Hisao Takagawa has a shock of white hair on the top of his narrow head. For twenty years he owned and ran a clothing store on Fillmore Street. Now the store is shuttered and the inventory sold to competitors for a fraction of its value.
“For you,” Hisao goes on, “this is not so bad. You are a citizen, not even married to a Japanese. There’s no chance they’ll deport you.”
“Ot
san,” Karl says, “they aren’t going to deport you.”
Karl has always been impatient with his parents’ nervous self-defensiveness, their reluctance to trust non-Japanese. Karl was born in California. His childhood memories are filled with San Francisco’s bright and shifting light, its banks of silver fog and rows of pastel-colored houses. Their neighborhood was full of Issei and Nissei, speaking Japanese, eating the foods—mikan at new year, sunamono, manju—and playing the music of their old homeland. But he also remembers white people and black people and Chinese living only streets away.
Once or twice when he was a teenager, he was called chink by white men in the street, older men with heavy faces and clothes more worn than his. He ignored them. Already he was interested in Communism, in the Party and its promise of a future where race and class and countries would be swept away. And where would this great change take place if not in America?
Hisao shrugs: who knows? He clears his throat. “I have heard,” he says, “a rumor.”
“That I am going to answer no to questions 27 and 28.”
“Is it true?”
Karl nods and Hisao sits back and folds his hands over his knees. “Well,” he says. “Please think about your mother and me before you make your answers. That is all I ask.”
“Otsan, my decision doesn’t have anything to do with you. You won’t be punished for what I do. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Is that right? How does it work if you know so much about it? Would you have thought that you could find yourself where you are today?”
Later that evening Karl is eating dinner in the mess hall, when out of the corner of his eye he sees someone enter the room and come toward him. He looks over and sees it is Keo Sasaki, followed by a couple of other men whose names he does not know.
Mr. Sasaki owned a big dry-goods store in his old life. There is talk that he ran a bookmaking operation, too, but no one knows for sure if this is true. Since evacuation, he has become the self-appointed spokesman for the internees, and a delegate to the Japanese American Citizens League from the camp. The administrators talk to Keo Sasaki if they want to know what people in the camp are thinking. Karl has heard him say that the American Japanese are fortunate that the government brought them to the relocation centers for their own protection, that it has provided them with work and schools and housing at a time of national crisis.
Now he comes to where Karl is sitting.
“Mr. Takagawa,” he says. “Would you walk outside with me?”
They go slowly, making a circuit around the building. Mr. Sasaki takes cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coat and offers one to Karl who accepts it. He is not afraid of Keo Sasaki, he tells himself.
At last Mr. Sasaki says: “I heard something and I want to find out from you if it is true.”
“What did you hear?” Karl asks. He knows the answer perfectly well, but to admit that would be to confirm the suspicion.
“You are going to refuse to swear your allegiance to our country.” He takes a pull on his cigarette and exhales smoke.
“The way I answer those questions is no one’s business but mine,” Karl says.
Mr. Sasaki sighs. “I wish,” he says, “that were true. I wish none of us had to answer any of these questions. We wouldn’t be here at all. We’d be at home. Your father would be running his store, I would be running mine.
“Unfortunately, we are at war. Normal considerations have to be suspended. Think about this for a minute. We have said to the authorities here and to the War Relocation Office that we shouldn’t be imprisoned because we are loyal Americans. How will it look if, when they ask us, some of our young men refuse to pledge their loyalty?
“Don’t you want to be allowed to leave this place? Think about the welfare of your people.”
Karl feels the anger tighten in his face. “My people aren’t only Japanese,” he says. “I act in solidarity with anyone who tries to do what is right when other people try to convince them to do what is easy.”
Mr. Sasaki stops walking. “Is that really what you think?” he says, wearily. “Have you looked around? I don’t see very many of your non-Japanese brothers in this camp. I didn’t see them protesting when we were sent away last year. On the contrary, I saw them lining up to buy your father’s stock for nothing and live in your vacated apartment.”
His voice has risen in anger, but now he resumes walking at his slow, meditative pace. “I understand you are a man of principle,” he says. “Just remember that I am not the only one who knows what you mean to do. Other people might not be so tolerant, you know. People get angry, get frustrated and then who can say what could occur? I dislike the idea of anyone being hurt.”
Mr. Sasaki drops the butt of his cigarette onto the frozen ground where it rolls and makes a black dash on the frost. Then he turns and walks away without another word.
Karl goes back to the mess hall to finish eating. No one asks him what Keo Sasaki said. Leigh takes May to get ready for bed and he stays at the table talking and smoking with a few men in the light and warmth.
As he is walking back to Building No. 147 he notices that he is being followed. There are three figures, maybe four walking behind him. Karl walks faster and so do they. He turns left down one of the rows of cabins. They turn left, too.
He stops and turns to face them. Now he counts five in all.
“What do you want?” he says loudly, hoping that people in the surrounding buildings will hear.
“Are you Karl Takagawa?” one figure asks.
“Yes,” he says. He stands up straight. “What do you want?”
The one who spoke approaches and Karl recognizes him, a skinny kid with slicked-back hair, though he does not know his name.
“We wanted to tell you,” the young man says, “that we are going to answer no. We’ve decided. Why should we go into the army now? We have to stand up for ourselves.”
Karl looks around at the others for the first time. They are all nodding and in the near-dark he can see that they are smiling. He laughs out loud with relief and claps the slick-haired leader on the back.
“Well done,” he says. “Well done. That’s great. We’ll show them.”
But later, when Karl tells Leigh what Mr. Sasaki said to him, she sits down abruptly on their bed like someone has let go of the strings that were holding her upright.
“He’s just a trumped-up old windbag,” Karl says. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Leigh says, “I heard that if you say no you might get sent away. To another camp. Is that true?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you heard about it, too?”
“Yes. I heard about it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” He does not reply to this. Leigh looks away from him, and he can tell that she is trying not to cry.
That night Karl cannot sleep. Eventually he gets out of bed and feels his way across the room. By touch he finds his coat and cigarettes. He opens the door and steps outside. The only lights are the arc lamps on the guard towers and over the main gate.