The Sun Gods (14 page)

“I don't understand. Is he at police headquarters?”

“No, it says the people's personal effects are being held there and the people themselves in the immigration station. But why? What are they going to do with them? Send them back to Japan? Kill them in revenge for the men killed at Pearl Harbor? We've got to get him out of there.”

“I'll call Tom. He'll go,” said Mitsuko, though she was dismayed to find herself wondering if her own words were true.

On the phone, Tom's initial reaction was reassuring. “Of course I'll go,” he said. But then he asked, “Will this afternoon be soon enough? I have to go to a meeting of the Council of Churches. It's an emergency meeting, to call for fair treatment of American-born Japanese.”

“But Yoshiko is going crazy. And what about Japanese who were not born in America? What about Goro? What about me?”

“Just stay put. I'm sure that everything is going to be all right. Do you have enough food?”

“I don't know. There are plenty of stores nearby.”

“No, don't go out. Stay home and listen to the radio. The President is about to speak.”

Yoshiko turned on the radio. If the attack on Pearl Harbor had seemed the isolated act of a madman, the intensity of President Roosevelt's thin, sharp voice made it clear that something new and dreadful had begun:

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

“The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

“Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the secretary of state a formal reply to a recent American message.”

One after another, the President listed the treacherous attacks that Japan had launched throughout the Pacific. Yoshiko listened in silence, and Mitsuko brought a box of tissues from the bathroom.

Exhausted from last night's crying jag, Billy was still asleep, but soon he was up and hungry. Hurrying back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, Mitsuko fed him and monitored the swift process by which Congress declared war on her homeland.

After his breakfast, Billy wanted to go outside to play, and Mitsuko had to find things for him to do while they listened to the radio and waited to hear from Tom. Yoshiko spent much of the day grabbing things from Billy's hands and putting them up where they could not be broken. Billy seemed determined to touch the white porcelain cat on the mantelpiece. Once, when left alone, he dragged a chair to the fireplace and tried to reach it. Finally, with a nervous Yoshiko watching, Mitsuko put the cat on the floor for him and let him “pet” it.

“Say ‘
neko
,' Billy. Nice neko.”

Billy touched the cat and pretended to shake its upraised paw until Yoshiko could no longer stand the threat to her prized figurine. She snatched it away and restored it to its honored position, which of course prompted tears from Billy and cries of “I want the neko!”

Tom's first call of the day came at 4:30. He had been to the immigration station and argued with officials there for hours but could get no one to admit anything more than that “some Japs” were being held there. He called next from police headquarters, where he had been told that no one knew where any of the detainees' personal possessions were kept.

“It's after six,” Mitsuko said. “Yoshiko is making dinner.”

“Don't wait for me. I'll see what else I can do,” Tom replied.

“Are you sure? Where are you now?”

After some hesitation, Tom said, “I'm not downtown anymore. I had some other business to take care of. I'll call you later.”

Before she could say anything, Tom cut the connection. After dinner, Mitsuko and Yoshiko switched on the radio, but it seemed to have gone dead. Tom finally called again after ten o'clock.

“Where are you?” she said. “Billy should have been in bed hours ago, and I need sleep, too.”

“I can't get back there tonight. There's a blackout going on. No lights, no driving after eleven o'clock. Everybody's worried about a Japanese sneak attack here in Seattle. The radio stations went off the air, and the buses are going to stop running.”

“Can't you get here before eleven? I wasn't planning to spend the night here. I don't have a change of clothes for Billy or myself. I haven't even given him his bath because I didn't want to take him out in the cold afterward. Where are you?”

“I'm up in Mountlake Terrace with some of the other ministers. I can't make it back in time.”

“Are you sure?”

Tom sighed. “Yes, I'm sure.”

“All right,” she said vaguely and hung up. There was still a little time before the blackout was scheduled to go into effect.

“I'm going home by cab,” she announced to her sister, but Yoshiko pleaded with her to spend another night there. If Mitsuko needed fresh clothes, she could borrow some of hers.

Mitsuko pointed out that there were none for Billy. He also needed his own blanket and his stuffed animals. “I'll catch a cab and run over to my apartment. I can be back in fifteen minutes.”

“But Tom said not to go out.”

“It can't be that bad. There were interviews with Nisei in the newspapers. They're going out.” Taking her coat and purse and a scarf, she left the house, ignoring Yoshiko's pleas.

In the darkness, and with the scarf on her head, she was sure she would have no difficulty hailing a cab. She walked to Madison, and the first empty cab stopped for her. Hunching down in the shadows of the back seat, she gave the driver her address. He grunted and stepped on the gas, but he missed the turn and continued on toward downtown.

“Wait,” she cried, “you should have turned right on Summit.”

“You don't want to go to Summit, lady,” he said.

“What are you talking about? Of course I do.”

“No, lady, you want to go to Tokyo.”

“Let me out of here. Stop the car now.”

But the man kept on driving.

“What's the matter, lady? They're havin' a party in Tokyo just for you and all your Jap friends. Then they're gonna come over here and drop some more bombs on us.”

She planned to leap out at the next stop light, but all the traffic signals were green, and when the light at Third Avenue started changing, the driver swerved wildly up Fourth. Now he was in heavy downtown traffic, and at last, near the corner of Pike, he had to apply the brakes.

Mitsuko jumped out even before the car came to a full stop, and she heard the driver yelling, “Go back to Tokyo, you lousy Jap!” She ducked between two parked cars and hurried along the sidewalk.

As she passed a clothing store on the corner, the street was suddenly plunged into darkness. The blackout had started, but her eyes adjusted soon enough. The dark night became suffused with a strange green glow. All the people and storefronts and lampposts wore this morbid, new patina.

“Hey, turn it off!” a male voice called to her left.

“Yeah,” a woman's screech chimed in, “this is war. Ya wanna show the Jap bastards where we live?”

For a moment, Mitsuko thought that everyone on the street was looking at her, but she realized their eyes were fixed above her on the source of the green light. She stepped to the curb and looked up. “Foreman and Clark,” read the huge, green neon sign. It was the only light in the intersection that had failed to go out at eleven o'clock.

Again the woman yelled, “This is war, ain't it? What the hell do they think they're doin'? Tryin' to sell clothes to the Japs?”

This drew a few laughs. Gradually, the number of onlookers began to grow, and the remarks became more resentful and surly. With some difficulty, Mitsuko withdrew her gaze from the dazzling green loops and began to walk into the darkness. Three young, scruffy-looking men blocked her way.

“Hey, will you look at that,” exclaimed the one in the middle. “Jap tail!”

She stepped down into the gutter to go around them, but the next thing she knew, two of them had her by the elbows and the third thrust his hand beneath her chin. “It's a Nip, all right,” he said. “Chinks' eyes slant in the other direction.”

“Let me go,” she muttered.

“You speakee English, Miss Tojo?” laughed the one holding her left arm.

“I will scream,” she warned.

“Oh, yeah?” the greasy-haired one in front of her said. “Who's gonna hear you? I don't see any cops around. And anyway, right now, we're the only ones who know you're here. You don't want all those other guys to find out, do you?”

“Come on,” said the greasy one, “Let's have a little fun.” With him leading the way, they entered the dark edges of the crowd that was forming under the neon sign.

Suddenly there was a metallic thud, and something bounced from the sign onto the street.

“Aw c'mon!” yelled the same shrill female voice she had heard before. “You can do better than that!”

“Yeah!” a number of voices responded in unison, and the throwing began in earnest. A brick. A few stones. More bricks. Half the time, the green neon tubes escaped unscathed, but when a missile connected, there was a shower of sparks and the sound of shattering glass. On the far edge of the crowd, someone turned a trash bin upside down, spreading a fresh supply of bottles and tin cans on the pavement. These began to pepper the sign relentlessly, and soon there was nothing left of the green lettering. The mob cheered when the last bit was extinguished.

“Hey, Ernie, look!” said the man on Mitsuko's right. They turned in the direction of an illuminated clock half a block away. The three men ran toward it, dragging her along. The one called Ernie picked up a rock and hurled it at the red neon lettering, “Weisfield & Goldberg's Fine Jewelry,” crushing two letters with a single blow. Others in the mob joined in, but the sign remained stubbornly lit. Finally, Ernie himself climbed up the clock standard and, to the accompaniment of cheers, smashed the rest of the neon tubes with his fist.

From behind, Mitsuko heard a police whistle and a voice yelling, “Come on, make way! Get back!” Instead of parting for the policeman, the crowd pressed in to form a protective barrier around Ernie, and as Mitsuko's two captors moved to join them, she wrenched free. Fighting her way through the crowd, she slipped into the anonymous darkness.

Hurrying down Fifth, she returned to Madison and began retracing the route the cab had taken. She walked as quickly as she dared through the darkened streets, which were rendered darker still by the thick overcast that had blanketed the city all day. She had experienced such darkness in the countryside before, but never in the city. Childhood stories of bewitching foxes and badgers flashed through her mind each time some black shape loomed out of the night. More than once, her shin crashed into a fire hydrant hidden in the shadows, and as she rounded the curve at the top of the hill, a car without lights nearly ran her down. A few blocks further, another darkened car sped by, and a moment later she heard a sickening crunch of steel and glass, then silence. She wanted to help, but she was afraid.

By the time she neared Olive Street, a fine mist was filtering through the night air, cooling her cheeks.

“Mit-chan, what happened?” Yoshiko cried when she stumbled into the house.

“I'm okay. Where's Billy?”

“I put him to bed in my room. Where have you been? What happened to you?”

Begging Yoshiko to hold off her questions until morning, she dropped onto the living room couch and sank immediately into a deep sleep.

15

“MIT-CHAN, WAKE UP!
Listen to this: ‘Enemy Planes Off Coast.' So it's true!”

Mitsuko found herself under a quilt, still wearing her overcoat. Her body ached and her shins were throbbing, and the smell of perspiration lingered about her. When she sat up and her bruised legs slipped out from under the quilt, Yoshiko gasped.

Mitsuko told her about the cab driver and the three men and the riot.

“You were in this?” Yoshiko said, showing her the headline: “Mobs Smash Windows in Riot: Crowd Irate Where Lights Still Show.”

As Yoshiko read to her, Mitsuko felt as if she were hearing an account of someone's bad dream. “But what about the planes?” she asked when Yoshiko finished.

“Listen to this one: ‘Seattle, which was the first major American city to stage a practice blackout in the current war last March, repeated the performance last night. But this time it was no mere rehearsal. It was in grim and deadly earnest, and the blackout extended all the way from the Canadian border to Roseburg, Oregon, along the strip west of the Cascades. The blackout extended at intervals for the entire length of the Coast. It was the result of persistent—though completely unconfirmed—rumors that a Japanese aircraft carrier was loose somewhere in the North Pacific and might unleash a murderous attack anywhere on the Coast.'”

Yoshiko's face brightened. “‘Unconfirmed rumors!' That means it's all a mistake. They know the Japanese planes can't come all the way over here to attack us. They'll let Goro out soon.”

“I hope so,” Mitsuko said. “But people believe the rumors. You should have seen that mob last night.”

“It must have been terrible,” Yoshiko said. “Are you really all right? Here, let me give you some breakfast.”

“I'm going to look in on Billy and take a bath first.”

By the time Mitsuko joined her at the breakfast table, Yoshiko's spirits had improved. “It's not all bad news,” she said. “There's something here on that Council of Churches meeting that Pastor Tom went to yesterday.”

“Let me see. Does it mention Tom?”

The headline didn't raise her spirits: “Council of Churches Asks Fairness to Jap Residents.”

“I like the fairness part, but do they have to call us Japs?”

At least the article itself used the word “Japanese.” Tom's name did not appear.

“What is so wonderful about this?” Mitsuko said, then read aloud: “‘The council issued a statement to Japanese of the Pacific Northwest expressing sympathy and pledging cooperation with the problems which face them as American citizens.' We are not American citizens.”

“Don't be so pessimistic. They will treat us all the same. Look at this one—‘Racial Harmony Welded By Resourceful Teacher.' I cried when I read it.”

The article told of Miss Ada Mahon, principal of the Bailey Gatzert School, where six hundred Japanese children were enrolled along with one hundred Chinese and one hundred white children. “Well aware how easily ill feeling and strife might become rampant among her pupils, Miss Mahon held a special assembly at the start of the school day. ‘I want to tell you a true story,' she said to them. ‘While I was downtown yesterday, I saw three little American boys, arms around each other. They were laughing, and as happy as could be. I asked them if they were shopping, and they said they were just looking at the things in the windows. Now of these three little American boys, one had Chinese parents, and the other two Japanese parents. Yet they were Americans and they were happy together. That's the way I want you to be. What has happened in the world outside is not the fault of any one of us here in the school, and we can't do anything about it. So I want you to forget the things that are going on outside, and not even talk about them.' Miss Mahon then faced the flag and gave the Pledge of Allegiance, after which all the children did the same. They then marched quietly to their classes, and everything went on just as before, with no hint of racial feeling.”

“It is very sweet,” said Mitsuko. “I only wish there were more people like Miss Mahon.”

“I have lived here much longer than you,” said Yoshiko, “and I have met many white people like her. The Americans are not bad people. As soon as they realize there is no danger of an attack, they will let Goro go.”

The FBI did not let Goro go that day, nor the following day, nor the day after that. Mitsuko brought two large suitcases full of clothing for herself and Billy to keep a vigil with her sister. The newspapers were full of reports on the fear of air raids, the establishment of medical centers where local “war wounded” could be taken for treatment, the continuing blackouts, and the deaths and injuries resulting from cars crashing into each other or into pedestrians in the dark. Two Japanese were the first to be arrested for blackout violations, and Japanese-born hotel owners were told they could not legally collect rent from their tenants owing to a prohibition against payments of money to Japanese nationals.

Money was beginning to be a problem for Yoshiko as well. On Thursday, Mitsuko went with her to the Nichi-Bei Bank, the firm for which Goro worked and where most of their money was kept. The doors were locked and a notice from the Secretary of the Treasury was posted outside prohibiting entrance under penalty of law. At Rainier Bank, Yoshiko was told that, as an enemy alien, her account had been blocked and they would not be able to release any money to her until the government had specified the limits they were imposing on withdrawals.

Finally, on Friday, a postcard arrived from Goro in the immigration station. It said only that he was well and that he needed a change of clothes and his shaving equipment. That same day, the decapitated corpse of a Chinese longshoreman was found on the Seattle waterfront, and the police, unable to establish a motive, speculated that he had been mistaken for a Japanese. Within hours, red, white and blue buttons with “CHINESE” in large capitals across the central white stripe were appearing on the lapels of many Asians.

A week later, permission came through for the detained Japanese nationals to have visitors. Tom was out on church business, so Yoshiko and Mitsuko went with Billy to the immigration station. The building was dark and depressing, and their footsteps echoed off the bare walls as they were shown down the corridor leading to the visitors' room.

Goro entered in his shirt sleeves, looking glum and tired. He bowed deeply to his visitors, and they to him. Then he picked Billy up and hugged him tightly.

“I am going to leave here soon,” he said when all had taken their seats around a dark oak table.

Yoshiko clapped her hands. “
Yokatta
!”—“How wonderful!”

But Goro did not return her smile. “They are sending us to a detention center in Montana.”

To Mitsuko that sounded like the regional “Protection and Supervision Centers” run by the Japanese thought police where “patients” with unorthodox ideas were “treated” until they realized their true Japaneseness.

Yoshiko sobbed into a handkerchief.

“There are nearly fifty of us, all Japanese nationals in important positions,” Goro said. “Before that, there will be hearings by a board of review. The immigration authorities, the district attorney and the FBI will decide if I can be released. We must get our white friends to sign letters saying that I am not a danger to the country.” He smiled wanly. “If only they had let me become a citizen, I would not be so dangerous to them.”

That evening, Tom came to eat with Mitsuko and Yoshiko at the Nomura house. He was withdrawn, and had to be reminded that today was Billy's fourth birthday. Not even that news made him smile.

At the dinner table, Yoshiko said, “Goro has made many white friends in banking. Miss Nelson and the other white ladies who help with the Sunday school will sign, I'm sure. And with an affidavit from you, Pastor Tom, I am sure they will let him out. We'll have him home for Christmas.”

“Santa Claus!” shouted Billy, who had been fed earlier and was playing nearby with a new truck that Mitsuko had carved for him. The women smiled at him.

“What do you want for Christmas?” called Yoshiko. “Uncle Goro will buy you anything you want.”

“Neko!” he replied without hesitation, pointing to the porcelain cat on the mantelpiece. “I want the cat. I want him to sleep with me.”

Yoshiko and Mitsuko laughed heartily at his persistence.

Tom had hardly said a word since entering the house. Now, setting down his knife and fork, he fixed a somber gaze on his sister-in-law. “Yoshiko,” he said. “I'm going to ask you something I have never asked you before, and I want you to answer me in absolute honesty.”

Yoshiko's eyes widened, and, like Tom, she set down her silverware. “What is it, Pastor Tom? Of course I am always completely honest with you.”

Mitsuko looked from her sister to her husband, and a knot grew in her chest.

“With Christ as your witness, can you tell me with total sincerity that you had no idea that Pearl Harbor was coming?”

“Tom!” Mitsuko cried. “What are you saying?”

“Mitsuko, you keep out of this. This is between Yoshiko and me.”

Mitsuko pushed away from the table. “How can you say that?”

“Be quiet. Let her speak.”

Yoshiko had gone pale. Her head dropped forward, and she pressed her hands against the table top as if to keep from losing her balance. “As God is my witness,” she began in a whisper.

“No!” shouted Mitsuko. “Don't answer him!—Tom! How could you?”

“Mitsuko,” he intoned, “your husband has commanded you to keep silent. Do you think this is easy for me? The FBI has arrested my wife's brother. There must be a reason for it.”

“Are you saying he is a spy?” Mitsuko asked.

“I'm not saying anything. I'm saying I just don't know.”

“Don't know? It's Goro, Tom. Goro and Yoshiko.”

“I know that, but don't you know what people are saying?”

“Yes, I know what they are saying. Hundreds of Japanese are coming forward and pledging their loyalty to this country. The white newspapers are saying they believe them. And you—”

“I know they're loyal. Who knows the Nisei better than I do?”

Yoshiko raised her head. “But I am not a Nisei?”

“I didn't mean that,” Tom said. “I just want to hear it from your lips.”

“I did not know,” she said calmly.

“And Goro?”

“Tom—”

“Mitsuko, be silent!”

“It's all right, Mit-chan. Goro is very sad, Pastor Tom. He only wishes he could have become a citizen of this country. He loves America as much as I do. He is not a spy.”

“Thank you, Yoshiko,” Tom said, offering her a comforting smile. “That's all I wanted to hear.”

“And now, Pastor Tom,” said Yoshiko in the same tone of quiet resignation, “would you please leave this house?”

Tom's blue eyes shone through the transparent reflections of the ceiling light on his glasses. Without speaking, he placed his napkin on the table beside his plate and stood. He looked at Mitsuko, but she folded her arms and turned away from him.

“I see,” he said. Leaving the table, he called to Billy on the floor, “Let's go, son. Put on your coat.”

The boy had grown quiet and apprehensive. Now he stood and ran to Mitsuko, cowering behind her chair.

Tom glared at Mitsuko, then at Yoshiko. He stood before them, surveying the room as if for the last time. Then, slowly, deliberately, he walked to the front door, turned once more to look at them as he opened it, and stepped across the threshold.