hawaiʻi. “What do you think of that?” Simpson demanded.
Kisaburo didn’t know what to say. Finally, he murmured, “It was dumb of them. I’m sure it will be over soon.” Simpson stared at him, hard, as if he were seeing him for the first time, and said, “Well, I’m afraid I can’t do business with you anymore. I have a political position I have to be careful of.” With that, he shut the door in Kisaburo’s face.
When he returned to the laundry, Kisaburo found his family waiting, hoping he would have work, something for them to do. But Fred could see at a glance that his father was empty-handed and utterly crestfallen. Kisaburo muttered, “Mr. Simpson said . . . well, he’s not going to do business with us anymore.”[10]
He sat quietly behind the counter for the rest of the morning, thinking about the apparent ruin of everything he had worked so hard to achieve over three decades in the United States. Fred had never seen him so crushed.
Kisaburo had come to America with a wicker suitcase and a head full of dreams. As the third son of a tenant farmer, he had no prospects at all in Japan—nothing beyond a life of labor and extreme poverty. When recruiters came to his village seeking workers for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he lunged at the opportunity and boarded a steamer to Vancouver.
The railroad work was desperately hard and paid low wages—just a dollar or two a day. Kisaburo and his fellow Japanese immigrants endured the long Canadian winters, wielding picks and shovels with frozen hands in relentless sleet and snow. At night, they slept in boxcars or tents and huddled around campfires, cooking rice and bits of fish and whatever else they could afford on their meager wages.
In the summers, they toiled under a broiling sun. Many of them suffered from scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. Some were maimed in explosions or crushed under tons of falling rock. It was a miserable existence, with mere survival the best a man could hope for.
When the section of railway track Kisaburo was working on brought him close to the US border, he decided he’d had enough and slipped across into the United States. He worked his way toward Washington State, where he found a job at the elegant Davenport Hotel in Spokane.
For the young man who had grown up in poverty in rural Japan, simply walking into the luxurious lobby of the hotel was entering another world. But the work was anything but elegant. Men his own age called him “boy.” He cleared tables, toted stacks of greasy plates into the kitchen, emptied spittoons and ashtrays, mopped restrooms, scrubbed dishes—anything that was asked of him—for nine or ten hours a day, six days a week.
Nevertheless, compared to years toiling on the railroad, it was nothing to Kisaburo. He poured his heart into every task. Within a year, he had so impressed his employers that they wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation, and with that in hand—and wearing a new suit and carrying a silk umbrella as evidence of his prosperity—he sailed for Japan to find a wife.
Tori Iwai lived in the village of Hatsuma, within walking distance of Kisaburo’s home village. The two were promptly married with the blessings of both sets of parents. Kisaburo returned to Spokane and bought the laundry, and Tori followed soon after. They leaped into their suddenly bright future together, working long hours, making friends in the community, and building a family.
By early 1941, they were secure. They were not the kind of people who could stay at the Davenport, or even have a meal there. Sometimes signs outside businesses informed them that they and their children were not welcome. Certain neighborhoods prevented them from buying a home, even if they had the money to do so. Random strangers sneered at them and called them “Japs.” But they had a thriving business, a home, an automobile, and children who were getting educations that would almost certainly allow them to rise into the American middle class.
That was before Pearl Harbor.
Fred returned reluctantly to school. His mother insisted. When he arrived at John R. Rogers High, his heart was racing and his stomach was churning. He took a deep breath, pushed his way through one of the four massive front doors, and made his way into the school’s clamoring hallways.
Students were huddled in clusters, talking excitedly about the war. They seemed too absorbed by the casualty figures and the prospect that the young men among them would soon all be in uniform to take any particular note of Fred. If anything, people seemed to avert their eyes.
By midmorning, to his enormous relief, he found that his friends were still his friends. His buddies on the track team still wanted to talk about the upcoming season. His friends in the photography club were already making assignments for next June’s yearbook. But those were his friends. And that was just the first few hours.
As the day wore on, Fred realized that while nobody was going to assault him at school, he now stood apart from most of the student body. Conversations dissolved into silence when he attempted to join in. Friendly glances were returned with blank stares. Backs were suddenly turned when he approached. And every afternoon he returned home to find the laundry machinery quiet and his parents idle and despondent.
Chapter 3
In Japan, Kats Miho’s sister, Fumiye, was teaching English in her classroom in suburban Tokyo when a young Russian teacher named Miss Zabriaski burst in. “Miss Miho, Miss Miho! War between Japan, America!”
Fumiye smiled and laughed her off. “No, no, that’s just propaganda,”[11] she said, and went on teaching. Miss Zabriaski looked exasperated, muttered something in Russian, and ran from the room.
Fed up with the racial discrimination she experienced growing up in Hawaiʻi, Fumiye had come to Japan in the spring of 1940, shortly after graduating from the University of Hawaiʻi. A famous scholar, Dr. Junjiro Takakusu, saw Fumiye’s academic potential and suggested she enroll for graduate studies at Japan’s most prestigious university, Tokyo Imperial.
Fumiye set sail for Japan almost without a second thought. It was only after she arrived that she discovered Dr. Takakusu had overlooked one crucial detail: women were not allowed to enroll at Tokyo Imperial. Nevertheless, she decided to stay in Japan and moved in with her older sister, Tsukie, and Tsukie’s husband, a dentist.
With great enthusiasm, Fumiye threw herself into her new life. She found jobs teaching English part-time. She took lessons in ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging—and dressed in a kimono for the tea ceremony every Friday. She developed a deep interest in Kabuki theater.
For the first time in her life, she felt that she was fully a part of the society in which she lived, as if she truly belonged. She knew that she would not be judged by her appearance or held back by her race.
Sure, tensions between the country where she had been born and the country where she chose to live were on the rise, but no matter. There were many good, kind people in both countries. So that morning, when Miss Zabriaski rushed into her classroom shouting about war, Fumiye immediately put it out of her mind and focused on her students.
Walking home that afternoon, she realized that something was, in fact, going on. Then, on a newsstand, she saw a shocking headline: entire US Navy destroyed in Hawaiʻi. She ran the rest of the way home, burst into the house, and fell sobbing into her sister’s arms. The two women tried to comfort each other, wondering aloud and fearing silently what might be happening to their family in Hawaiʻi.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
When the FBI came for him at the Miho Hotel, Katsuichi Miho had been frightened but not really surprised. He knew that his dedication to keeping Japanese culture alive in Hawaiʻi was likely to look suspicious to the American authorities.
He was taken to Sand Island, a bleak expanse of sand and dead coral in Honolulu Harbor, where soldiers herded him and roughly 450 other Issei men into a five-acre enclosure surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Eight towers, guarded by soldiers with machine guns, stood at intervals around the perimeter. The Issei men were assigned canvas tents, each with eight cots laid directly on the mud and coral.
Agents arresting Issei men.
It rained for days on end that December, and the tents flooded. Several times a day, the men had to stand outside, in the driving rain, for roll call. They shivered in their wet clothes day and night. They had no access to phones, radios, newspapers, pens, paper, wristwatches, or even bars of soap. The guards referred to them as prisoners of war. They had little idea about what was happening in the outside world and no idea at all about what was going to happen to them.
For those outside the camp, with access to radios and newspapers, the war news just kept getting worse. Japanese imperial forces seized Hong Kong, invaded Thailand, and bombed Guam and the Philippines. On December 12 they landed troops in the Philippines, and on December 14 they invaded Burma.
They even returned to Hawaiʻi. At dusk on December 15, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Maui and lobbed ten shells into Kahului, damaging a pineapple cannery. Only two chickens died in the attack, but it had its desired effect, terrorizing the town’s inhabitants and reinforcing the belief that a Japanese invasion of Hawaiʻi was imminent.
As the bad news continued to roll in, the nation’s angriest voices became the loudest, unleashing a torrent of racist invective that all but drowned out those still able to take a step back and distinguish between friend and foe.
Politicians who knew how to use racial hatred to their advantage seized the opportunity, and their rhetoric quickly became brazenly toxic. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi declared, “This is a race war . . . I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese . . . Let’s get rid of them now!”[12]
Since the earliest days of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, certain US newspapers warned about what they called the “Yellow Peril,” claiming that the arrival of too many people from Asia would engulf white American civilization and culture.
In the 1920s, Hollywood reinforced this notion, giving the world the character of Fu Manchu, an evil criminal mastermind hell-bent on destroying the Western world. Other unsavory Asian characters—almost always played by white actors—were common in American movies. By the 1940s, the racist caricatures and the hatred they roused were ingrained in the minds of millions of Americans.
Now, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Japanese American children were taunted on their way to school, barred from public amusement parks, turned away from theaters. Restaurants and hair salons, pharmacies, and dental offices refused to serve Japanese American customers. People boycotted Japanese businesses. The president of the University of Arizona forbade the library to lend books to Japanese American students, declaring that “these people are our enemies.”[13]
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
For nearly six weeks, Kats Miho and his fellow guardsmen of the Hawaiʻi Territorial Guard patrolled Oʻahu. From the first moment they heard the news of Pearl Harbor—or witnessed the attack with their own eyes—they knew they would bear a particular burden in this war. More than three-quarters of their number were Japanese American, and their faces and last names suggested a connection with the enemy. They were determined to prove that they were just as American—and just as eager to fight—as anyone else.
Then, early on January 19, came a blow they never expected. Kats and his squad were picked up from their post and brought to an athletics field, where they found the entire Territorial Guard milling around in the predawn dark, wondering why they were there. Finally, one of their commanding officers explained—tears welling in his eyes as he spoke.
Captain Nolle Smith was a large man, a halfback on the University of Hawaiʻi football team. As a Black man, he knew something about discrimination. He said that he had tried to stop what was about to happen, that all the local officers had tried, but that they were overruled by someone in Washington, DC.
Then, another officer took over and got bluntly to the heart of the matter. Some of the brass visiting from the mainland had been upset to see men who appeared to be Japanese carrying guns. Orders had come down. “The reason you are here is because you—all you Americans of Japanese ancestry—because of your ethnic background, you are being discharged from the Hawaiian Territorial Guard.”[14]
Kats stood stunned, his mouth open. They were all stunned. And angry. And humiliated. All they had wanted since the morning of December 7 was to serve their country. Now that opportunity had been taken away, replaced with the realization that they—Japanese Americans—were not trusted. Worse even than that, they were not seen as truly American.
For a few moments, there was only silence. Then Kats heard men weeping softly in the darkness all around him.
Chapter 4
Spring came early in 1942, as it often does in California’s Salinas Valley, where vast fields of lettuce, chard, spinach, and artichokes stretch from the Gabilán mountains in the east all the way to the great blue crescent of Monterey Bay in the west. Less than a century after Americans from eastern states swept into California in search of gold, displacing the original Mexican families from the valley’s sprawling ranchos, white Americans now owned most of the land.
But it was mainly Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese immigrants who worked that land. It was they who grew, harvested, and shipped east the bulk of the nation’s fresh green produce, they whose labor had, by the 1930s, turned the valley into “America’s Salad Bowl.”
The work was tough, unrelenting, and poorly paid, and so were many of the kids who grew up in the valley. Few were tougher than sixteen-year-old Rudy Tokiwa. Slight of build, born prematurely, and asthmatic, Rudy had always been a fighter.
On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, he was standing in a field of lettuce, leaning on a hoe. His sister, Fumi, brought him the news, running across the field toward him, waving her arms and yelling.
Rudy had been alarmed but not really surprised. His first thought was Well, it had to happen. Then, almost immediately, a second thought—a question—came to mind. If this meant war, war with Japan, what would he do if called upon to fight?
For Rudy, that was a complex question. Like many young Japanese Americans, Rudy had spent time in Japan—living with family members, learning the language, and getting to know his parents’ culture. As a schoolboy in his family’s ancestral prefecture, Kagoshima in southern Japan, he found Japanese life to be far harder and harsher than he had expected.
When he was thirteen, he and his classmates had to do military training. They could be summoned by bugle from their beds at any hour of the night and sent out on military exercises in the countryside. Sometimes the maneuvers went on for forty-eight hours straight, with the teenagers stumbling across fields, staggering under the weight of heavy packs. If Rudy hadn’t remembered to have food ready to bring with him, he went hungry.
