“Well, if you’re sure it’s not a bother, I would like some. Thank you.”
“Good.”
The complicated dance of apology and refusal, offer and denial was carried out in traditional Japanese fashion, and I could see that Mrs. Okada was pleased that I knew my proper role in the elaborate social interplay. It showed I was “raised right.”
Mrs. Okada had the tea things ready in the kitchen, and she returned with them on a tray almost immediately. Of course I was expected to accept the tea, despite all the protestations, so she already had it prepared. If I had either accepted too readily or refused she would have been hurt and put out by my lack of manners. On the tray was a spectacular satsuma platter with characteristic gold and colored enamel designs. It held Japanese arare rice crackers, and it seemed a shame to use such a lovely piece for such plebeian purposes.
“This platter is beautiful,” I said, touching the edge of the dish.
“It’s a very poor thing,” Mrs. Okada said, even though obviously it wasn’t.
When all the social preliminaries had been dispensed with, we sat back in our seats. Mrs. Okada sort of perched on her chair with her legs barely touching the ground. Her curved spine forced her to look up to see me, but her face had an expression of expectation.
“My grandson should be here soon,” she said.
“Okay. Do you know what he covers for the Times?”
“I’m not totally sure. My eyes are bad so I don’t read much anymore. I used to love to read, but now I have a hard time. My daughter sometimes reads stories to me that my grandson wrote. They all seem to do with Asian business.”
“You must be proud of him.”
She waved that thought away with her hand, but I could see she was pleased. Floundering to make polite small talk until her grandson appeared, I noticed that the book on her coffee table bore the picture of a dark mountain jutting out of a high desert landscape. The book was titled Heart Mountain. I pointed to the book.
“Is that book about the Heart Mountain Relocation camp?”
“Concentration camp,” she corrected. “Relocation camp is what they call it now to make themselves feel better. The book is about it. I was in that camp during the war.”
“Oh. It must have been pretty bad.”
“It was bad. The only nice part was you could see Heart Mountain. It was beautiful. Sometimes when I look at the cover of this book and I see the picture of Heart Mountain in Wyoming, it makes me think of Mount Fuji in Japan.”
“Were you born in Japan?”
“Heavens, no. I was born in Seattle. My father owned a hardware store before the war. I didn’t even visit Japan until the 1960s. I always wanted to see Japan, and I realize now I went at the perfect time, before the dollar became worthless!”
“What was Heart Mountain like?”
“It was just a collection of barracks at the foot of a mountain in Wyoming. The summers were unbearably hot, with all kinds of bugs biting at you. The winters were incredibly cold, with icy air coming out of Canada. I was a teenager then, but I still suffered from the cold during the winter. The old people really suffered. We used to joke that the average yearly temperature at Heart Mountain was great. It was the individual daily temperature that was lousy.” She poured the tea as she talked. “It seems like a lot of the camps were put in locations where there were extremes in temperature.
“The barracks at Heart Mountain were just little tar paper and rough board things, so they did nothing to stop the cold and they seemed to increase the heat. The lids from tin cans were in great demand because they could be used to patch knotholes. We were in room F of our barracks, which meant we had a little bigger room. Each barrack had six rooms, of three different sizes. The rooms got smaller in size as you approached the middle.”
“How big were the barracks?” I asked, interested.
“About sixty feet in total.”
“And your entire family lived in just one room in the barracks?”
“Yes. We had these rusty old army cots from the First World War and we strung blankets across on string to give some privacy. Something like a shelf to hold your possessions was actually a luxury. That’s because wood was so scarce. Every winter we would scrounge around for wood to burn to keep us warm. But even if you were lucky enough to find enough wood, the little potbelly stoves in the barracks would hardly take the frost out of the air on some cold mornings.
“The first men into the camps actually built most of it. My father was in that bunch, because they figured that if he owned a hardware store he must know all about construction. He told us the first group of men were convinced they were being taken into the wilderness to be shot. The guards on the train were real mean and they made the men sit in the same position for days. Sitting still for days doesn’t sound like much punishment, but after a while it can get to be agony if you’re not allowed to even stand up and stretch. They could only get up one at a time to go to the bathroom twice a day, on a regular schedule. If you didn’t have to go when it was your time, well, too bad. If you had to go at any other time, well, you just had to hold it.
“When they finally got to Heart Mountain, they found a bunch of tar paper and lumber dumped off by the side of the train tracks and they were forced to build the camp. My father said the materials they provided were junk, and a lot of the men didn’t know what they were doing. There was hardly a right angle in any barracks in that camp. He said he thought someone was selling the good lumber and such on the black market. I know the chefs at the camp were selling sugar and milk on the black market. It got so bad that the children didn’t have milk to drink and there was almost a riot over that.”
“I remember they gave us boiled squid and rice for weeks on end. I know squid is supposed to be a delicacy, but to this day I still can’t eat it.” She picked up her cup of tea, “You remarked on my satsuma platter. At the camp we had these cups and plates that were enormously thick and large. They all had ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ on the back, and I can remember wondering what kind of company would make porcelain so thick and clumsy. I eventually found out that ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ stood for ‘U.S. Quartermaster Corps.’ The plates were old army plates from World War One.” She laughed. It was a light, friendly laugh.
“From the time I was a little girl I loved porcelain. It came from my mother. When they gave us orders to go to camp we could only take what we could carry. Before we left I remember my mother packing her beloved porcelain away in a barrel for storage. A white man was going door-to-door in our neighborhood buying things from Japanese at just pennies on the dollar. When he got to our house he told my mother everything in storage would be confiscated anyway, and that he’d buy the plates for a penny apiece. I can remember my mother walking to the front door of the house with a handful of plates and throwing them on the sidewalk. They hit and shattered into a thousand pieces. She preferred breaking them over selling them to a profiteer. It turned out our things in storage weren’t confiscated, but some were stolen. This satsuma platter is one thing that survived.” She lightly touched the edge of the platter.
“It sounds like a terrible time.”
“We actually tried to have what we thought was a normal American life in camp. We had schools and clubs and even a boy scout troop. But it was a hollow kind of life. In the camps the whole family structure disintegrated. That’s what I think was sad. The men felt low and helpless. Kids were uprooted and put in a strange environment. The women put up with things they never had to put up with in civilian life.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for instance, the toilets had no doors on them. They were just open-faced stalls, with one side open up for everyone to see. The government wouldn’t provide materials for doors. It was humiliating. We had pieces of cardboard we would hold in front of us while we did our business. It was things like that. Little indignities that chipped away at the kind of family we had before the war.