The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (34 page)

Meanwhile, the war in the Pacific continued. On August 6, 1945, a twelve-man crew of Americans on a Boeing B-29 called the
Enola Gay
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The blast obliterated everything within four square miles. About eighty thousand people were immediately killed and seventy thousand more wounded. Still, the Japanese did not surrender. Three days later, a second bomb, which killed forty thousand, was dropped on Nagasaki.

The following day, Emperor Hirohito surrendered. On August 15, Hirohito gave a short address in Tokyo, and for the first time the people of Japan heard the voice of their emperor on the radio. He urged the people to accept what he called the “unacceptable.” He spoke in an indirect way of surrender—never using the word explicitly—which created confusion in Japan. The military was opposed to surrender, which they thought was dishonorable. Finally, on September 2, General Douglas MacArthur formally accepted the surrender on the deck of the USS
Missouri
, in Tokyo Bay.

In Crystal City, news continued to travel not by radio but by word of mouth, one internee to another. “I was in Crystal City when the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could hear grown men crying all over the camp, including my father,” said Yae Kanogawa. “Many of them didn’t believe Japan had lost the war. They thought it was just propaganda. They couldn’t accept it. All of us kids in camp knew it was true and we were glad the war was over.”

Everyone puzzled over what they heard, as different people in camp heard different versions of the event. Carmen Higa Mochizuki, one of the hundreds of Japanese Peruvians in camp, was a student in the Japanese School in Crystal City, trying to learn to speak Japanese. Her teacher announced in class that “the war was over” but did not say who won. Carmen’s father insisted that Japan had won the war, not the United States. Her brother, who had previously been a journalist in Peru, knew that Japan had in fact lost. The father and son quarreled for days and then stopped speaking to each other. “That’s what I remember about the end of the war,” said Carmen. “The big silence in
our home and at school. No one was allowed to talk about it.”

Ella Ohta was playing softball when someone ran onto the field and shouted, “The war is over! Japan has surrendered.” The game stopped. Everyone on the field seemed stunned. Unlike many in camp, Ella’s parents believed it to be true, and Ella felt relief.

From his bungalow in camp, Isamu Taniguchi tended trees and plants. He believed the news; indeed, it came as a revelation to him. “It was like watching the world come to an end,” Taniguchi later wrote. “The radiation from atomic bombs, which started from flash and sound over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shines in every corner of our skulls, flying over our heads with the humming sound, pressing us to act in repentance.”

A few months earlier, as the war was drawing to a close, the War Relocation Authority announced its intention to close all internment camps by the end of 1945. Following the defeat of the Japanese, the INS began releasing inmates in internment camps who were considered nonthreatening, including many of the recent graduates of Crystal City’s Federal High School. Others hoped to be freed soon. But on September 8, 1945, Truman issued a proclamation, No. 2355, which authorized the secretary of state to order the repatriation of all alien enemies. Also included was “any person who appears to be so clearly dangerous as to make his repatriation desirable.” The issue of US born spouses and children was left unresolved, as was the issue of where the thousands of enemy aliens from Latin America and other foreign countries would be shipped. One by one other internment camps closed—Fort Lincoln in March 1945, Fort Stanton in November 1945—and those classified by the government as “dangerous deportees” were sent to Crystal City to await repatriation. Rather than close, Crystal City absorbed internees from other camps.

“After V-E Day and certainly after the Japanese surrendered, I thought we’d be released,” said Eb. “But the war ended and nothing changed.” Over the next few days, it became clear that most of those remaining
in Crystal City—American as well as foreign-born—would likely be what the US government called “repatriated” internees, even though many were born in America, not Axis countries, and therefore could not by definition be repatriated. The fact that the US government used the word
repatriation
without irony implied that the Germans and Japanese interned in Crystal City, immigrants and native-born, were never fully considered Americans. A new wave of fear swept over the camp: the fear of involuntary transport to Germany or Japan.

The mood in Sumi’s bungalow was sour. Only the day before, on August 14, 1945, she had turned seventeen. Her mother had made her a marble cake. Like Yae, Sumi had heard the sound of men crying all over camp and the disbelief of both women and men. “My father always said Japan would never surrender,” Sumi said. He couldn’t believe that Hirohito, whose official photograph had hung in the family’s apartment in Los Angeles, would ever acknowledge defeat. Now, he told Sumi and her mother, Nobu, to prepare for their return to Japan.

During the fall of 1945, Sumi hoped that somehow the end of the war would mean that she could return to Los Angeles, where she had been born. As the days in Crystal City crept by with uncertainty, inside bungalow T-37-B Tokiji made plans to leave for Japan. In a letter to O’Rourke on September 17, 1945, Tokiji asked that the cameras the FBI had seized from his apartment on East First Street be returned to him. “The photographic business is the only profession I know,” he wrote, and explained he intended to revive his career in Japan, even though by then he was sixty-eight years old. “I can earn my bread and butter by that profession alone.” In the kitchen of the triplex, fifty-six-year-old Nobu went about her business with glacial calm as she, too, made plans to return to Japan.

It was midterm of Sumi’s junior year. Her grades were good and she was the yell leader in a cheering squad at the Federal High School, and a popular member of a group of girls that nicknamed themselves the Big Six, which was her safe haven. Her friends understood her reluctance to leave Crystal City and her inability to defy her father.

On the morning of December 4, 1945,
six hundred Japanese and Japanese Americans from Hawaii boarded special trains at the small station in Crystal City to return to the Hawaiian islands. Sumi said good-bye to some of her Hawaiian friends, who were happy to be going home. The following day Sumi, along with many others, would also board trains, but for Japan, not their home.

Never in the history of the small town of Crystal City had there been such a busy and chaotic scene as at the train station that
morning. Trains lined the track for as far as the eye could see. Six hundred Japanese Peruvians, many who did not speak Japanese, and eighteen hundred Japanese and Japanese Americans, including Sumi, shuffled on board the trains, as if sleepwalking in a nightmare. Like Tokiji, many of the men on the trains believed that going back to Japan was better than the betrayal and humiliation of internment. Their children had no choice.

Though Sumi had long known this day was coming, it seemed inexplicable that she was once again on a train—leaving Crystal City with spasms of regret—and not bound for Los Angeles. Having avoided being exchanged on September 2, 1943, on the
Gripsholm
in New York harbor, Sumi was devastated to have been given yet another confusing government label: no longer
internee
but
repatriate.
Even though she wasn’t yet on a ship to Japan, she felt an undertow of anxiety.

She wore a T-shirt that day, stuffed her fists in her pants pockets, and sat speechless on the hard seat beside Nobu. Whistles blew and the trains pulled out of the tiny station and headed west. She thought of all she’d seen and heard in Crystal City: the Popeye statue in town, the way some people said
howdy
and others
adios
, the wild cats that roamed the camp, the red ants, the hard work of fathers and mothers to build the camp, school graduations and weddings, sunsets and starry nights, come and gone.

INS regulations insisted that all trains be staffed with escorts. Sumi was disappointed that the escort in her car was a high school teacher who had given Sumi a difficult time. Just the week before, the teacher had asked her students, including Sumi, how many of them were repatriating to Japan. Sumi raised her hand. The teacher told Sumi since she was going back to Japan, it must mean she was disloyal to America. Sumi was outraged; nothing could have been further from the truth.

The first night on the train seemed endless. She stayed awake, listening to the rumbling of the train and the snores of her fellow passengers. Since Pearl Harbor, Sumi had come a long way—from Los
Angeles, to Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming, to Ellis Island, and finally to Crystal City. With each move, Nobu reminded Sumi to practice
gaman
—the spirit of enduring what had to be endured. Now she was on a train to Seattle, Washington, where she would board a ship for Japan. She had an American birth certificate and her parents held a repatriation order to Japan. How would she survive in Japan? This was the context of her next lessons in
gaman
. Her status reflected so much that she had experienced: betrayal by her government, divided loyalties, incarceration, and now repatriation.

On the long journey, the teacher insisted that when the train traveled through cities, all the shades be lowered and the passenger car be dark. Sumi knew this drill; she’d been on INS trains before. Still, she was annoyed and repeatedly asked the teacher if, when the train passed through Los Angeles, Sumi might be able to raise the shades. “I just want one glimpse of my hometown,” Sumi said.

The teacher made no promises. When the train neared Los Angeles, a teeming World War II metropolis with a distinct skyline, Sumi again asked the teacher to leave the shades up. Sumi wanted to see the city’s iconic City Hall, located near her former home in Little Tokyo, and perhaps get a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.

The teacher jerked the shades down and told Sumi not to raise them. For the first time since her father’s arrest, Sumi cried. From her seat, she imagined the sights and smells of Little Tokyo and remembered her family’s apartment on East First Street. Her mother placed her arm around Sumi’s shoulder as if to say,
It’ll be okay
.

It took six days to reach Seattle, and in the cars of the train people played cards and slept. Their clothes grew wrinkled and smelled stale. Occasionally rain whapped against the darkened windows. People shuffled to and from the dining cars as the escorts, including the teacher, patrolled the aisles. The murmur of three distinct languages—English, Japanese, and Spanish, by the Peruvians—created a strange background music for the trip.

On December 11, the train pulled into the port of Seattle, stopped, and the shades were raised. The train was crowded and it took
many hours for everyone to disembark. When Sumi stepped outside, a blast of cold wind struck her in the face.

One by one the twenty-four hundred passengers—Japanese, Japanese Americans, and Peruvian Japanese—boarded the enormous ocean liner SS
Matsonia
, a former cruise ship that had been commissioned by the US government for troop transports and repatriations.

The distance from Seattle to the port of Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay across the Pacific Ocean was vast, almost forty-two hundred nautical miles. Like many of the others, Sumi had never sailed before. She and Nobu were assigned quarters belowdecks. They descended, step by step, into the entrails of the giant steamship on stairs without rails. Eventually they passed the level of the mess hall and walked down one more flight of stairs to a large room filled with bunks. The bunks, made of canvas and supported by long chains lashed to pipes, were stacked four high from the floor to the ceiling. To Sumi, the room seemed as deep and dark a place as she’d ever been.

Tokiji was assigned quarters on the top deck of the ship. During the day, passengers walked on the broad deck and watched the long hull of the ship cut a path of white foam through the dark waters of the Pacific. They kept a lookout for fish and birds and breathed in the crisp ocean air.

In the hold of the ship, many of the passengers suffered from seasickness. The great liner pitched, plunged, rolled, and tossed. What Sumi wouldn’t have given for the flat, dusty desert of Texas and a simple bowl of rice from her mother’s kitchen. “Food was the last thing we wanted,” recalled Sumi. “It might have been wonderful if we could have disconnected feelings in the stomach from feelings in the head.” Even though she had no appetite, Sumi was one of the lucky few on the lower deck who did not suffer from seasickness. Day after day in the hold, she brought tea and sympathy to one seasick friend from Crystal City to another.

At night, she stayed close to Nobu, who urged her daughter to rest and said,
“Shikata ga nai.”
The phrase was as familiar to Sumi as Nobu’s face and meant: “It cannot be helped.”

Teenagers from Crystal City were all over the ship. Not far away from Sumi, Mas Okabe, who had been a fourteen-year-old freshman at the Federal High School in Crystal City, crowded together with his family: his father, mother, and three brothers. Before the war, his father was a farmer in Yolo, California, near Sacramento. Like Sumi’s father, Mas Okabe’s father was also convinced that Japan had won the war and that the news to the contrary was merely American propaganda. “My parents didn’t discuss decisions with us,” recalled Mas during an interview. “In Crystal City, I overheard them talking about going back to Japan. My father’s word was the law. He said we were going and so we packed up. No questions asked.”

During the voyage, Mas’s mother was seasick and stayed in the hold of the ship, but Mas and his brothers spent most of the time on the top deck. “We were taught to make the best of things, and that’s what we did,” recalled Mas. “We played pickup ball on the deck and hide-and-seek. We watched for whales and dolphins.” They had no idea what they would face when the ship docked in Japan, but they’d been living with uncertainty since the beginning of the war. “We knew that family was all we had,” said Mas. “When you suffer together as a family, the bond grows stronger.”