Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 6
There was another major sticking point. Bolton said that every adult in the camps was now required to sign a loyalty oath, whether or not they planned to enlist. Why was that required of them and not of other Americans?
For many of the young men at Poston—and for their sisters, wives, mothers, and fathers, as well—it just didn’t add up.
After the meeting, Rudy and his friends huddled together, arguing about signing up, unable to come to an agreement. They needed to figure it out. Registration would take place at the end of the week, just four days away. Lloyd Onoye called for a meeting of their own. Every young man sixteen and older, he said, should attend.
The next morning, they gathered out in the desert, where a few mesquite trees offered a scant bit of shade. About forty men showed up. They formed a rough circle, some sitting on boulders, some leaning against the twisted black tree trunks.
Then Harry Madokoro stepped into the middle of the circle and got things going. As far as he was concerned, he said, they should all sign up and do it right away, but he wanted to hear what the others thought.
One young man piped up. “Why should we go out, fight for a country that locks us up?” Others nodded their heads in agreement.
Harry got up again and said that he was going to volunteer anyway. It wasn’t a choice, he said. It was a duty. Besides, it was also an opportunity. When the war was over, either they would return from the camps still stigmatized as “Japs” or they would return as Americans who had served, maybe even as war heroes.
Lloyd Onoye said he was in, too. Most of the younger men were still skeptical.
Finally, Rudy stood up. He was the youngest there, and in some ways he was more “Japanese” than many of the others, being fluent in the language and having gone to school in Japan. But he wasn’t Japanese. He was an American. An angry one. That’s what it came down to for him now. He deserved respect. His father and his mother deserved respect. His sister deserved respect. And if he had to fight to earn respect, he’d fight.
Private Rudy Tokiwa.
“Say nobody volunteers out of the camps,” Rudy said. “What can Roosevelt say? Well, he can say that we’re more loyal to Japan than the United States, that’s what.”
A consensus slowly formed, and by the time the meeting broke up, nearly every man there had committed to registering by the end of the week.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
It couldn’t be put off any longer. A letter arrived informing Fred Shiosaki that he was to report to Fort Douglas in Utah for induction into the army. He waited until his parents were together in the kitchen, then sauntered into the room and told them the news as casually as he could.
His father stared at him for a moment. Then he exploded in a torrent of Japanese curses that Fred couldn’t understand. He went on and on. Fred was afraid he was going to hit him. He’d never seen him so angry.
But the more his father yelled, the more determined Fred became. He was eighteen now, and he could make his own decisions. He didn’t need anyone’s approval, not even his parents’, much as he respected them.
Private Fred Shiosaki.
A few days later, his sister, Blanche, drove him to the train station. Kisaburo refused to go, refused even to say goodbye. Weeks later, Private First Class Shiosaki was back in Hillyard, wearing a crisp new khaki uniform. The army had conducted his physical, given him his inoculations, run some aptitude tests, and told him it would be a few more weeks before he’d get orders to report to basic training in Mississippi. To fill the interval, Fred went back to work in the laundry.
But when the day came to leave, Kisaburo Shiosaki drove his son to the station. As the train pulled in, he took Fred’s hand, shook it, looked him in the eye, and said, simply, “Come back healthy.”[31]
Then, without another word, he turned around and walked away.
Soon after that, a service flag with two blue stars appeared in the downstairs front window of the Hillyard Laundry. A tradition begun in World War I, the flag indicated the number of family members serving in the military. If the worst happened and the family member was killed, the blue star would be replaced with one of gold.
Chapter 10
Gordon Hirabayashi continued to wage his own quiet war on behalf of his principles. Early on the morning of February 12, 1943, he walked out of the King County Jail and onto Seattle’s bustling Third Avenue. His attorneys had taken his case to the Supreme Court and organized bail so he could live in Spokane while waiting for a ruling on his case.
Gordon found lodgings in Spokane with some fellow Quakers, then went to meet his principal mentor, Floyd Schmoe—a Quaker activist as well as an accomplished mountaineer and marine biologist.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Schmoe resigned from a faculty position at the University of Washington to devote his time to championing the rights of incarcerated Issei and Nisei. From the beginning, he had been one of Gordon’s fiercest defenders and advocates.
Schmoe’s daughter, Esther, a nursing student and a Quaker activist like her father, was a vibrant young woman with blond curls, a sprinkle of freckles, and luminous blue eyes. She was also intelligent, sociable, and brimming over with youthful hope and idealism.
Esther visited Gordon weekly while he was in jail, first in the company of her father and then increasingly by herself—just her and Gordon sitting on cold metal benches, talking through the bars, sharing their ideas about life and religion, and falling in love.
Now Gordon helped Esther and her father set up the new American Friends Service Committee office, and the three went to work trying to ease the burdens of Japanese American families in the Pacific Northwest—both those in the camps and those outside the exclusion zone.
One day, Esther was in a Spokane laundry, inquiring about possible jobs for people she was trying to help. Gordon waited for her in the car. At first, all went well. The owner had several positions and was ready to hire—until he found out that Esther was representing Japanese Americans. He exploded. “Hell no! We don’t want to take a chance hiring Japanese!”[32]
When Esther got back to the car, she wept for five minutes straight. Until then, she had not quite realized what she was up against. Gordon, comforting her, hadn’t realized how different the world looked through her eyes.
For him, that kind of treatment was nothing new. Just recently, he’d been traveling with a white friend in Idaho when they decided to stop at a restaurant in a dusty little farm town called Caldwell. They failed to notice the sign in the front window—No Japs.
A waitress came over and took their order, but half an hour went by, and no food appeared. Finally, the waitress edged back to the table and asked Gordon, “Are you Japanese?”
“No, I’m American. I’m of Japanese ancestry, but I’m American.”
“Oh, well, if you’re of Japanese ancestry, we can’t serve you.”
Gordon asked to speak to the manager. The man seemed nervous, almost apologetic. “I’m forced to do it,” he said. “If I don’t, I’ll have people boycotting me, walking out.”
Gordon didn’t get angry, and he didn’t argue. Instead, he proposed an experiment. “Well, you have an empty table right near the entrance. Let me test whether you’re correct or not . . . If anybody comes in, sees me, and leaves, I’ll pay for an average meal so that you wouldn’t have lost that.”
The man hesitated. Gordon persisted, logically and patiently making his case. “I want to test this,” he said. “I’m curious myself.”
The manager agreed warily to the deal, but only if Gordon sat at the counter, not near the door. Gordon and his friend ate as slowly as they could and managed to run another hour off the clock. Nothing happened. No one got up and left. No one seemed to even notice. Gordon paid up, and they left. A few weeks later, Gordon’s friend wrote to him from Idaho. “Say, that guy took that sign off.”[33]
For weeks, Gordon had been growing more impatient to know that his case had been resolved by the Supreme Court. He had no doubt that he would win. The racial rationale behind the curfew was so obvious, the lack of due process leading to the incarcerations so apparent, that neither could possibly fit within the framework of the Constitution.
When the court finally rendered its opinion in Hirabayashi v. United States, on June 21, Gordon only learned of it from the newspapers. What he read there was crushing. The justices, acting unanimously, backed the government’s assertion that wartime conditions justified the racist policy. Gordon couldn’t believe it. He later wrote, “I thought that the raison d’être for the Supreme Court was to uphold the Constitution. I didn’t realize the extent to which World War II hysteria had swept up everyone.”[34]
Now all he could do was keep busy working with his Quaker colleagues and wait for someone to show up and take him back to jail.
It wasn’t until September that a big black sedan pulled up and an FBI agent approached Gordon and asked him if he knew where Gordon Hirabayashi was.
“I am he,” Gordon replied. “What took you so long?”[35]
When Gordon arrived downtown, there was a hitch. He had agreed to accept a longer sentence—ninety days rather than sixty—so he’d be eligible to do his time in a federal work camp rather than in another crowded jail. That way, he figured, he’d at least be outdoors and doing something productive.
The FBI agents told him that wasn’t going to work. The closest work camp was Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, well within the exclusion zone, which legally Gordon could not enter. The next closest was in Tucson, Arizona, and the government wasn’t about to pay to send him there. He’d have to serve his time in the Spokane County Jail.
Gordon unleashed his customary firm, implacable logic. He pointed out that the government was violating its agreement with him. If they couldn’t afford to send him to Tucson, that wasn’t his fault. Why not let him get himself to Arizona? Supposing he just hitchhiked?
The agent in charge was surprised by the proposal, but Gordon wore him down with his calm but relentless manner of arguing. Finally the agent shrugged and approved the idea, and Gordon set out for Arizona.
Traveling first to Idaho and then through eastern Oregon into Utah and Nevada, he trudged for endless miles alongside remote highways, his thumb stuck out, as cars and trucks sped by. Sometimes drivers slowed down, saw that he was Asian, and sped up again. Occasionally, someone took him a few miles down the road.
A farmer driving a truck picked Gordon up, studied him for a while out of the corner of his eye as he drove, and finally said, “You’re a Chinese, right?”
“No, I’m an American.”
“I know that, but you’re a Chinese American, aren’t you?”
“My parents came from Japan.”
The farmer chewed on that for a few moments, then replied, “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have picked you up.”
Gordon offered to get out of the truck, but the man grudgingly kept driving. After a long silence, they began to chat, then to talk in earnest. Gordon explained why he was on his way to prison, what he believed in, how proud he was to be an American, and what the Constitution meant to him. The farmer ended up inviting Gordon to his home, drawing him a warm bath, feeding him dinner, and then driving him to a well-traveled road so he could continue on his way.
When Gordon finally got to Tucson, he walked into the office of the local federal marshal. The marshal was perplexed by the sudden appearance of this strange young man. At first, he tried to get rid of him. “What’s your name? We don’t have any orders to take you in, so you might as well go home.”
Gordon wasn’t having any of that. “It took me a couple of weeks to get down here, and I’d go home, but you’d probably find those orders and I would have to do this all again.”[36] He suggested the marshal make some phone calls.
The marshal told him to come back that evening, and Gordon wandered outside into the blistering heat. He found an air-conditioned movie theater and settled in to watch a show. By the time he returned, the marshal had made the calls, decided Gordon was in fact a legitimate lawbreaker, and agreed to incarcerate him.
A deputy drove Gordon out into the foothills and delivered him to the Catalina Federal Honor Camp. There, inside the gates, standing silently among scraggly pines, mesquite trees, and rock formations aglow in an Arizona sunset, stood a small contingent of inmates who had heard that the famous Gordon Hirabayashi was coming. They wanted to welcome him personally.
Chapter 11
That April, Kats and the Nisei soldiers from Hawaiʻi arrived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. During the three-day train ride across the country, they were allowed off the train only twice—in the middle of the night and in open countryside where no one would see them.
At Camp Shelby, just south of town, they were assigned hutments—long, narrow sheds set up off the ground. The spring weather in Mississippi was freezing by Hawaiian standards, and they huddled next to coal-burning stoves or lay on their metal cots, shivering under green wool army blankets.
The water in the showers had only one temperature—cold. The roofs were leaky. The latrines were open ditches, and they stank. The food—mutton, boiled potatoes, mushy peas, pork and beans, creamed beef on toast—was unfamiliar. Most of the men, used to eating fresh fruit, fresh fish, and rice, found nearly all of it vile. By the end of the first week, some of them could be found crouched behind the hutments, homesick and weeping.
But the biggest obstacle wasn’t the living conditions, or the food, or homesickness. It was each other.
The men from Hawaiʻi weren’t the first Nisei troops to arrive in Shelby. Another group of Nisei, from the mainland, was there before them. This first group had already gone through basic training, and they occupied nearly all the noncommissioned officer positions. They were the corporals, the sergeants, the staff sergeants.
The men from Hawaiʻi found themselves having to take orders from men who looked like them, who had surnames like theirs, whose ancestry was the same as theirs, but who spoke and acted as if they were from an entirely different world.
Then more mainland men showed up from the concentration camps out west, and an already tense situation got worse. Fistfights broke out all over camp. The islanders called the mainlanders “kotonks,” after the hollow sound a coconut makes when it is hit. They claimed that’s what the mainlanders’ heads sounded like when they hit them. The mainlanders started referring to the men from Hawaiʻi as “Buddhaheads,” though no one on either side was sure what that meant.
They couldn’t even have a conversation without it turning into a fight. The men from Hawaiʻi spoke a hybrid language, Hawaiian Pidgin, which sounded coarse or even ignorant to the mainlanders. It was neither. It was a warm, familiar language that combined words and expressions from English, Portuguese, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and Spanish.
When a Buddhahead told a kotonk, “You go stay go,” he would become irritated when the mainlander didn’t understand that he was being told to “go ahead and leave.” And the mainlander would be irritated because he just plain didn’t understand.
At first, many of the mainlanders let their contempt show. George Goto, from Colorado, thought the men from Hawaiʻi didn’t even speak or understand English. Chester Tanaka, from St. Louis, thought they were “savages.” The mainlanders laughed at the way the islanders talked. But laughing was the worst thing they could do—guaranteed to set off a melee.
Language wasn’t the only problem. The mainlanders who volunteered from the concentration camps arrived angry, determined to prove themselves as patriotic Americans. They were clean-cut and respectful of authority—as their parents had taught them to be. The Buddhaheads, on the other hand, were happy-go-lucky and approached life as an adventure. They carried ukuleles and guitars wherever they went, danced and sang whenever they could, and were warmly affectionate with one another. They had grown up together and thought of one another as belonging to the same ʻohana—the same big family.
And they tended to see authority—particularly any kind of authority that seemed designed to hold them down—as something to be defied at every turn.
This defiance came from a deep place—from their own and their Issei parents’ experience in Hawaiʻi. They knew what their parents had endured at the hands of the mostly white and powerful owners and managers on the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. They also knew what they themselves had experienced growing up in a racially and economically stratified society. And they weren’t about to put up with a bunch of Japanese American men their own age who sounded and acted like the white bosses back home.
Shortly after arriving at Shelby, Kats Miho was assigned to the 442nd’s dedicated artillery unit, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. He spent a lot of his time in classrooms, learning the complex geometry and calculus required to accurately fire the unit’s big howitzer cannons.
This did nothing, though, to insulate him from the war between the kotonks and the Buddhaheads. He already knew many of the men from Maui, and he was as comfortable speaking Hawaiian Pidgin as standard English.
But Kats occupied the middle ground. He tended to hang out with other former university students, whether from the University of Hawaiʻi or schools on the mainland. And he always preferred to fight with strong, logical arguments rather than with his fists.
