It was then that the sound of the radio came to me across the intervening spaces of the building. Herbert’s radio. He had a new Zenith in his room, a very powerful receiver with terrific sound quality and an extended aerial he’d fashioned himself, and we often gathered there to listen to programs at night, but here it was the middle of the day — lunchtime — and I could only wonder at that. I moved toward the sound as if in a trance. The sound grew louder. I heard voices raised in excitement and someone crying “Shush!” as the announcer thundered out the news and then I was there, framed in the doorway in astonishment: Herbert’s room was a scrum of humanity, everyone — even Mabel, even Wrieto-San — wedged in as tightly as commuters on the subway.
The radio crackled ominously. Someone glanced up at me — Wes. “Did you hear?” he said, and they all looked up now, no trace of irony or even awareness in his voice — he was delivering information, that was alclass="underline" Did you hear?
“Hear what?” I said. “What is it?”
“The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Wrieto-San, as I’m sure so many readers are aware, was a pacifist. During the war years he advised his apprentices to declare themselves conscientious objectors and at least two of them that I know of — John Howe and Herbert Mohl — were imprisoned as a result. Wrieto-San stuck by them. He visited them in jail, sent them foodstuffs, letters, books and other amusements. So it was with me as well. Within an hour of the initial broadcasts, after we’d dined and got back to work in the drafting room, he took me aside. “Tadashi,” he said, “I’m very sorry about all this, this — unfortunate — business.” And he was sorry indeed, not only for the madness that was to come, the loss of life and destruction, but because he so genuinely admired the cultures of the powers the United States and its allies had aligned against. Certainly if the war had been with Australia or Indonesia or the Belgian Congo he would have opposed it, but this went even deeper, this saddened him so that his voice shook and lost its timbre. He looked up at me. We were standing just beyond the doorway to the drafting room, out of sight of the others. “You know what this means, don’t you? ”
I wasn’t thinking. Call me naïve, but I never dreamed that the Americans among whom I’d lived and worked for so long now would see me as a threat to the national security. Or — more significantly — that I would be forced to leave Taliesin, the only sanctuary I’d fully embraced in all my life, the place that was more a home to me than Tokyo itself, and the man who was, at this juncture, as much my father as the man who’d sired me. I was about to slip the question back to him like the baton in a relay race, to say, No, what does it mean? when his face told me. I was going into exile. Going to prison.
“They’ll be coming for you,” he said. “And by God”—his eyes flared—“I’ll do everything in my power to keep them off of this property, but I’m afraid it’s not going to do much good. Not in the end.”
“But isn’t it possible—?” I protested. I let my arm sweep forward to suggest all that was or should have been included in that realm of possibility, that they would see me as the harmless architectural apprentice I was, as a devotee of Taliesin and a follower of one Master only, and that against all reason or expectation I would be allowed to stay on and assist in the great work of Wrieto-San and humanity itself.
He took a moment. I could hear my fellow apprentices chattering away excitedly, war in the air, this place Pearl Harbor stamped suddenly in all our minds though none of us could have pinpointed it on a map the day before. “You might want to think about Canada.”
A picture of that vast polar country came to me — a place I’d never been to, but which seemed an eternal wintry Wisconsin spread from one sea to the other — and my dubiety must have shown on my face.
Wrieto-San reached out his hand then and laid it on my shoulder, a gesture I will always remember for the spontaneous warmth of it, as Wrieto-San was never physical with anyone, always standing erect and proper and respecting what today would be called one’s personal space. “Whatever you need,” he said. “Anything. Just ask.” He dropped his hand and shoved it deep into his pocket, then turned and strode back into the drafting room, crying out, “Good God, it’s like a meat locker in here! Can’t any of you keep up a fire?”
The next day, though it was snowing and Taliesin loomed amidst the frozen landscape like an ark locked in the fastness of an unreachable sea, they came for me. Two men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, showing badges and faces as grim as boot heels. I’d thought of hiding in the stables, of asking Herbert or Wes to lie for me and say I’d fled to Canada, but that was the way of cowardice, not honor. That was the way that would have implicated them — and Wrieto-San — and I couldn’t take it. Instead, though I was as close to tears as I’ve ever been in my adult life, I came forward, striding purposefully through that miracle of organic architecture and aesthetic purity, and bowed to the two men in the heavy twill suits and tan overcoats. Shikata ga nai, is what I said to myself — it can’t be helped. And then I bowed to Wrieto-San, to Mrs. Wright and my fellow apprentices who’d gathered there in the living room as if for a Saturday night’s entertainment, and gave myself up to the snow and my innocence and the two steely representatives of the country my country had wronged.
But I see, once again, that I’ve gone on too long here. Suffice to say that I experienced the usual abuses and deprivations, the local jail (or should I say hoosegow?) at first, then, after President Roosevelt issued his infamous executive order 9066, removal to a relocation center in Arkansas and finally to the Tule Lake camp in the north of California, where the most radical and suspect aliens were interned. I won’t take time here to describe the appalling conditions of the uninsulated tarpaper barracks into which we were crowded, the lack of cooking facilities or waste and sewage disposal, the threats and insults of the guards or the anomalous and quite mad fact that hundreds of South American Japanese, many of whom no longer even spoke the language of Dai Nippon, were extradited and interned with us. Nor will I say anything about the national administrator of the internment program, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, except to repeat his rationale for all this suffering, humiliation and deprivation of basic human rights not only for resident aliens like myself but for the Nisei who were born in America — that is, “A Jap’s a Jap.”
Wrieto-San wrote me from time to time. My fellow apprentices, many of whom enlisted and went off to fight despite Wrieto-San’s disapproval, sent me books and foodstuffs and for Christmas that first year a quart bottle of Canadian Club reserve whiskey that smelled, tasted and went down like the pure distillate of freedom itself. Still, for long stretches of time that seemed as vast as the desert scrub that fell away from the two knobs of desiccated rock that were all we had to stare at, I didn’t care what became of me. I’d lost Taliesin. Lost Wrieto-San. Lost my dignity and status as a human being. If I’d known then how long the war would go on or that the scene in the courtyard would be the last time I’d lay eyes on Wrieto-San till after it was over, I don’t think I would have been able to endure.