Snow Falling on Cedars (22 page)

They sat in their cedar tree thinking about this, but the war still seemed far away. The war did not disturb them there, and they continued to view themselves as exceedingly fortunate in the particulars of their secret existence. Their absorption in one another, the heat of their bodies, their mingling smells and the movements of their limbs – these things shielded them from certain truths. Yet sometimes at night Ishmael Chambers would lie awake because there was a war on in the world. He would turn his thoughts toward Hatsue then and keep them there until at the verge of sleep the war swam back to spill forth horribly anyway in his dreams.

Hatsue Imada was standing in the foyer of the Amity Harbor Buddhist Chapel, buttoning her coat after services, when Georgia Katanaka’s mother told the people gathered there the news about Pearl Harbor. ‘It’s very bad,’ she said. ‘A bombing raid. The Japanese air force has bombed everything. It is bad for us, terribly bad. There is nothing else on the radio. Everything is Pearl Harbor.’

Hatsue pulled her lapels more closely around her throat and turned her eyes toward her parents. Her father – he’d been busy helping her mother into her coat – only stood there blinking at Mrs. Katanaka. ‘It can’t be true,’ he said.

‘It’s true,’ he said.

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘Find a radio. Just this morning. They bombed Hawaii.’

They stood in the reception room kitchen with the Katanakas, Ichiharas, Sasakis, and Hayashidas and listened to the Bendix sitting on the counter. Nobody spoke – they merely stood there. They listened for ten minutes without moving, their heads down, their ears turned toward the radio. Finally Hatsue’s father began to pace and scratch his head and then to rub his chin, long strokes. ‘We’d better get home,’ he said.

They drove home and listened to the radio again, the five Imada girls and their parents. They kept the radio on all afternoon and late into the evening, too. Now and then the telephone would ring, and Hatsue’s father, in Japanese, would discuss matters with Mr. Oshiro or Mr. Nishi. More than a half-dozen times he made calls himself to discuss matters with other people. He would hang up, scratch his head, then return to his seat by the radio.

Mr. Oshiro called again and told Hatsue’s father that in Amity Harbor a fisherman named Otto Willets had put up a ladder in front of Shigeru Ichiyama’s movie theater and unscrewed the lightbulbs in the marquee. While he was busy at it two other men had steadied the ladder for him and yelled curses at the Ichiyamas, who were not present. Otto Willets and his friends, on discovering this, had driven out to Lundgren Road and sat in front of the Ichiyamas’ in a pickup truck, where they pounded on the horn until Shig came out and stood on his porch to see what they wanted. Willets had called Shig a dirty Jap and told him he ought to have smashed every light in the marquee – didn’t he know there was a blackout? Shig said no, he hadn’t known, he was glad to have been told, he was thankful to the men for unscrewing the marquee bulbs for him. He ignored Otto Willets’s insults.

At ten o’clock Mr. Oshiro called again; armed men had posted themselves around Amity Harbor out of fear of a Japanese attack. There were men with shotguns behind logs along the beach just north and south of town. The defense of San Piedro was being organized; there were men meeting right now at the Masons’ lodge. The Otsubos had driven by at eight o’clock and seen at least forty cars and pickup trucks parked along the road near the Masons’. Furthermore three or four gill-netters, it was said, had left the harbor to patrol San Piedro’s waters. Mr. Oshiro had seen one drifting on the tide, its engine cut, its running lights out, below the bluff near his home on Crescent Bay, a mere silhouette in the night. Hatsue’s father – he spoke in Japanese – asked Mr. Oshiro if in fact there were submarines and if the rumors of an invasion of Oregon and California were factual. ‘Anything is possible,’ answered Mr. Oshiro. ‘You should be prepared for anything, Hisao.’

Hatsue’s father took his shotgun from the closet and set it in the corner of the living room, unloaded. He got out a box of squirrel loads, too, and slipped three shells into his shirt pocket. Then he turned off every light but one and hung sheets across all the windows. Every few minutes he would leave his place
by the radio to pull back a corner of one of these sheets and peer out into the strawberry fields. Then he would go out onto the porch to listen and to search the sky for airplanes. There were none, but on the other hand the sky was mostly overcast and a plane would not easily be seen.

They went to bed; nobody slept. In the morning, on the school bus, Hatsue looked directly at Ishmael Chambers as she passed him on the way to her seat. Ishmael looked back and nodded at her, once. The bus driver, Ron Lamberson, had an Anacortes newspaper tucked underneath his chair; at each stop he flung the door open with a flourish, then sat reading a section of the paper while the children boarded in silence. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he called over his shoulder as the school bus wound down Mill Run Road. ‘The Japanese are attacking all over the place, not just Pearl Harbor. They’re making raids all over the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt is going to declare war today, but what are we gonna do about these attacks? The whole fleet’s been destroyed out there, is the deal. And they’re arresting Jap traitors in Hawaii and other places – the FBI’s in on it. They’re getting them down in Seattle right now, in fact. Arresting the spies and everything. The government’s frozen Jap bank accounts, too. Main thing, there’s a blackout ordered for tonight all up and down the coast. The navy figures there’s gonna be an air raid. Don’t want to scare you kids, but could be right here – the transmitter station at Agate Point? The navy transmitter station? Your radio is gonna be off the air from seven tonight until tomorrow morning so the Japs don’t pick up any signals. Everyone’s supposed to put black cloth on their windows and stay inside, stay calm.’

At school, all day, there was nothing but the radio. Two thousand men had been killed. The voices that spoke were cheerless and sober and suggested a barely suppressed urgency. The young people sat with their books unopened and listened to a navy man describe in detail how to extinguish incendiary bombs, and then to reports of further Japanese attacks, Roosevelt’s speech before the Congress, an announcement by Attorney General Biddle that Japanese fifth columnists were being arrested in Washington,
Oregon, and California. Mr. Sparling became restive and bitter and began to talk in a desolate monotone about his eleven months in France during the Great War. He said that he hoped the boys in his class would take their duty to fight seriously and that furthermore they should consider it an honor to meet the Japs head-on and do the job of paying them back. ‘War stinks,’ he added. ‘But they started it. They bombed Hawaii on a Sunday morning. On a Sunday morning, of all things.’ He shook his head, turned up the radio, and leaned morosely against the blackboard with his arms seized against his narrow chest.

By three o’clock that afternoon Ishmael’s father had printed and distributed the first war extra in the history of his island newspaper, a one-page edition with a banner headline – ISLAND DEFENSE SET!

Only a few hours after the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States, San Piedro Island late last night was prepared – temporarily at least – for an air raid bombing or other serious emergency.

A meeting of the local defense commission was called promptly by Richard A. Blackington, local defense commissioner, at the Masons’ lodge yesterday afteroon and attended by all defense commission lieutenants. An air raid blackout signal system, details of which can be found elsewhere in this edition, was established. It will rely on church bells, industrial plant whistles, and automobile horns.

Defense leaders, taking the attitude that ‘anything can happen,’ warned islanders to be on the alert to black out electric lights on extremely short notice.

Island watchers for the Interceptor Command will be on duty on a twenty-four-hour basis. Meanwhile members of the island’s Japanese community pledged their loyalty to the United States.

Guards were trebled at the U.S. Navy’s Agate Point radio transmitter station and at the Crow Marine Railway
and Shipbuilding Company. The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company and the Puget Sound Power and Light Company indicated steps would be taken to guard their facilities here.

Arrangements were being made to bring summer fire-fighting equipment, stored for the winter in Anacortes, back to the island today.

Ensign R. B. Clawson, representing Comdr. L. N. Channing of the Agate Point radio transmitter station, addressed the defense commission meeting. Military and naval intelligence units, he said, have the situation well in hand and are taking proper local steps to guard against saboteurs and spies. ‘The transmitter station went on prearranged war alert status immediately upon news of the Pearl Harbor attack,’ added Ensign Clawson. ‘Nevertheless, island civilians must do whatever they can independent of naval and military aid to safeguard their homes and businesses against sabotage or bombing.’

The following lieutenants of the defense commission were present at yesterday’s meeting:

Bill Ingraham, communications; Ernest Tingstaad, transportation; Mrs. Thomas McKibben, medical supplies; Mrs. Clarence Wukstich, supplies and food; Jim Milleren, auxiliary police; Einar Petersen, roads and engineering; Larry Phillips, auxiliary fire force; Arthur Chambers, publicity.

Also present were Major O. W. Hotchkins, chairman of the separate local defense council; Bart Johannson, an assistant to Major Hotchkins; and S. Austin Coney, organizer of the island’s Interceptor Command force.

At the bottom of the page, in bold sixteen-point type, was a message from the island defense commission:

AT THE SOUND OF PROLONGED RINGING OP CHURCH BELLS, THE PROLONGED SOUNDING OF AUTOMOBILE HORNS, AND THE
PROLONGED BLOWING OF WHISTLES AT THE CHOW MARINE RAILWAY AND SHIPBUILDING COMPANY, IMMEDIATELY TURN OFF ALL ELECTRIC LIGHTS. THIS INCLUDES THE TURNING OFF OF ALL PERMANENT NIGHT LIGHTS, SUCH AS STORE DISPLAY LIGHTS, WHICH ARE UNDER YOUR CONTROL. KEEP LIGHTS OFF UNTIL THE ALL-CLEAR SIGNAL, WHICH WILL BE A DUPLICATION OF THE AIR RAID WARNING SIGNAL.

There was also a statement issued by Richard Blackington that church bells and automobile horns should be used only in a manner consistent with the air raid warning system. Mrs. Thomas McKibben, in charge of medical supplies, requested that any islander with a station wagon available for use as an emergency ambulance should contact her at Amity Harbor 172-R; she was also registering emergency nurses and those with emergency first-aid training. Finally, the island sheriff, Gerald Lundquist, asked islanders to report suspicious activities or signs of sabotage to his office with all due speed.

Arthur’s war extra included an article entitled ‘Japanese Leaders Here Pledge Loyalty to America,’ in which Masato Nagaishi, Masao Uyeda, and Zenhichi Miyamoto, all strawberry men, made statements to the effect that they and all other island Japanese stood ready to protect the American flag. They spoke on behalf of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, the Japanese-American Citizens’ League, and the Japanese Community Center, and their pledges, said the
Review,
were ‘prompt and unequivocal,’ including Mr. Uyeda’s promise that ‘if there is any sign of sabotage or spies, we will be the first ones to report it to the authorities.’ Arthur also ran his editor’s column under the usual heading of ‘Plain Talk,’ which he’d composed wearily at two
A.M.
with a candle propped beside his typewriter:

If ever there was a community which faced a local emergency growing out of something over which it had no control, it is San Piedro Island this Monday morning, December 8, 1941.

This is, indeed, a time for plain talk about things that matter to all of us.

There are on this island some 800 members of 150 families whose blood ties lie with a nation which yesterday committed an atrocity against all that is decent. That nation has committed itself to a war against us and has earned our swift and sure action. America will unite to respond courageously to the threat now facing us in the Pacific. And when the dust settles, America will have won.

In the meantime the task before us is grave and invites our strongest emotions. Yet these emotions, the
Review
must stress, should not include a blind, hysterical hatred of all persons who trace their ancestry to Japan. That some of these persons happen to be American citizens, happen to be loyal to this country, or happen to have no longer a binding tie with the land of their birth could all easily be swept aside by mob hysteria.

In light of this, the
Review
points out that those of Japanese descent on this island are not responsible for the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. Make no mistake about it. They have pledged their loyalty to the United States and have been fine citizens of San Piedro for decades now. These people are our neighbors. They have sent six of their sons into the United States Army. They, in short, are not the enemy, any more than our fellow islanders of German or Italian descent. We should not allow ourselves to forget these things, and they should guide us in our behavior toward all our neighbors.

So of all islanders – of all ancestries – the
Review
would seek as calm an approach as possible in this emergency. Let us so live in this trying time that when it is all over we islanders can look one another in the eye with the knowledge that we have behaved honorably and fairly. Let us remember what is so easy to forget in the mad intensity of wartime: that prejudice and
hatred are never right and never to be accepted by a just society.

Ishmael sat reading his father’s words in the cedar tree; he was rereading them when Hatsue, in her coat and scarf, ducked in and sat down on the moss beside him. ‘My father was up all night,’ said Ishmael. ‘He put this paper out.’

‘My father can’t get our money from the bank,’ Hatsue replied to this. ‘We have a few dollars, and the rest we can’t get. My parents aren’t citizens.’