Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 7
Hula at Shelby.
One of the university students Kats grew close to, also assigned to the 522nd, was George Oiye from Montana. George had been born in a cabin in the woods, the nearest store twelve hours away on snowshoes. Like most Montana boys, he grew up with a hunting rifle in one hand and a fishing rod in the other.
George had been popular in high school, playing quarterback on the football team and mingling easily with the nearly all-white student body. He dreamed of becoming an aviator in the army and began taking engineering classes.
Then came Pearl Harbor.
George tried to enlist, but, like Fred Shiosaki, he was told that he was an “enemy alien.” He persisted, determined to get into the army and fly airplanes. He argued his case to some of his professors, who went repeatedly to the adjutant general of Montana State University’s ROTC program, lobbying on George’s behalf.
Finally, one day in early 1943, his earnestness and his popularity on campus paid off. The adjutant general called George into his office and told him that if he could get five prominent white townspeople to vouch for his loyalty, he could enlist in the army and train as an aviator.
It seemed terribly unfair to George that he should have to have white people vouch for him, but he quickly secured the recommendations. The town threw him a going-away party, and soon he was on his way to Fort Douglas in Utah to be processed into the service.
It was only after he was sworn in that someone told him he wasn’t going to be flying any planes. Instead, he was to report to a place called Camp Shelby for training as an infantryman.
George was shocked and angry. He felt betrayed.
Things only got worse when he got to Mississippi. Having been in the ROTC program, George knew how to wear his uniform properly. He kept his shoes polished and his shirts buttoned to the collar. He snapped to attention when officers entered a room. He made up his bunk according to regulations.
The men from Hawaiʻi, who went barefoot as often as they could and wore their uniform shirts open to the waist when it was hot, hated George’s spit-and-polish ways and beat him up every chance they got.
George needed friends, preferably those who spoke like the men from Hawaiʻi. He gravitated toward Kats, and Kats readily offered both his friendship and his protection. It was a friendship that would only grow stronger as time passed and both men experienced the hazards of war.
Chapter 12
Despite the continuing conflict, that spring, as the weather warmed and the dogwoods blossomed in the woods around them, the Nisei men learned the fundamentals of soldiering. Wearing uniforms that were often too large for them and helmets that sometimes hung down below their ears, they drilled for endless hours on the parade grounds.
They ran obstacle courses, dug the small defensive pits known as foxholes, endured early morning bed inspections, disassembled and reassembled their rifles over and over again, cleaned out latrines, and peeled vast numbers of potatoes.
Then it began to rain, and the red Mississippi dust turned into red Mississippi mud. The men were made to get down on their bellies and crawl through it, clutching their rifles, wriggling under barbed wire as someone fired machine-gun rounds over their heads.
Then, on June 15, the 100th Infantry Battalion—another unit of all-Nisei soldiers from Hawaiʻi who had enlisted or been drafted before Pearl Harbor—returned to Shelby from maneuvers. For Kats and many of the 442nd’s Buddhaheads, it was a joyous occasion.
Young men who had known one another as boys on the islands renewed old friendships and exchanged family news. They got out ukuleles and sat on the steps of their hutments singing island songs. To the 442nd men, the 100th soldiers were like big brothers, whom they looked up to with respect and a measure of awe. They were mostly a few years older and had been in the service for at least a year and a half. They walked and talked with a certain amount of swagger and confidence.
By midsummer, the men of the 442nd had completed their basic training and were heading off on their first furloughs. Many of the Buddhaheads had been given large stashes of cash by their parents, who were eager for their sons to have a good time before they went off to war. They climbed onto trains and buses bound for New Orleans and New York City in high spirits.
The kotonks, on the other hand, were not so flush. Most of them were sending money from their paychecks to their parents in the camps to purchase small comforts and conveniences, and most of them, as soon as they had leave, headed for the camps to visit their families behind barbed wire.
Not everyone in the camps was pleased to see Nisei in uniform. Some of their fathers and brothers and uncles took them to one side and told them they were fools for enlisting, for being tools of an American government that was oppressing their people. For the most part, the young soldiers remained steadfast, convinced of the rightness of their actions.
But they headed back to Camp Shelby disturbed and angry, having been reminded of what their families were enduring in the camps.
Refreshed from their furloughs, the Buddhaheads could not understand why the kotonks were always so serious. The kotonks thought the men from Hawaiʻi frivolous and undisciplined, clueless about what was going on in the country. As morale continued to spiral downward and the fighting continued, the senior officer corps wondered whether the Japanese American soldiers would ever come together as an effective fighting unit. Should they just dissolve the regiment?
Nearly all the 442nd’s commissioned officers were white, with only a small number of Japanese Americans in leadership positions, mostly doctors and chaplains. To the Buddhaheads, the army’s racial hierarchy—white men at the top, everybody else working for them—mirrored the way in which the plantations back home were run. To the kotonks, it mirrored the way the camps where their families were incarcerated were run.
But as they got to know them, both the kotonks and the Buddhaheads began to warm to their officers. The fact was that most of the 442nd’s white officers made a deliberate choice to join the unit. They wanted to go into battle with Japanese Americans, and they were prepared to die with them.
The notion that these white officers would voluntarily share the hazards of war with them impressed the Nisei. And before long it was clear that the respect and goodwill were mutual.
The commander of the 442nd was Colonel Charles Wilbur Pence. Short, blunt-faced, and tough as a rooster, Pence made it clear right from the start of basic training that the men were in for a rough time. Then he sat down and penned a heartfelt letter to each of their mothers: “You have given a soldier to the Army of the United States. He has arrived here safely, and I am happy to have him in my command . . . We shall make a glorious record for the Japanese Americans in our country.”[37]
It was the “we” that mattered to the men. It came through in everything Pence did and said. He made it clear that he personally would be leading them into battle, putting his life on the line along with theirs. He seldom pulled rank, played baseball on the camp diamond with them, and enjoyed chatting with them in the mess hall. Pence believed in them and in what they were trying to do. And, before long, they believed in him.
In August, the 100th packed their duffel bags, said their alohas, and left Shelby, bound for North Africa, Italy, and the war.
The 442nd men were sad to see them go. Most had finished basic training by now and faced testing and field trials to prove their competency in everything from marksmanship to physical fitness. Almost without exception, they excelled, with 98 percent of them earning passing scores—the highest average in the entire Third Army that summer.
In early September, some of the army’s top officers arrived for a formal review. In full battle uniforms, amid the clashing of cymbals and the blaring of brass, the Nisei soldiers—infantrymen, engineers, medics, and artillerymen—unfurled the Stars and Stripes, hoisted their regimental colors, and marched past their officers in tight, crisp formations. As the last company of the “Go for Broke” regiment—as they had begun to call themselves—stepped off the field, Pence turned to a reporter from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and said, with a jut to his jaw and a glint in his eye, “I’ll take these men into battle without hesitation.”[38]
The fact was, Pence was coming to love these young men. But he was still struggling to get them to stop fighting each other. He had demoted men for fighting. He’d even threatened to disband the entire outfit. Nothing had worked.
When two Japanese American chaplains arrived at Camp Shelby, Pence gave them the urgent task of finding a way forward.
Both Chaplain Hiro Higuchi and Chaplain Masao Yamada were from Hawaiʻi. They had watched with admiration but deep concern when thousands of island men signed up to serve, and they both decided they needed to accompany these men to war, to watch out for them on the battlefield.
It was Hiro Higuchi who found a solution to the conflict.
Higuchi noticed that the Buddhaheads were always talking about what their homecoming after the war would be like: the parades, the lūʻaus, the leis hung around their necks, home-cooked meals, falling asleep in their own beds to the sound of pounding surf and rustling palms.
Most of the mainlanders, many of whom had come out of the camps, had nothing like that to look forward to. For some of them, there might not even be homes to return to. At best there would be a scramble to find land to farm, a struggle to rent houses in segregated neighborhoods, and the huge effort required to help parents start new businesses, all amid the continued scorn of many of their neighbors. At worst, there might be a return to the misery of camps.
Higuchi realized that the men from Hawaiʻi had no idea what the mainlanders were dealing with. Some of them had never even heard about the concentration camps. Perhaps, he figured, if the Buddhaheads saw the camps for themselves, they might begin to understand the mainlanders and ease up on them.
He went to Pence and proposed a series of organized trips. Pence immediately agreed. Send as many of the men from Hawaiʻi as you can, he said, especially the leaders and the opinion formers. Kats Miho was a natural choice. So was Daniel Inouye.
They left early in the morning. As the buses rolled north through a vast sea of white cotton, the ukuleles and guitars came out, and the men began to sing and horse around. Everyone was in high spirits. They had no idea where they were going.
Then they came around a bend in the road and saw what appeared to be some kind of military camp up ahead. They had arrived at the Jerome Relocation Center, in southeastern Arkansas.
Kats piled off the bus with the others and found himself looking through tall fencing at row upon row of flimsy barracks made from tar paper and pinewood. Guard towers stood at the gate and on the four corners of the compound.
And the guns in the towers were pointed inward, at the people moving around inside the fence. Japanese and Japanese American people, like them. Realization slowly dawned on the men. Kats was shocked. They were all shocked.
Kats couldn’t believe what he was seeing. These were American citizens, like himself. There were women and small children—girls playing hopscotch, a boy bouncing a rubber ball against a wall. A pregnant woman passed, carrying a basket of laundry. Middle-aged men sat idle on the steps of a barracks, staring blankly back at them. Their expressions weren’t frightened or angry so much as dull, impassive, as if they had given up, had nothing to look forward to.
Most of the families did their best to welcome the Nisei soldiers. They had saved up their rations of food and used their communal kitchens to prepare small feasts. They presented gifts—mostly kobu, traditional wood carvings they had made from the twisted roots of oak and swamp cypress trees. They offered to sleep outside so the soldiers could sleep in the barracks, but the men said they’d do fine sleeping on the bus or in the mess hall.
On the bus ride back to Mississippi, nobody pulled out musical instruments. For the most part, there was silence. The men wanted time to think about what they had seen. They could not help but wonder if they would have volunteered for the army out of such a place.
When they got back to Shelby, they told the other men from Hawaiʻi to go and see the camps for themselves. And with each busload that returned, more Buddhaheads began to ease up on more kotonks.
After visiting one of the camps, one of the Buddhaheads approached Rudy Tokiwa, eager to tell him about his visit. “Hey, Rudy, all you mainland guys. Your families in places like that?”
“Well, majority of ’em, yes.”
“Well, how much money these guys gettin’ paid to be in there?”
“They don’t get paid.”
“Hey, you kotonks good up in the head, yeah? You be buddies with everybody?”[39]
The war between the kotonks and the Buddhaheads was finally beginning to wind down.
Chapter 13
Over time, incarcerated Issei, such as Katsuichi Miho, were brought before hearing boards. Some were given permission to join their families in the concentration camps. Most of the rest were moved from one military facility to another as the government tried to figure out the most cost-effective way to keep them—along with increasing numbers of Italian, German, and Japanese prisoners of war (POWs)—behind barbed wire.
When Kats Miho and his brother Katsuaki enlisted, the Department of Justice suggested that their father might be eligible to be released into the legal custody of his sons. But Katsuichi refused to leave unless roughly twenty other Maui Issei incarcerated with him were also allowed to go home to Hawaiʻi.
So, instead of being released, he was moved to Fort Missoula, in Montana, in June 1943.
The air in Montana was fresh and cool. At night, brilliant sprays of stars lit up a vast and utterly black sky. By day, from almost anywhere in camp, there were spectacular views of the jagged Bitterroot Mountains.
But boredom and tedium filled the Issei men’s days. With little else to do, they collected and patiently polished by hand the stones they dug from the camp’s soil—mostly agates, jasper, and jadeite—before carving them into figurines, ashtrays, jewelry, soap dishes. The work passed the time and soothed the soul.
Sometimes, the men were allowed to fish in the Bitterroot River that flowed through a corner of the camp. They caught trout and whitefish, which they sliced into sashimi, or ate fried, or sometimes smoked to send to relatives on the outside.
Katsuichi began to feel that perhaps his fate was not quite so grim as he had feared when he was led away from his home at gunpoint. He missed Ayano and his children desperately. He missed the Miho Hotel and his busy life in Kahului. He worried about his daughters living in Japan. He still thought of himself as Japanese, but he was proud that two of his sons had volunteered for the US Army. He never doubted that they should serve their country. That was the way of the samurai, after all: to faithfully serve those to whom one owed loyalty, even at the cost of one’s life.
So now, here in the mountains of Montana, he would wait out the war as patiently as he could and let younger men settle the dispute between nations. He would gather and polish colorful stones like the other old men and look forward to the day when his family would be reunited.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
As they graduated from basic training, some of the Nisei soldiers from Camp Shelby were sent to Alabama to guard German POWs captured in North Africa. The Germans had eagerly volunteered to dig peanuts on private farms—largely to escape the boredom of sitting in camps. With thousands of Black farm laborers serving in the military, Alabama’s peanut farmers were glad to have the help.
In many rural communities, particularly in the South, the German prisoners—all white men—were not only tolerated but sometimes even welcomed, sharing Sunday dinner with local families, or eating at lunch counters and drinking from water fountains where Black Americans were not allowed to eat or drink. The locals often seemed more at ease with the German prisoners than the Japanese Americans guarding them, even though not long before those same Germans had been doing their best to kill Americans.
But guarding the Germans proved to be an exceptionally easy duty for the Nisei soldiers. By and large, the POWs were friendly, easygoing, and happy to be out of the war. They hadn’t the slightest interest in escaping.
The Nisei sat in the shade under trees watching the Germans dig peanuts. Many didn’t even bother to load their rifles. At least once, a soldier handed his loaded rifle to a POW so he could shoot some crows that were gobbling the peanuts as fast as they could dig them.
Among the men guarding Germans in Alabama was Kats’s brother Katsuaki. One September night, he and roughly twenty other guards were returning to their base after visiting a movie theater when their truck overturned as the driver took a bend in the road a little too fast.
The soldiers were catapulted from the back of the truck. Some landed in the grass beside the road. Some slammed into the asphalt roadway. More than a dozen were injured, and two were killed instantly: Private Shosei Kutaka and Corporal Katsuaki Miho.
No news could have been harder for Kats to bear. He was exceptionally close to Katsuaki and looked up to him as little brothers often look up to big brothers. He was devastated.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
As the fall of 1943 slid toward winter and the weather cooled again in Mississippi, the men of the 442nd spent little time at Camp Shelby. They were mostly out in the woods now, living in pup tents or sleeping under the stars on beds of pine boughs or in dank foxholes.
Fred Shiosaki’s feet hurt nearly all the time, but he was so fit he could march all day with fifty pounds of gear on his back and hardly break a sweat. Rudy Tokiwa slogged along, uncomplaining, lean, lithe, and tougher than ever, grateful for the time he had spent on long marches as a boy in Japan.
