The Phoenix Tree

‘Nothing.’ Only a little less blind was a wife.

He walked out of the hut, pulling his hat down over his brow against the pale blue glare of the Wyoming sky. The mountain peak had the sharp outline of winter; much sharper than the peaks had been back home. When they had brought him and his family here to Blood Mountain relocation camp two years ago he had felt a bitter, masochistic joy at how the Americans had spun the wheel full circle to grind him under again. He had got out of the bus that had brought them from Green River, where they had been unloaded from the train that had brought them from California, and he had looked around at the wide landscape, thinking how little it seemed to have changed since he had first seen it forty-one years ago.

‘Welcome back,’ he had said sardonically, but he had said it to himself, a private joke that he knew was pointless to share with his family. None of them, not even Tsuchi, knew what he had endured here.

He had come to the United States from Nagasaki in 1901, when he was twenty-one years old. He was middle class, descendant of a long line of weapon makers who were more than artisans; the line could be traced back to one of the master swordsmiths of Tanega who were the first Japanese introduced to guns by Portuguese traders in the middle of the sixteenth century. Okada guns and swords were bought and prized by army and naval officers; Chojiro had completed his apprenticeship when he got into trouble. He had never told his own family why he had left Japan: he had climbed into bed with his eldest brother’s wife, something his brother’s wife had liked but his brother hadn’t. He had landed in San Francisco and, through one of the boarding-houses that also acted as employment agents, he had got one of the few jobs then available to Orientals: working on the railroad. He had worked for a year in Wyoming, never becoming accustomed to the vastness of the landscape; it had seemed to reduce himself in his own estimation, making him ridiculously small in any scheme of things. He had received poor pay, poor accommodation and poor food, had been abused day after day by the Irish foremen who, with the advent of the Chinese and Japanese labourers, had now moved up the social scale. It was the first time the Irish long upper lip had come close to being a patrician feature.

The day his contract ended he had left the railroad and gone down to Idaho to work on sugar-beet farms, where the pay was no better but where the farmers, Mormons who themselves knew a little about discrimination, treated him better than had the Irish foremen. Four years later, having saved a little money won at gambling, he had moved to Los Angeles. Since the Mafia and Bugsy Siegel had not yet arrived in California, there was little call for a gunsmith; men were shot dead occasionally, but a Colt .45 was usually sufficient for the deed and it could be bought on mail order. He drifted to Gardena, where there was a small Japanese community, and there he started a nursery, as much by chance as by choice. It had been a hard struggle for the first five years; then he had begun to prosper. He had dreamed of going home to Japan, but he was still in disgrace with the family and he would not return till his parents wrote him to come back. His brother had divorced his errant wife and taken another, but that hadn’t altered his parents’ opinion of Chojiro.

In 1914 he had married Tsuchi Yataba, a ‘picture bride’ he had chosen from a selection sent him by an agent. There had never been any love in the marriage, but there had been respect on both sides: it was enough for each of them. There had been three children: Tamezo, born in 1916 after Tsuchi had had a miscarriage with her first pregnancy; then the two girls, Etsu and Masako, born two and three years later respectively. Their father never forgave them for calling themselves, Tom, Ettie and Madge when they started going to school and, despite their protests, he never called them anything but their Japanese names.

Ettie was now walking up the camp’s main road towards him, picking her way carefully through the dust. The camp these days was half-empty and the camp authorities put in no more than was absolutely necessary to maintain the roads and huts. Earth was piled up against the walls of the huts as insulation against the bitter winds that blew down from the mountains in winter; they reminded him of the sod houses, built by the pioneer settlers, that he and some of the other railroad workers had lived in all those years ago. He regretted, more than he could tell them, that his wife and daughters had to live in such conditions. But it was not his fault: everything was to be blamed on the Americans.

‘Another letter from Tom.’ Ettie held up letter, as she always did, though she knew her father, as he always did, would not ask what news it contained. But this time she did tell him: ‘He is not in the fighting any more, he’s safe somewhere. He said he can’t say where, just that it was some sort of training school.’

Chojiro Okada said nothing, looking away from her.

‘Dad—’ Ettie was a pretty girl with a soft, sad voice that suggested she was ready to weep for the world; instead, she was an incurable optimist, an American trait her father found insufferable. ‘I’m going to Chicago.’

‘What for?’

‘To work as a nurse. I’m tired of living here at Blood Mountain.’

Blood Mountain had been turned into a camp for incorrigibles, the ‘disloyals’ as they were called, those who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Some of the women had been passed as trustworthy and were allowed to take jobs in nearby towns; Ettie worked for a dentist in Green River and her sister Madge was a cook on a neighbouring ranch. They were looked upon as traitors by some of the more aggressive men in the camp, but they were never subjected to any abuse because of the respect in which Chojiro, a true patriot, was held.

‘Madge is going with me.’

‘You will not be allowed.’

‘Permission has already been granted.’

‘Not by me.’

Her voice was truly sad now. ‘Dad, Madge and I are grown women. You don’t try to understand that, just as you never tried to understand Tom’s point of view—’

‘Don’t mention your brother.’ He had stopped calling him my son. That implied some bond still existed between them, when there was none.

Ettie bowed her head. Whenever she was with her father, speaking in Japanese as he insisted, she automatically fell into certain Japanese gestures. ‘Madge and I will be leaving in two days’ time. We’d like to go with your blessing.’

He walked away from her, up towards the barbed wire that ran right round the camp. He was aware of the soldier, rifle slung over his shoulder, watching him from the nearest guard-tower, but he ignored him. There had been several escapes from the camp, including one attempt at a mass break-out; half a dozen of the escapers had been shot and all but three of the others had been recaptured. He had never himself attempted to escape, because he had known that his lot would not be improved: he would only have been at large in America. He was prepared to wait till the war was over, till Japan had won and he could go home again to the land of his ancestors. But lately he had been kept awake at night by doubts; if American propaganda could be believed the war was going badly for Japan. He was querulous with impotent rage at the gods. He had never been religious, but he had to blame someone other than the generals for the way things had gone. It did not occur to him to blame the Emperor.

In 1923, when his brother had died, Chojiro’s parents had written to say he was forgiven and was no longer in disgrace. In the late summer of that year he went home alone, leaving Tsuchi and the children in Gardena. Getting off the ship in Yokohama he went straight to a geisha house, determined to plunge into old customs as soon as possible; if there were any geishas in Gardena, he had never met any. He was still in the house when the great earthquake of 1 September struck at just over a minute before noon. He had been dressed and ready to leave when the house suddenly fell down around him. He survived, unhurt but for cuts and bruises, and for the next seven days distinguished himself by his bravery and his devotion to the injured. Four hours after the earthquake struck, a cyclone blew up, fanning the burning buildings and houses into an inferno. Over 100,000 people died or were posted missing and Chojiro would carry the memories of that week with him forever. He was superstitious enough to wonder at first if it meant some omen about his return to Japan.

But no: he went home to Nagasaki a hero. Both Asahi and Mainichi ran stories on him and he went home to more than just a prodigal son’s welcome. From then on he had known he would never be happy to die in America, that eventually he would have to be laid to rest in the shadow of the hills outside Nagasaki where he had grown up. He had gone back again in 1927, telling his father he would come home to stay when he had made himself a rich man in America. He had become Westernized to that extent: the prodigal son is even more welcome if he brings home his own fatted calf. He had come to realize, though reluctantly, that he lived better in America than his parents did in Japan.

In 1929 he had returned to Japan once more, this time taking Tamezo with him. The 13-year-old boy had not minded going; after all, his best friend, Kenji Minato, was also going, with his father. The two boys had been left with their respective grandparents; at the end of two years Tamezo had been glad to return to America, but Kenji had stayed on, content to be thoroughly Japanese. Chojiro had been bitterly disappointed and almost uncomprehending when Tamezo, in his first fit of filial rebellion, told him how much he had hated Japan and everything about it. He had taken Tamezo with him again in the summer of 1937, when Hideki and Mieko Minato had gone home to live in Japan for good. But the visit had not been a success. Tamezo had been politely respectful towards his grandparents, but adamant towards his father that Japan was not for him.

Tamezo had visited the Minatos in their new home in Tokyo and come away shocked. ‘Ken’s become one hundred per cent Japanese,’ he told his father. ‘Ken – he wouldn’t let me call him that, like I used to. He insisted on Kenji—’

‘As he should,’ said Chojiro. ‘You should take him as an example.’

‘Dad, I don’t want that sort of example. For Pete’s sake, I just want to be an American – what’s wrong with that?’ As if to prove his point, Tamezo spoke in English. ‘That’s where we live, isn’t it?’

‘Only till the right time comes to leave,’ said Chojiro in Japanese.

Over the next few years Chojiro talked of going home to Japan to stay. But, though he was not demonstrative, he loved his children and he came to realize that, if he and Tsuchi retired to Japan, Tamezo and his sisters would refuse to accompany them. They had become Americans, despite all his sometimes harsh discipline that was meant to make them Japanese.

He had welcomed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if it were a blow for freedom. ‘You will see now what Japan can teach the world. There are still too many barbarians masquerading as civilized people.’

‘Hitler, for instance?’ said Tamezo, now insisting on being called Tom.

‘Germany is like Japan, it is entitled to its own sphere of influence. Do you think the barbarians we have in Washington are any better?’

They had argued, stiffly polite, with Tom choking on his anger at his father’s attitude. Then the barbarians did start to emerge. Westbrook Pegler wrote in his column: ‘The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now – and to hell with habeas corpus.’ California’s Attorney-General, Earl Warren, demonstrated that Justice could be as blind in one eye as any politician cared to make her. The Western Defence commander, Lieutenant-General De-Witt, showed his stars as a racist; he took an overdose of patriotism, a bad thing for military men. There were no American-Japanese, as far as the bigots were concerned: they were Japs and nothing else, not even to be trusted as much as Germans. The Yellow Peril was peril indeed, and on 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt, one of Tom’s heroes, signed Executive Order 9066, interning all Japanese from the West Coast.

‘I told you so,’ said Chojiro and packed his bags for the internment camp at Santa Anita racetrack, content to have been proven Japanese by the barbarians. Though they did not know it, he and his family were quartered in a horsestall that had once housed Phar Lap, an Australian national hero that had come to California and, according to Australian legend, been poisoned by the Americans. No one was safe from the barbarians, not even horses.

He had ignored Tamezo’s vehement protests to the authorities at Santa Anita and then at Blood Mountain. It was shameful to have a son who so openly and loudly declared his allegiance to the American flag; so he went out of his way to shut America out of the family circle. In the camp he insisted that nothing but Japanese should be spoken amongst them. He had not taken part in any of the pro-Japanese demonstrations by the Issei and the Kibei, the Japan-educated Nisei, leaving that to the younger men; but he had sat in on the meetings that had planned the demonstrations. When a group of Kibei had attacked Tamezo, who had abused them for their treason to the land of their birth, he had turned his back and walked away, though it had hurt him more than he would ever confess, even to Tsuchi.

When in 1943 Tamezo had, after a number of applications, at last been accepted for army service, Chojiro had once more turned his back. This time he had moved out of the family hut and remained out of it till Tamezo had left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Once his son had gone he had joined all the demonstrations, as if he were fighting his own small private war. He had to wash away his shame in front of the other Issei.

‘Okada-san—’

He came back from his reverie of the past, turned away from the barbed wire to see Yosuke Mazaki standing a few yards from him. ‘I’m sorry, I was a long way away then – What is it?’

Mazaki was one of the Kibei, a young man whose fanaticism sometimes made even Chojiro uncomfortable. He was a hero who, fortunately, knew he would never be called upon to be heroic; such men are often more dangerous to their cause than to their enemies. Chojiro did not like him, but tolerated him.

‘Okada-san, I’ve had a message. Kenji Minato has been held by American Naval Intelligence for the past six months down in San Diego.’

Chojiro Okada worked his lips up and down over his teeth, the only indication he ever showed that he was perturbed. As a young man he had been like his son, profligate with his emotions and the expression of them; but the years in America had taught him the dangers and non-profit in such indulgence. He had tried to look calm, but it was always the calm of a thinly frozen lake.

‘What else did the message say?’ He had no part in the espionage network that ran through the camps and through other channels of which he had no knowledge at all. But it had been he whom Kenji Minato had come to first.

Mazaki did not look at him directly, as if turning his face away from the steel of the wind. ‘That he has now escaped.’

Chojiro Okada had been surprised when, two days after Pearl Harbor, Kenji Minato had phoned him. ‘I should like to meet with you, Okada-san. But please do not mention me to your family, not even to Tamezo.’

He had driven all the way out to Santa Monica in the two-year-old Buick which he had to sell only three months later for two hundred dollars, the best offer he could get before he and his family were carted off to Santa Anita racetrack. The irony was that on that day of the enforced sale in Gardena there had been several vultures with German names.

He and Kenji Minato had walked up and down under the palm trees on the promenade. People looked at them suspiciously or, in the case of one man, accusingly. He was an elderly man, wearing a faded American Legion cap, and he stood at the promenade railing staring out to sea, towards Japan, then looking back at Okada and Minato as if expecting them to start signalling the invasion fleet just beyond the horizon of his dimly-sighted eyes.

‘Why didn’t you come to visit us?’ Chojiro Okada had been circumspect in his greeting of the younger man, expressing no surprise. The war with Japan was only forty-eight hours old and already bricks had shattered the glasshouses in Gardena. Kenji Minato, wherever he had come from was not here just to pay his respects to his father’s old friend.

‘I had work to do. Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego. I very rarely came to Los Angeles.’

It was a moment or two before the significance of the three cities he had named besides Los Angeles sank in. ‘You were attached to the US Navy?’ Then he smiled at his own naivety; Minato mirrored his smile. Over by the railing the Legion veteran glared at them, then looked hurriedly out to sea again; he hated all Slant-Eyes, but especially ones who smiled as if the war was already won. Okada ignored the veteran of the war long gone; he nodded approvingly at the young man who was fighting the present war, albeit covertly. ‘You started early.’

‘Almost three years ago.’