Milwaukee, Wisconsin—Spring 1998

While attending a Jesuit college in the Midwest, I first came to understand fragments of my father’s childhood. I had been reading Jeanne Wakatsuki’s Farewell to Manzanar, and I happened to mention the book to my father as I was talking with him on the telephone one evening. To my surprise, he began to tell me that he was part of this particular history. In the beginning, my father refused to discuss any details surrounding his experience, but over time, and after numerous telephone calls, he eventually began to cave in. As I probed my father and asked him to remember his experiences, a new, competing history began to emerge for me that was not only different from the national narratives we tell over the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but counter to those tales told by Issei and Nisei survivors of internment, including Wakatsuki’s personal narrative account. My father’s recollection began to move me from the images I had in my head to an actual text, in a reversal where “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about.” I too had been haunted by ghosts that visited me through images in my sleep. My father’s memories also become a way to access myself—an entrance into my own interior life history.

I continued to press my father for more of his story—my story. He told me that he was part of a voluntary group of Japanese Americans who cooperated with the government during the war, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, so they wouldn’t be accused of acts of treason or sabotage against their country. At that time, as it still is today, to cooperate with the government somehow constituted a patriotic demonstration of loyalty—being willing to do whatever your country asks of you at a time of war. I began to understand my father’s shame, or chizoku, and why he never spoke much about anything that happened during the war. I would have to make more than a few telephone calls before I started to hear a version of the truth.

Father on family farm just prior to relocation in 1941.

My father’s first recollections were of his childhood at the age of six. He and my grandfather were living on a 25-acre strawberry farm near Portland, Oregon. Grandfather owned the land in my father’s name, and with the help of migrant laborers, he managed to keep the farm afloat, working hard everyday tending to his prized crops. My grandmother and two aunts had died some years before, so it was just my father and grandfather. Visitors to the farm were rare, but my father remembers some visitors—they were the white men from the FBI who came to visit Grandfather a number of times before Pearl Harbor had even been bombed. They drove up in their big, shiny black car just as the sun was setting. They would always bring Grandfather a clear, alcoholic beverage in a bottle and proceed to drink with Grandfather, getting him drunk. It was then that the men from the FBI would ask Grandfather many questions, one asking the questions while the other took notes in a little black book. Though they seemed friendly enough, my father said that grandfather was always very angry after these men left. Grandfather would throw things around the small farmhouse, curse and mumble to himself. At these times, my father would hide under the house, on the cold damp earth, sleeping there until morning, when Grandfather had calmed down and my father could no longer hear the sound of glass breaking on the floorboards above him.

On one occasion, the same men came to visit early in the morning, before the daily work in the fields had started. The men spoke to Grandfather briefly and then sped away in their car, leaving a dust trail behind them as they drove away. After the men left, Grandfather didn’t work in the fields that day; in fact, he never worked their fields again. Grandfather was given 48 hours to evacuate 300 miles inland. Why they were going my father never understood, but where they went my father would never forget.

Grandfather packed some clothing, old photographs, eating utensils, an old dresser, and drove my father in their pick-up truck to the city. They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Grandfather stopped at the Bodle Produce Processing Company, the firm that was mortgaging the land to Grandfather. He explained to the manager that he would not be able to fulfill his contract with them, and so the manager asked for the pick-up truck as partial compensation. My father was ordered to help Grandfather unload the contents of the truck, and after finishing this task, they waited patiently.

My father told me they were waiting for my great-grandfather who was a sharecropper in Ontario, Oregon. Great-grandfather had been made aware of the situation via the town telephone, and was driving into the city of Portland to pick them up. When Great-grandfather arrived, his truck was loaded with their personal belongings, and the three of them headed toward the city’s police station. In order to drive east without getting arrested, Great-grandfather needed to make sure he took the right route. The local police obliged him by marking Great-grandfather’s tattered map with a route that would not pass any areas that were considered military installations, which in turn would keep everyone safe from incarceration. After running out of gas and getting a flat tire, my father said that they arrived in Weiser, Idaho, just over the Snake River. Of course, as my father said to me on the phone, this trip took some time because not every gas station along the way would sell gas to “Japs” or fix their tires for them. Weiser is where my father would spend the rest of his youth.

Tanaka family. Great-aunt is the baby being held.
grandmother is the woman standing off to the side.