Facing the Mountain (Adapted for Young Readers), page 8
More and more, the men grew comfortable in their individual jobs. More and more, they worked together seamlessly, moving through the woods not as individuals but as squads and platoons, as part of something larger than themselves.
They didn’t realize it yet, but they were becoming one of the most proficient and deadly fighting forces in the Third Army.
And, for the first time, they began to have fun in the woods. In their free time, they foraged for wild persimmons and pecans. At night, they lay on their backs, staring at the stars and talking story. They played practical jokes on each other, and particularly on their officers.
More and more, they were speaking the same language. Men who’d grown up in the American West surrounded by sagebrush—like George Oiye and Fred Shiosaki—now sounded as if they’d grown up on Hawaiʻi surrounded by cane fields. Hawaiian Pidgin, the language that had at first divided them so sharply, was becoming their shared language, knitting the 442nd together, defining the contours of their identity.
Almost every night, the men from Hawaiʻi pulled out their ukuleles and guitars and sang island songs with sweet voices, their words floating improbably through the night air over moonlit bayous.
And now there was something new. The kotonks were joining in.
As they sat around their campfires, they began to talk about what was to come. What the war would be like when they finally got into it. What it would feel like to be wounded or to die on the battlefield. What they would suffer or what their parents or siblings would suffer when they got the bad news. They worried about that.
But most of all they worried that the war might end before they got into battle. That would be worse than dying, they agreed. They would lose forever the chance to prove their loyalty and earn Japanese Americans their rightful place in American society.
They talked about what was happening in Europe, where Germany, ruled by the fascist Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, had in 1939 and 1940 invaded its neighbors, bringing about war with Britain and France. They talked about why that mattered in America. They came back again and again to what they had learned in high school about the American Constitution and the principles of democracy: personal liberty, equality, free speech, the right to vote for their leaders. They talked about whether those things could be said to exist in a country that imprisoned their families.
They also talked about the values their Japanese parents had taught them. Fred talked about the expectation in his family that he and his siblings would always respect their parents’ authority and uphold the family’s honor.
Kats talked about the samurai movies he used to watch as a boy and how he had learned from them the eight virtues of Bushido, the warrior’s code: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, honesty, honor, loyalty, and self-control. He talked about his father’s emphasis on giri, social obligation, and balancing it with ninjō, human warmth and compassion.
Rudy talked about his boyhood military training in Japan, about the idea of gaman—enduring the seemingly unendurable quietly and with patience—and about the spirit of Yamato-damashii, sticking together no matter what, fighting for your group rather than for yourself.
As they talked these things over among themselves, something solid and enduring began to take shape—a common identity that was both American and Japanese, something that, in the not-too-distant future, would carry them through unimaginable hardships and terrors.
Finally, on April 22, 1944, the order came, and the men were assigned to their battalions and companies. Fred and Rudy were both placed in the Third Battalion’s K Company. Rudy was thrilled that his mentor from Poston, Harry Madokoro, was also in K Company. He found the prospect of having Harry close by reassuring. His other buddy from Poston, Lloyd Onoye, was in I Company.
On the morning of May 1, a warm, breezy day on the Chesapeake Bay, the roughly forty-one hundred men and officers of the 442nd RCT filed up gangplanks onto gray-bellied Liberty ships. A brass band played, and Red Cross volunteers handed the men doughnuts and a form letter from President Roosevelt, telling them that they bore with them “the hope, the gratitude, the confidence, and the prayers of your family, your fellow citizens, and your President.”[40]
Some of the men realized that it was Lei Day back home in Hawaiʻi. Ever since 1927, May 1st had been celebrated on the islands by the making and sharing of leis. With no flowers to be found on board, the boys from Hawaiʻi made off with crates of oranges from the galley, which they carefully peeled in long spirals. They hung the peels around each other’s necks and around the necks of the mainlanders as well, wishing them and one another much aloha and feasting on the oranges.
At about the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, the sun was setting over the horizon beside the once-lovely Italian seaside town of Anzio, thirty-one miles south of Rome. As the light faded, Nisei soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion crawled from foxholes and from bunkers in the rubble of what had until recently been people’s homes.
They had not forgotten what day it was, either. Cautiously, they began to search for flowers, climbing over piles of masonry, circling ragged shell craters, trying to ignore the stench of the dead bodies buried under the ruins, as they collected the small, blood-red poppies of an Italian spring.
Chapter 14
The law wasn’t yet finished with Gordon Hirabayashi, nor was Gordon finished with the law. As the 442nd made its way across the Atlantic, he was waiting to be arrested again.
After he was released from the Catalina Federal Honor Camp in Tucson in December 1943, having served his ninety-day sentence, the government instructed him to report to the district attorney on his return to Spokane. Gordon decided he would ignore these instructions. As far as he knew, no other prisoner released from federal custody was required to report to a local DA. Once again, the requirement seemed to have been imposed on him solely because of his ancestry.
He went back to working with Esther and Floyd Schmoe, aiding displaced and incarcerated Japanese American families.
Then, in February 1944, he received a notification from the draft board in Seattle. After suspending the draft for Japanese Americans shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Selective Service had now decided to resume it.
Although Gordon, as a Quaker, was a conscientious objector, he, like all Nisei men of draft age, was sent a form titled “Statement of United States Citizens of Japanese Ancestry.” The form required Gordon to disclose, among other things, any foreign languages he spoke, any clubs or associations he belonged to, his religion, and any magazines he subscribed to. It also required him to provide five references from people unrelated to him. Finally, it required him to declare his loyalty to the United States.
Gordon was deeply loyal to the United States and to its constitution. That’s why he felt he had no other choice than to refuse to complete a form required only of Japanese Americans. He returned it to the draft board, pointing out that its very title made it discriminatory.
“This questionnaire, which I am returning to you unfilled, is an outright violation of both the Christian and the American principles of justice and democracy . . . The form is based purely on ancestry . . . I believe if I were to fill in this form I would be cooperating with a policy of race discrimination.”[41]
To save everyone time, he included his address in Spokane so that they would know where to find him to arrest him.
Gordon was far from the only young Nisei man for whom the renewal of the draft and the required oaths of allegiance provoked a crisis of conscience. For hundreds, particularly those incarcerated in the camps, the questions again arose: Why should they be compelled to fight for a nation that removed them from their homes and denied them the rights and liberties afforded to other citizens? Why, if they were to serve, were they to be relegated to a segregated unit?
Most men in most of the camps complied with the orders to report. But others decided they would refuse to serve so long as their families were incarcerated. Thirty-two men refused at the Minidoka camp, thirty-one at Amache, five at Topaz, 106 at Poston, eighty-five at Heart Mountain, and twenty-seven at Tule Lake. Federal marshals descended on the camps and hauled the draft resisters off to local jails to await trial.
Before Gordon could be taken into custody again, there was something important he wanted to do first. He and Esther had decided to get married. On Saturday, July 29, 1944, with Gordon wearing a gray suit and a white carnation in his buttonhole and Esther in a simple white dress and holding an orchid corsage, they joined nearly two hundred of their friends, family members, and fellow Quakers in a church in Spokane.
After a period of silent worship, when Gordon and Esther felt the moment was right, they rose, held hands, put rings on each other’s fingers, and declared their commitment to each other, to the Holy Spirit, and to the community assembled with them in the church.
Esther and Gordon Hirabayashi’s wedding photograph.
As they walked out of the church to have some photographs taken, a reporter approached them. This was something Gordon had been worried about. He had hoped to keep the wedding out of the news, but they had little choice but to answer the reporter’s questions.
Esther asserted, as she had many times, that Gordon’s race was irrelevant to her: “I love him . . . He is a sweet and loving character . . . Gordon is as American as I am.” On Gordon’s arrest and impending incarceration, she said, “He simply refused to fill out the form because it was sent only to Japanese-Americans and is discriminatory.”[42]
The reporter seemed sympathetic, and his story cast the news in a favorable light: “The barriers of race, national enmity, and criminal charges went down before love and Quaker brotherhood with the marriage here of an attractive young white girl to a Japanese-American youth.”[43]
The news was also picked up by the Associated Press, and a shorter, sparer account, emphasizing that Esther was an “attractive white girl,” spread quickly across the country and around the world. The story attracted wide attention, largely because in some states it was still illegal for people of different races to marry.
Within a few days, hate mail began to fill the newlyweds’ mailbox. Most of the letters were anonymous, and most of the venom was directed at Esther, whom the writers repeatedly labeled a “traitor to her race.”[44] There were crude drawings of Gordon with absurdly slanted eyes, a pernicious racial stereotype, accompanied by vicious racial slurs.
There were anonymous phone calls, too, always for Esther, voices hissing at her in the dark. Sometimes she argued with the callers, but usually she had to hang up on them and try to compose herself.
One letter of a very different sort arrived. It was addressed to both of them and was signed by the sender. It came from an American GI fighting the Japanese in the jungles of the Philippines. “I’m risking my life out here for the rights—you know, the values of our American citizenship and way of life. And that includes your safety and enjoyment. And I’m contributing this to your future.” Enclosed was fifty dollars.[45]
Five months later, after spending Christmas with Esther—now newly pregnant with twins—Gordon was sent to federal prison at McNeil Island, Washington.
He was not the only Nisei confined at McNeil Island that December. Through the spring, summer, and fall of that year, nearly three hundred draft resisters from the camps had gone to trial in various federal courtrooms on charges of violating the Selective Service Act. Their trials unfolded in a number of different ways but concluded almost universally with convictions.
Sixty-three Nisei resisters from Heart Mountain were tried as a group. After addressing them in a dismissive and racist way as “you Jap boys” on the opening day of the trial and rejecting their constitutional arguments, Judge T. Blake Kennedy made short work of convicting all of them and sentencing them to three-year prison terms.[46]
And yet the point these young defendants were trying to make, about the fundamental injustice of their situation, did not go entirely unheeded. Many of the trials were held in communities in which the citizenry was overwhelmingly hostile to anyone of Japanese ancestry. One of these communities was the logging town of Eureka, in the redwoods of far northern California, where there was a long and often vicious history of anti-Asian sentiment. There, Judge Louis E. Goodman presided over the trial of twenty-seven Nisei draft resisters from the Tule Lake camp. Goodman was troubled by the notion of trying American citizens who had been transported to his courtroom from what he termed a “concentration center.” How, he wondered, could they be considered free agents over their own affairs when their fundamental rights as citizens had been stripped from them?
Goodman waited until the last moments of the trial to reveal his thinking, but when he did, it was stinging: “It is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty, and then, while so under duress and restraint, be compelled to serve in the armed forces, or be prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion.”[47]
With that, in front of a stunned courtroom, he dismissed all the charges. The Nisei resisters were free—but free only to return to the Tule Lake concentration camp.
Chapter 15
The vessels carrying the 442nd across the Atlantic and into the war joined a much larger convoy, and now more than ninety ships surrounded theirs, extending all the way to the horizon in every direction. Navy destroyers and cruisers on the convoy’s flanks protected the ships from the German submarines they all knew might be lurking below the waves.
By day, porpoises cruised alongside. From time to time, whales surfaced, exhaling long, sonorous plumes of spray. Enormous jellyfish, white and pink, floated by. At night, the sea itself lit up as they slid over its surface, millions of phosphorescent organisms glowing green. It was, Fred Shiosaki thought, one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
By and large, the men weren’t afraid. They didn’t yet know enough to be afraid. But they had been away from home for a long time already. They yearned for the parents and siblings and friends they had left behind. At night, lying in their berths, they reached out and touched the things they had brought with them, things from home, things they hoped would carry them through the battles to come.
Some reached for crucifixes, some for small figures of the Buddha. Some had Bibles, some love letters from girlfriends back home. Some had rabbits’ feet to bring good luck, some Saint Christopher medals for divine protection. Chaplain Hiro Higuchi had pictures of his wife, Hisako, his seven-year-old son, Peter, and Jane, the newborn daughter he had not yet met. One of the men in Kats’s artillery unit, Roy Fujii, had a Honolulu bus token, which he wore on a chain around his neck. He planned to use it after the war to get from the docks in Honolulu back to his parents’ house.
Sus Ito, another of Kats’s artillery buddies, had a white senninbari his mother had sent him. Emblazoned with the image of a tiger—a symbol of safe homecoming—the traditional warrior’s sash was embroidered with a thousand individual stitches, each made by a different woman with red silk thread to confer good luck, protection, and courage. Sus kept it folded up in his pocket, close to his heart.
Rudy Tokiwa also had received a gift from his mother. At Poston, Fusa had plucked a single grain of brown rice out of a hundred-pound sack of white rice. Somehow, it had survived the rice-polishing machinery. She sewed it into a pouch that Rudy now wore around his neck. When she sent it to him, she said, “This rice kernel was real lucky . . . It’s the only one that lived through it and was able to keep this husk on. So I’m sending you this so that you’ll come home to us.”[48]
Kats’s 522nd Field Artillery Battalion docked in Brindisi—on the heel of the Italian boot—on May 28, 1944. From there, the men traveled by rail, in rickety cattle cars, northwest across Italy to rendezvous with the rest of the 442nd in Naples. The ride was slow and jolting, but, despite the discomfort, Kats was fascinated by his first glimpses of Europe. The scenery was lovely: gray-green olive trees, their trunks black and gnarled; sepia-colored hills; ancient villages perched on hilltops. It was hard to believe that this was a country at war.
But a few hours into the trip, when the train stopped in a bigger town and Kats climbed down from his boxcar to stretch his legs and look around, he found buildings crumpled by artillery fire and tanks, the rubble pushed into heaps by army bulldozers. Throngs of people—old men, women, and children—approached him, desperate, their hands outstretched, asking for food, for chocolate, for cigarettes, for help.
Worst of all was the children. Half-starved, they roamed the streets in small bands. Some wore cast-off German army jackets, others moth-eaten woolen trousers. Most were barefoot or wore tattered shoes.
When they saw Kats’s American uniform, they ran up and clustered around him, their faces begrimed, their hair matted, their eyes hollow. They pleaded with him, calling him Joe, as they did every GI in Italy. He could not turn a street corner without encountering more of them.
He dug into his kit, pulled out his rations of chocolate and fig bars and cigarettes, and tossed them to the boys. But around the next street corner there were always more.
* * *
★ ★ ★ ★
On the other side of Italy, the main body of the 442nd arrived in Anzio, just south of Rome, and were landed by flat-bottomed landing craft onto the beachhead the Allies held there. Fred Shiosaki, weak from seasickness, walked down the ramp and glanced warily around him. Then he hoisted his gear and began marching with the rest of K Company through the shattered remains of Anzio’s waterfront. The town was a hellish landscape of rubble, trenches, and barbed wire. Allied troops had been storming ashore here for five months under almost continual German fire. Only in the last few days had the Germans finally been driven back toward Rome.
