Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 4
And with that he sat down, opened his books, and resumed studying.[21]
Gordon Hirabayashi was one of those people who are determined to find their own path through life. He was a resolute and unflappable young man. He chose his words carefully, deploying them deliberately in a slow, measured way that invited close attention to each and every one. He had grown up in the White River valley, south of Seattle, where his parents grew vegetables and raised their son to follow his own moral compass, defend just principles, and align his actions with his beliefs. Gordon wanted to live a courageous life, and the essence of courage, as he saw it, was holding fast to fundamental truths, regardless of how inconvenient or painful the consequences.
When he first entered the University of Washington, Gordon enrolled in the ROTC program, but after participating in a debate about the military draft he moved toward pacifism and nonviolence. By 1940, well before Pearl Harbor, he left the ROTC and registered with the Selective Service (the government agency responsible for administering the draft) as a conscientious objector.
As the deadline for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from Seattle approached, Gordon dropped out of the university and went to work for the local Quaker chapter, helping the families of Issei men who had been imprisoned by the Department of Justice. With their husbands and fathers gone, many women and children needed help preparing for their own incarceration—selling their possessions, closing businesses, packing, figuring out how much they could carry to the buses that were to take them to the camps.
Gordon soon realized that old women and men with canes couldn’t carry much of anything. Mothers carrying infants couldn’t also manage a cradle or diapers or extra clothing for the baby. Furniture, automobiles, and cherished heirlooms couldn’t be carried at all and so had to be given away, sold for pennies on the dollar, or stored for who knew how long at who knew what cost.
And personal possessions were the least of it. Anxiety, depression, and fear stalked Japanese American communities up and down the West Coast. Gordon volunteered to help as parents sat children down and explained they would have to give up beloved pets. He counseled students who realized they would have to quit classes midsemester, say goodbye to their closest friends, miss senior proms, perhaps even forgo diplomas they had all but earned. He found experts to advise anxious business owners forced to close businesses they had nurtured for decades.
As the date approached on which Gordon himself was required to register, he decided that he wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. Not if he were to remain true to his principles. As an American, he simply could not surrender his constitutional rights as if they meant nothing, as if they were mere words scrawled on an old piece of parchment.
Once he had made up his mind, Gordon’s main concern was that he didn’t get his Quaker associates or his friends at the YMCA in trouble for harboring a fugitive. He wanted to make it clear that he alone was responsible for what he was about to do.
He told a few select friends what he planned. Then he phoned his parents to explain his decision. It was a hard conversation because they expected him to join them on their bus. His mother began to cry. She hadn’t expected them to have to part ways. She agreed with him in principle, respected his position, and admired him for his courage, but she was desperately afraid for him.
“Please put your principles aside on this occasion,” she pleaded. “Come home and move with us. Heaven knows what will become of you if you confront the government.”
“I’d like to,” Gordon said, “but I wouldn’t be the same person if I went now.”
As he put down the phone receiver, Gordon was crying, too. But he would not budge. Not even for his mother. And so, when the last bus to Camp Harmony pulled out of town on May 12, Gordon was not on it.
He was now the last Japanese American living in Seattle. The next day, he sat down at a typewriter and pecked out a statement addressed to the FBI. He handed copies to officials at the YMCA, the director of the ROTC program, and several of his Quaker friends.
Later that week, he went with his lawyer to the FBI offices in the Vance Building at Third and Union in Seattle. Special Agent Francis Manion glanced at Gordon’s statement and said, “Oh, we already have that. We’ve been expecting you.”
Gordon wanted it made clear that he was surrendering voluntarily, not because someone had intercepted his statement or turned him in. “Here is the original,” he said. “I’d like to leave it with you.”
“Okay,” Manion said. “We’ll take it.”
Now that they had him, the FBI couldn’t figure out what to do with Gordon. They drove him over to where Japanese Americans were supposed to register, and someone put a paper in front of him.
“That looks like the same registration form I saw a few days ago,” Gordon said. “Has there been any change in it?”
“Well, no.”
“Then I can’t sign it.”
“But you have to sign it. Everyone has to sign it,” Manion said.
Gordon, unruffled, asked, “Have you signed it?”
Taken aback, Manion replied, “If you don’t sign it, you are breaking the law, and you’re subject to punishment.” He opened the diary Gordon had kept, in which he’d deliberately recorded his curfew violations.
“Were you out after 8:00 p.m. last night?” Manion asked.
“Yes, like you and other Americans,” Gordon replied.
“Oh, then you violated the curfew. That would be a ‘count two’ violation.”
Gordon looked Manion in the eye and replied softly, “Are you turning yourself in for curfew violation, since you did exactly as I did, and we are both Americans?”
“Ah, but you are of Japanese ancestry.”
“Has the Constitution been suspended?”
Manion had no answer for that. He had not expected an argument. Some of the people being incarcerated had been angry. Some had complained. But none, as far as he knew, had simply refused to cooperate.
Finally, late in the day, Manion took Gordon to the King County Jail in downtown Seattle and left him in the federal holding tank.
On Monday morning, a military officer, Captain Michael Revisto of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, showed up at the jail. Revisto was cordial, even charming, but he was also clearly upset. “You know you violated a lotta things, and if they add these together, you’re gonna have a long jail sentence. But they’re willing to forget all that. And soon as you sign this statement here, we’re all set. I’ve got a car here ready to take you to Puyallup.”
Gordon wanted to be helpful, but he wasn’t about to sign the form.
“You know,” he said, “I’m not physically objecting to your doing this. It’s just that I can’t give you the consent myself under the circumstances . . . But I don’t see why you can’t take me down there without my consent. And all you need to do is just get a couple of your guys to escort me down to the car, throw me in the back, and drive down forty miles, open up the barbed wire, plunk me down, drive out, close the gate.”
Revisto, startled, replied, “We can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“That’d be breaking the law.”
“You mean you think breaking the law, putting me in without signing, is worse than 120,000 people who were forced to be moved out?”[22]
Shaking his head, Revisto gave up and left, perplexed.
On June 1, Gordon was charged in a federal court. He pleaded “not guilty” on the basis that both the exclusion order and the curfew were racially motivated and unconstitutional. He was offered bail, but because he could not be released into the exclusion zone—because he was Japanese American—and because he still refused to register for removal to one of the camps, he was returned to the King County Jail to await trial.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
For Gordon Hirabayashi in the King County Jail, for Fred Shiosaki in Hillyard, for Rudy Tokiwa in the Salinas Assembly Center, for Kats Miho in Hawaiʻi, and for thousands of young Japanese Americans like them, the summer and fall of 1942 were seasons of profound discontent and worry.
Many of them and their parents—more than one hundred thousand people—were now living behind barbed-wire fences. Assumptions they had held all their lives had been turned on their heads. Their sense of self, of who they were and how they fit into the larger world, was uncertain. When they washed their faces and combed their hair in the morning, they saw Americans looking back at them from the bathroom mirror. But each and every day they were reminded that many of their compatriots saw them not as Americans but as enemies of all that America stood for and all that they themselves believed in.
There didn’t seem to be much they could do about it.
Chapter 7
Every weekday morning, Rudy Tokiwa stood at the perimeter fence of the Salinas Assembly Center, trying to catch a glimpse of his friends as they passed in school buses on their way to Salinas High.
The first day, nearly everyone on the bus saw Rudy, and most waved to him as they passed. A few friends came after school and visited with him through the fence. Some of his football teammates came. The Pozzi brothers came.
Everybody agreed that it just wasn’t fair what was happening to Rudy and his family. After all, a lot of them were Italian Americans. Italy was at war with the United States, and they hadn’t been locked up.
As the days passed, life on the outside went on, and fewer and fewer kids waved from the bus. Eventually, nobody waved. Rudy realized he was becoming invisible to them. He also realized that he was going to go stir-crazy if he didn’t find something to do other than stand staring out through the fence.
At the mess hall one day, he approached Mr. Abe, the head cook. Abe didn’t speak much English, but Rudy’s Japanese was pretty good. Rudy said that he was bored and that he’d like to learn to cook. Abe, impressed that someone as young as Rudy was willing to put in long hours in the kitchen, didn’t hesitate. “I will teach you,” he said.
Rudy threw himself into the job. He worked seven days a week, sometimes from 4:00 a.m. until after 8:00 p.m., helping to feed more than a thousand people in a sitting, three times a day. He brewed vats of coffee, poured sacks of rice into enormous pots of boiling water, and scrambled eggs on a griddle—dozens at a time.
Sometimes he wondered whether it might be better to just hang out with the boys who loafed around the camp all day. But Mr. Abe had a way of looking at him and saying, in quick, emphatic Japanese, “If you have free time, your mind wanders and you get in trouble.”[23] It reminded Rudy of the stern way his teachers in Japan talked, and while he hadn’t liked it then, he found Abe’s gruff manner reassuring now. The work, and the discipline it required, helped him cope with the situation. He decided to keep his head down and keep working.
Two months later, the Salinas Assembly Center was closed, and the camp’s population transferred to more permanent facilities. On the night of July 4, 1942—Independence Day—Rudy and his family found themselves traveling south, confined to a darkened railway car. Guards had ordered the passengers to pull the window shades down so nobody on the outside caught so much as a glimpse of them as the train passed through the small towns along the route.
The next morning, the passengers stepped off the train into the blast furnace of an Arizona summer. None of them had ever experienced heat like it before. Many of the women were wearing their Sunday best for traveling, and some of the men had on coats and ties. Sweating and bleary-eyed from a mostly sleepless night, they climbed into the backs of green army trucks. Half an hour later, the group arrived at what was to be their home for the foreseeable future: the Poston Relocation Center.
The camp was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation—home to the Mojave and Chemehuevi people. A tribal council had objected to the camp. They did not want to be a part of an injustice. The government’s Office of Indian Affairs had overruled them.
Rudy, squinting against the glare, looked around in disbelief. Row upon row of black, tar paper–clad barracks stood on a vast expanse of sunbaked sand—stretching three miles from one end to the other. Heat waves shimmered, and a fine gray dust lay over everything. The wind was hot and dry and offered no relief. Horned lizards skittered this way and that.
Almost immediately, people began to faint. Those who had arrived earlier rushed to the newcomers, handing out salt tablets and water. Young Nisei women helped others off the backs of the trucks and sat them down in the sand in the narrow margins of shade alongside the barracks. The newly arrived had to sort through mountains of baggage to find their own, then wander through a maze of identical buildings to locate their quarters.
When the Tokiwas found their assigned barracks in Block 213, someone handed Rudy’s mother, Fusa, and Fumi empty sacks and pointed to bales of straw outside.
“Fill them up with hay. That’s your mattresses.”
Fusa and Fumi started stuffing mattresses.
Stuffing mattresses at Poston.
It was even hotter inside the building. Drifts of dust had blown up between the floorboards, and Fusa borrowed a broom and started sweeping, but with each gust of hot wind more dust wafted into the room. As in Salinas, there was no furniture, so Rudy and Duke gathered scrap lumber with which to improvise shelving, tables, and chairs. All the newcomers seemed to be doing the same, and all of them were shocked. They had thought that at least there would be beds to sleep in and chairs to sit on.
As evening approached, word spread that although the refrigerators in the mess hall contained food, no one had been assigned to cook. A crowd gathered in front of the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do about it.
Because Rudy had cooked in Salinas, some of the younger men approached him. “Hey, Rudy, how about cookin’ here? We gotta have someone cook the meals.”
Rudy was irritated. Why him? Why a sixteen-year-old kid? He peered into the kitchen. There was dust and sand on the floor and all over the equipment. “Naw, I ain’t going to cook in this heat,” he growled. “No way! Any of you guys want to get stuck in there?”
The young men backed off. But they knew Rudy, and they knew how to get to him. A few minutes later, a group of stern-faced older men appeared and, speaking Japanese now, reopened the case.
“We have to have someone cooking, Rudy. And it’s going to have to be you young guys. So please, will you take the kitchen over?”
This time Rudy said yes. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t one to ignore the wishes of his elders.
Rudy was the right man for the job. He quickly organized a crew and set them to sweeping the place out. When he realized there weren’t enough knives and forks, he sent volunteers out to gather wood and begin whittling chopsticks.
But as he looked at the supplies, his anxiety ratcheted up. How was he going to feed hundreds of hungry people with these meager ingredients? It was mostly going to have to be fried Spam. He wasn’t looking forward to the complaints.
It was nearly midnight by the time everyone was fed. And, instead of complaining, people thanked Rudy. The old men and women nodded and said, “Dōmo arigatō,” thank you very much.
When he finished for the night, Rudy wandered out into the night air. He was proud of what he had done and proud of his people. They were tough, and uncomplaining. As unfair as their situation was, it was nice to feel that he was part of a community and able to make things a little better for his companions.
Young men playing basketball at Poston.
Rudy’s first night of cooking soon turned into a full-time job. The WRA employed those incarcerated in the camps to carry on much of the day-to-day business of feeding, policing, educating, caring for, and cleaning up. The pay was low, but it helped people pay off loans on homes they could no longer live in, or their income taxes, or the bills they received for storing their possessions on the outside.
As people settled into life at Poston, they did everything in their power to maintain some sense of normalcy and to combat the boredom—and anger—that threatened to consume them.
Dust storm at Poston.
They constructed schools, complete with auditoriums, out of adobe bricks they made themselves from mud and straw. They turned spare barracks into Christian and Buddhist churches. They established poultry and hog farms so they could have fresh eggs and meat and irrigated the desert to cultivate crops.
They organized an internal police force and a fire department and ran health clinics, beauty shops, barbershops, and newspapers. They organized Boy Scout troops and PTAs as well as a wide variety of clubs and social activities.
They scraped the sagebrush from the desert to clear baseball diamonds and football fields and set up basketball hoops on the gable ends of barracks. They even smoothed out patches of sand and sank tin cans in them to make “greens” for an improvised desert golf course.
Then they formed sports teams, with leagues and divisions, for baseball, football, basketball, and volleyball. Duke Tokiwa played for Block 213’s basketball team, the Terrors. Rudy was athletic, but he was small, not nearly as big and muscular as Duke. Nevertheless, he threw himself into the games wherever he could. Often these games ended abruptly when blinding and choking dust storms swept in off the desert, sending everyone scurrying for the shelter of the barracks with wet cloths clutched to their faces so they could breathe.
Rudy surprised himself by signing up for dancing lessons. He learned to waltz and jitterbug. He resumed his education at the camp’s high school and was even asked to teach agricultural classes. He began to make friends among the young men with whom he worked and played—and there were a couple in particular he really looked up to.
There was Lloyd Onoye, who came from the same part of Salinas as Rudy. Lloyd was a gentle giant, so powerful that when he grabbed other young men in wrestling matches or tackled them in football games, he sometimes inadvertently squeezed them so hard they passed out. Lloyd was slow to anger, but once during a basketball game he became enraged over a series of foul calls and wound up dragging six other men around the court as they tried to keep him from throttling the referee. Finally, one of them yelled, “If you want to live, Mac, you’d better get out of here!”
Gordon Hirabayashi was one of those people who are determined to find their own path through life. He was a resolute and unflappable young man. He chose his words carefully, deploying them deliberately in a slow, measured way that invited close attention to each and every one. He had grown up in the White River valley, south of Seattle, where his parents grew vegetables and raised their son to follow his own moral compass, defend just principles, and align his actions with his beliefs. Gordon wanted to live a courageous life, and the essence of courage, as he saw it, was holding fast to fundamental truths, regardless of how inconvenient or painful the consequences.
When he first entered the University of Washington, Gordon enrolled in the ROTC program, but after participating in a debate about the military draft he moved toward pacifism and nonviolence. By 1940, well before Pearl Harbor, he left the ROTC and registered with the Selective Service (the government agency responsible for administering the draft) as a conscientious objector.
As the deadline for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from Seattle approached, Gordon dropped out of the university and went to work for the local Quaker chapter, helping the families of Issei men who had been imprisoned by the Department of Justice. With their husbands and fathers gone, many women and children needed help preparing for their own incarceration—selling their possessions, closing businesses, packing, figuring out how much they could carry to the buses that were to take them to the camps.
Gordon soon realized that old women and men with canes couldn’t carry much of anything. Mothers carrying infants couldn’t also manage a cradle or diapers or extra clothing for the baby. Furniture, automobiles, and cherished heirlooms couldn’t be carried at all and so had to be given away, sold for pennies on the dollar, or stored for who knew how long at who knew what cost.
And personal possessions were the least of it. Anxiety, depression, and fear stalked Japanese American communities up and down the West Coast. Gordon volunteered to help as parents sat children down and explained they would have to give up beloved pets. He counseled students who realized they would have to quit classes midsemester, say goodbye to their closest friends, miss senior proms, perhaps even forgo diplomas they had all but earned. He found experts to advise anxious business owners forced to close businesses they had nurtured for decades.
As the date approached on which Gordon himself was required to register, he decided that he wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. Not if he were to remain true to his principles. As an American, he simply could not surrender his constitutional rights as if they meant nothing, as if they were mere words scrawled on an old piece of parchment.
Once he had made up his mind, Gordon’s main concern was that he didn’t get his Quaker associates or his friends at the YMCA in trouble for harboring a fugitive. He wanted to make it clear that he alone was responsible for what he was about to do.
He told a few select friends what he planned. Then he phoned his parents to explain his decision. It was a hard conversation because they expected him to join them on their bus. His mother began to cry. She hadn’t expected them to have to part ways. She agreed with him in principle, respected his position, and admired him for his courage, but she was desperately afraid for him.
“Please put your principles aside on this occasion,” she pleaded. “Come home and move with us. Heaven knows what will become of you if you confront the government.”
“I’d like to,” Gordon said, “but I wouldn’t be the same person if I went now.”
As he put down the phone receiver, Gordon was crying, too. But he would not budge. Not even for his mother. And so, when the last bus to Camp Harmony pulled out of town on May 12, Gordon was not on it.
He was now the last Japanese American living in Seattle. The next day, he sat down at a typewriter and pecked out a statement addressed to the FBI. He handed copies to officials at the YMCA, the director of the ROTC program, and several of his Quaker friends.
Later that week, he went with his lawyer to the FBI offices in the Vance Building at Third and Union in Seattle. Special Agent Francis Manion glanced at Gordon’s statement and said, “Oh, we already have that. We’ve been expecting you.”
Gordon wanted it made clear that he was surrendering voluntarily, not because someone had intercepted his statement or turned him in. “Here is the original,” he said. “I’d like to leave it with you.”
“Okay,” Manion said. “We’ll take it.”
Now that they had him, the FBI couldn’t figure out what to do with Gordon. They drove him over to where Japanese Americans were supposed to register, and someone put a paper in front of him.
“That looks like the same registration form I saw a few days ago,” Gordon said. “Has there been any change in it?”
“Well, no.”
“Then I can’t sign it.”
“But you have to sign it. Everyone has to sign it,” Manion said.
Gordon, unruffled, asked, “Have you signed it?”
Taken aback, Manion replied, “If you don’t sign it, you are breaking the law, and you’re subject to punishment.” He opened the diary Gordon had kept, in which he’d deliberately recorded his curfew violations.
“Were you out after 8:00 p.m. last night?” Manion asked.
“Yes, like you and other Americans,” Gordon replied.
“Oh, then you violated the curfew. That would be a ‘count two’ violation.”
Gordon looked Manion in the eye and replied softly, “Are you turning yourself in for curfew violation, since you did exactly as I did, and we are both Americans?”
“Ah, but you are of Japanese ancestry.”
“Has the Constitution been suspended?”
Manion had no answer for that. He had not expected an argument. Some of the people being incarcerated had been angry. Some had complained. But none, as far as he knew, had simply refused to cooperate.
Finally, late in the day, Manion took Gordon to the King County Jail in downtown Seattle and left him in the federal holding tank.
On Monday morning, a military officer, Captain Michael Revisto of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, showed up at the jail. Revisto was cordial, even charming, but he was also clearly upset. “You know you violated a lotta things, and if they add these together, you’re gonna have a long jail sentence. But they’re willing to forget all that. And soon as you sign this statement here, we’re all set. I’ve got a car here ready to take you to Puyallup.”
Gordon wanted to be helpful, but he wasn’t about to sign the form.
“You know,” he said, “I’m not physically objecting to your doing this. It’s just that I can’t give you the consent myself under the circumstances . . . But I don’t see why you can’t take me down there without my consent. And all you need to do is just get a couple of your guys to escort me down to the car, throw me in the back, and drive down forty miles, open up the barbed wire, plunk me down, drive out, close the gate.”
Revisto, startled, replied, “We can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“That’d be breaking the law.”
“You mean you think breaking the law, putting me in without signing, is worse than 120,000 people who were forced to be moved out?”[22]
Shaking his head, Revisto gave up and left, perplexed.
On June 1, Gordon was charged in a federal court. He pleaded “not guilty” on the basis that both the exclusion order and the curfew were racially motivated and unconstitutional. He was offered bail, but because he could not be released into the exclusion zone—because he was Japanese American—and because he still refused to register for removal to one of the camps, he was returned to the King County Jail to await trial.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
For Gordon Hirabayashi in the King County Jail, for Fred Shiosaki in Hillyard, for Rudy Tokiwa in the Salinas Assembly Center, for Kats Miho in Hawaiʻi, and for thousands of young Japanese Americans like them, the summer and fall of 1942 were seasons of profound discontent and worry.
Many of them and their parents—more than one hundred thousand people—were now living behind barbed-wire fences. Assumptions they had held all their lives had been turned on their heads. Their sense of self, of who they were and how they fit into the larger world, was uncertain. When they washed their faces and combed their hair in the morning, they saw Americans looking back at them from the bathroom mirror. But each and every day they were reminded that many of their compatriots saw them not as Americans but as enemies of all that America stood for and all that they themselves believed in.
There didn’t seem to be much they could do about it.
Chapter 7
Every weekday morning, Rudy Tokiwa stood at the perimeter fence of the Salinas Assembly Center, trying to catch a glimpse of his friends as they passed in school buses on their way to Salinas High.
The first day, nearly everyone on the bus saw Rudy, and most waved to him as they passed. A few friends came after school and visited with him through the fence. Some of his football teammates came. The Pozzi brothers came.
Everybody agreed that it just wasn’t fair what was happening to Rudy and his family. After all, a lot of them were Italian Americans. Italy was at war with the United States, and they hadn’t been locked up.
As the days passed, life on the outside went on, and fewer and fewer kids waved from the bus. Eventually, nobody waved. Rudy realized he was becoming invisible to them. He also realized that he was going to go stir-crazy if he didn’t find something to do other than stand staring out through the fence.
At the mess hall one day, he approached Mr. Abe, the head cook. Abe didn’t speak much English, but Rudy’s Japanese was pretty good. Rudy said that he was bored and that he’d like to learn to cook. Abe, impressed that someone as young as Rudy was willing to put in long hours in the kitchen, didn’t hesitate. “I will teach you,” he said.
Rudy threw himself into the job. He worked seven days a week, sometimes from 4:00 a.m. until after 8:00 p.m., helping to feed more than a thousand people in a sitting, three times a day. He brewed vats of coffee, poured sacks of rice into enormous pots of boiling water, and scrambled eggs on a griddle—dozens at a time.
Sometimes he wondered whether it might be better to just hang out with the boys who loafed around the camp all day. But Mr. Abe had a way of looking at him and saying, in quick, emphatic Japanese, “If you have free time, your mind wanders and you get in trouble.”[23] It reminded Rudy of the stern way his teachers in Japan talked, and while he hadn’t liked it then, he found Abe’s gruff manner reassuring now. The work, and the discipline it required, helped him cope with the situation. He decided to keep his head down and keep working.
Two months later, the Salinas Assembly Center was closed, and the camp’s population transferred to more permanent facilities. On the night of July 4, 1942—Independence Day—Rudy and his family found themselves traveling south, confined to a darkened railway car. Guards had ordered the passengers to pull the window shades down so nobody on the outside caught so much as a glimpse of them as the train passed through the small towns along the route.
The next morning, the passengers stepped off the train into the blast furnace of an Arizona summer. None of them had ever experienced heat like it before. Many of the women were wearing their Sunday best for traveling, and some of the men had on coats and ties. Sweating and bleary-eyed from a mostly sleepless night, they climbed into the backs of green army trucks. Half an hour later, the group arrived at what was to be their home for the foreseeable future: the Poston Relocation Center.
The camp was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation—home to the Mojave and Chemehuevi people. A tribal council had objected to the camp. They did not want to be a part of an injustice. The government’s Office of Indian Affairs had overruled them.
Rudy, squinting against the glare, looked around in disbelief. Row upon row of black, tar paper–clad barracks stood on a vast expanse of sunbaked sand—stretching three miles from one end to the other. Heat waves shimmered, and a fine gray dust lay over everything. The wind was hot and dry and offered no relief. Horned lizards skittered this way and that.
Almost immediately, people began to faint. Those who had arrived earlier rushed to the newcomers, handing out salt tablets and water. Young Nisei women helped others off the backs of the trucks and sat them down in the sand in the narrow margins of shade alongside the barracks. The newly arrived had to sort through mountains of baggage to find their own, then wander through a maze of identical buildings to locate their quarters.
When the Tokiwas found their assigned barracks in Block 213, someone handed Rudy’s mother, Fusa, and Fumi empty sacks and pointed to bales of straw outside.
“Fill them up with hay. That’s your mattresses.”
Fusa and Fumi started stuffing mattresses.
Stuffing mattresses at Poston.
It was even hotter inside the building. Drifts of dust had blown up between the floorboards, and Fusa borrowed a broom and started sweeping, but with each gust of hot wind more dust wafted into the room. As in Salinas, there was no furniture, so Rudy and Duke gathered scrap lumber with which to improvise shelving, tables, and chairs. All the newcomers seemed to be doing the same, and all of them were shocked. They had thought that at least there would be beds to sleep in and chairs to sit on.
As evening approached, word spread that although the refrigerators in the mess hall contained food, no one had been assigned to cook. A crowd gathered in front of the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do about it.
Because Rudy had cooked in Salinas, some of the younger men approached him. “Hey, Rudy, how about cookin’ here? We gotta have someone cook the meals.”
Rudy was irritated. Why him? Why a sixteen-year-old kid? He peered into the kitchen. There was dust and sand on the floor and all over the equipment. “Naw, I ain’t going to cook in this heat,” he growled. “No way! Any of you guys want to get stuck in there?”
The young men backed off. But they knew Rudy, and they knew how to get to him. A few minutes later, a group of stern-faced older men appeared and, speaking Japanese now, reopened the case.
“We have to have someone cooking, Rudy. And it’s going to have to be you young guys. So please, will you take the kitchen over?”
This time Rudy said yes. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t one to ignore the wishes of his elders.
Rudy was the right man for the job. He quickly organized a crew and set them to sweeping the place out. When he realized there weren’t enough knives and forks, he sent volunteers out to gather wood and begin whittling chopsticks.
But as he looked at the supplies, his anxiety ratcheted up. How was he going to feed hundreds of hungry people with these meager ingredients? It was mostly going to have to be fried Spam. He wasn’t looking forward to the complaints.
It was nearly midnight by the time everyone was fed. And, instead of complaining, people thanked Rudy. The old men and women nodded and said, “Dōmo arigatō,” thank you very much.
When he finished for the night, Rudy wandered out into the night air. He was proud of what he had done and proud of his people. They were tough, and uncomplaining. As unfair as their situation was, it was nice to feel that he was part of a community and able to make things a little better for his companions.
Young men playing basketball at Poston.
Rudy’s first night of cooking soon turned into a full-time job. The WRA employed those incarcerated in the camps to carry on much of the day-to-day business of feeding, policing, educating, caring for, and cleaning up. The pay was low, but it helped people pay off loans on homes they could no longer live in, or their income taxes, or the bills they received for storing their possessions on the outside.
As people settled into life at Poston, they did everything in their power to maintain some sense of normalcy and to combat the boredom—and anger—that threatened to consume them.
Dust storm at Poston.
They constructed schools, complete with auditoriums, out of adobe bricks they made themselves from mud and straw. They turned spare barracks into Christian and Buddhist churches. They established poultry and hog farms so they could have fresh eggs and meat and irrigated the desert to cultivate crops.
They organized an internal police force and a fire department and ran health clinics, beauty shops, barbershops, and newspapers. They organized Boy Scout troops and PTAs as well as a wide variety of clubs and social activities.
They scraped the sagebrush from the desert to clear baseball diamonds and football fields and set up basketball hoops on the gable ends of barracks. They even smoothed out patches of sand and sank tin cans in them to make “greens” for an improvised desert golf course.
Then they formed sports teams, with leagues and divisions, for baseball, football, basketball, and volleyball. Duke Tokiwa played for Block 213’s basketball team, the Terrors. Rudy was athletic, but he was small, not nearly as big and muscular as Duke. Nevertheless, he threw himself into the games wherever he could. Often these games ended abruptly when blinding and choking dust storms swept in off the desert, sending everyone scurrying for the shelter of the barracks with wet cloths clutched to their faces so they could breathe.
Rudy surprised himself by signing up for dancing lessons. He learned to waltz and jitterbug. He resumed his education at the camp’s high school and was even asked to teach agricultural classes. He began to make friends among the young men with whom he worked and played—and there were a couple in particular he really looked up to.
There was Lloyd Onoye, who came from the same part of Salinas as Rudy. Lloyd was a gentle giant, so powerful that when he grabbed other young men in wrestling matches or tackled them in football games, he sometimes inadvertently squeezed them so hard they passed out. Lloyd was slow to anger, but once during a basketball game he became enraged over a series of foul calls and wound up dragging six other men around the court as they tried to keep him from throttling the referee. Finally, one of them yelled, “If you want to live, Mac, you’d better get out of here!”
