“Was he crazy?”
“No. Just proud of his work and not too concerned about his personal well-being. There’s no death penalty in Japan, and if he had any family he knew they’d be well taken care of by his Yakuza bosses. It’s all that Japanese nonsense about loyalty to the group taken to its ultimate, perverse conclusion.”
I sat back, soaking in what Evan had told me. During the lull in the conversation, Mrs. Okada leaned forward and patted him on the arm, saying, “I’m pleased that you’re helping. Do you want some arare crackers?”
12
When I was done at Mrs. Okada’s I decided to stop at my apartment in Silver Lake to kill time until my appointment with Michael. As I drove I had a lot to think about. Evan didn’t know much more about Matsuda’s Yakuza connection, so the discussion ended soon after his remark about the sword being a Yakuza weapon. Funnily enough, some of the things that Mrs. Okada had told me affected me more than the stuff Evan Okada told me.
It was my first personal conversation with someone about the camp experience, even though most of the older Japanese-Americans I know on the mainland must have been in a camp. Most simply don’t talk about it. From the books, I knew the recitation of facts about the camps, but hearing that something like boiled squid had been served ad nauseam made the experience seem more real.
Also from the books, I knew that at the beginning of World War II over one hundred twenty thousand people had been herded into U.S. camps based solely on their Japanese racial background. About two-thirds of them were American citizens, and many of the ones who weren’t citizens were actually prevented from becoming citizens by Asian exclusion laws. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that naturalization for citizenship was only open to whites and people of African descent. Since Asians were neither, the Court said it was constitutional to pass laws that prevented them from becoming citizens or even owning land. The last of these laws were on the books until 1952.
J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a liberal, advised against the camps because the FBI couldn’t find a single case of disloyal activity in the Japanese-American community. Ironically, Earl Warren, who was then governor of California and later known as a liberal chief justice of the Supreme Court, pushed for the camps. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, despite the protest of a couple of local chapters, supported the camps.
All people of color have a hard time in our country. We’d like to think that isn’t so, but unfortunately it is. I think Asians have had an especially tough time in U.S. culture because for over a century an Asian face has been the face of the enemy.
First were the Chinese. The Chinese were imported to the U.S. to build the railroads and to wash the laundry, but they were soon branded as the “Yellow Peril” and viewed with hatred and suspicion when they dared to think that they could share the American dream.
Then came the Filipinos. As a result of our annexing the Philippines as part of the Spanish-American War, we became engaged in a vicious guerrilla war in our newly acquired colony. The fanatic charges of Filipinos caused the U.S. Army to adopt the.45 caliber automatic as the standard handgun, because this pistol had the stopping power to drop a man in his tracks. Some of the things we did in the Philippines at the turn of the century foreshadowed our worst actions in Vietnam.
Then came the Japanese and World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor was truly an infamous act, but an equally infamous act was herding Japanese-Americans into camps based on the notion that an Asian face meant a traitor’s face.
Then came the Korean War, where even the people we were supposed to be helping (the South Koreans) were “gooks” to our troops, just like the North Korean enemy.
Eventually the Southeast Asians got their turn with Vietnam. That war is too close for me to even understand my feelings about it. Like a lot of Americans, I thought the war was wrong. And like a lot of young American men, I still went to war because I couldn’t define what courage really meant.
I guess to some people we will never be “real” Americans because our faces remain Asian, even though our hearts belong to the United States. That’s a sad fact that gnaws at us. By the time I got home I was depressed. I got more depressed when I played the messages on my machine. Detective Hansen had called. I dialed the number he left.
“This is Police Detective Hansen.”
“This is Ken Tanaka. Did you want to speak to me?”
“Yes. I’m wondering if I could ask your cooperation in something.”
“Yes?” This was a new development, asking me for help.
“None of the clubs downtown have a dancer that matches your description, but when I went to the Paradise Vineyard they had three redheads dancing there. None of them would admit to knowing Mr. Matsuda, so I’d like you to go down there this evening before their first show to see if you can identify the woman you saw with Mr. Matsuda two nights ago.”
“What time?”
“Five o’clock.”
“Can you make it five-thirty?” I didn’t want to cut my appointment with Michael at three-thirty short. His office was in the mid-Wilshire district and the traffic might be a problem.
“Okay.”
“Can you pick me up in front of the office building where you first met me?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, I’ll see you then. Good-bye.”
I hung up the phone. The police not finding the woman who was with Matsuda was not a good sign.
Michael’s office was in one of the glass cube office buildings that dot Los Angeles. I suppose the first one of these had some style, but now there’re so many of them that they sort of blend into the horizon. After going through the preliminaries with the receptionist, I was ushered into Michael Kosaka’s domain.
Michael had a raffish beard that made him look like a pirate, an image that isn’t totally inappropriate for a single practice attorney. From the gray in his hair I’d say he was in his early forties, and he had a hint of a middle-aged paunch gently pressing against the belly of his light blue shirt.
His office was decorated in highly polished rosewood furniture, and on his walls he had Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Two were Hiroshiges, and another was a triptych of Yoshitoshi’s flute player: expensive antiques.
Japanese woodblocks are interesting. In the 1700s and 1800s they were made to be sold for literally pennies. That’s why there are series of woodblocks like “100 Views of the Moon” or “100 Views of Edo (Tokyo).” The artist wanted you to collect all one hundred so he could turn a reasonable profit on things that sold so cheaply. Now a masterpiece by a Hokusai or a Hiroshige, which originally sold for pennies, can fetch enormous sums of money. Something inexpensive and new eventually turns into something expensive and old. It’s a kind of alchemy.
To make a woodblock, individual cherry wood blocks are carved for each color in the print. The blue color has its own block, the red its own block, and so forth. When a piece of mulberry paper is printed with all the blocks, the image emerges. All the blocks have to be in perfect alignment, or register, for the picture to come out clearly. Sometimes when you see a block for just one color, it’s hard to see what the picture is. It occurred to me that unraveling crimes is a little like woodblock printing. Layer after layer is put together until the total picture emerges, and everything has to fit together properly if the picture is going to look clear.
The L.A. County Museum of Art has an example of the same Yoshitoshi flute player that I saw on Michael’s wall. It’s a three-panel print of a flute player walking across a marshy plain under a full moon. Behind some marsh grass a robber waits to attack the traveler and kill him. As I recall the legend, the music of the flute so enchanted the robber that he let the traveler go. The example in the museum’s collection is pretty ratty and soiled, but Kosaka’s example was in excellent condition, with still-vibrant colors. I decided the first thing I better talk about was his fee. The office, furniture, and especially the art all spelled money.