The Inoues, newlyweds like my parents had been when they immigrated, made their way to Los Angeles and to Little Tokyo, where second and third cousins were already living. The Inoue family business back in Tokyo had been retail clothing. Kenji’s parents and his grandparents and great-grandparents had been making traditional Japanese clothing for decades: kimonos—which I had heard of—but other kinds of garments, too, like hakama, obijime, and yukata, which I hadn’t. But Kenji was wanting to try something new, as he had tired of the family business, and there were plenty of other clothing retailers already in Little Tokyo when he and Chiyo arrived. He opened a vegetable and herb shop on Central Avenue, and because the building he leased had a large empty lot behind it, he could grow many of the vegetables and herbs himself in the plentiful California sunshine.
Twins Tomeo, a boy, and Kaminari, a girl, were born in 1926, and Mariko three years later. The family lived above the shop in an apartment where Mariko shared a room with Kaminari. The children spoke both Japanese and English at home. Kenji wanted them to be able to excel in America—go to a university, get good-paying jobs, and marry other Japanese Americans who accomplished the same. But he also wanted them to retain respect and admiration for their Japanese heritage. Mariko and her siblings went to public schools during the week and a local Japanese school on Saturday mornings, for language, writing, and cultural studies.
Even though Mariko shared a room with her older sister, Kaminari preferred her twin’s company to Mariko’s. The twins spent their free time when they weren’t working at the shop with a tight circle of friends, made up of both girls and boys, all of whom were nisei—first-generation Americans born of immigrant Japanese parents.
Kenji, who became fluent in English after only a decade in the States, and who would often translate for non-English-speaking Japanese, was a leader in the Little Tokyo community. Up until the attack on Pearl Harbor, he and the rest of the Japanese American enclave were, for the most part, an accepted appendage of Los Angeles. All of that changed on the morning of December 7. When the residents of Little Tokyo turned on their radios that Sunday, they’d heard the same shocking news as the rest of Los Angeles.
“Stay inside today,” her father had told Mariko after the Inoues had listened to the radio broadcasts and learned what had happened far away in Hawaii. And then on Monday, the eighth, he told his children, “You’re staying in Little Tokyo today.”
“I can’t go to school?” Mariko asked. She knew what had happened the day before in Hawaii was horrible. But she wanted to close her eyes to it, pretend it had never happened. She had a math test that day that she had studied hard for. There were plans being made for a seventh-grade Christmas play, and she was in charge of writing the program. She had library books due. But most important, there was a boy, Charles Kinwood, who had put a note in her locker the Thursday before. Do you like me? he had written. And she had responded on the same note, which she dropped through the vent into his locker, Yes. I do. On Friday at lunchtime she’d found another note in her locker that read, Do you want to be my girlfriend?
Mariko had been with a trio of her closest friends when she’d read it: a redhead named Sharon Kopasky, a raven-haired girl named Lupe Reyes, and a second-generation Japanese American girl named Patricia. They had huddled close to giggle and gush over Mariko’s note as she stood next to her open locker. Mariko was the first of their group to have a boyfriend. Brainy Charles Kinwood, who got As in every subject and who looked like a younger version of Gary Cooper, had been new to the school the previous year. She and he had been partners a few weeks earlier for a history project on the Incas. She thought perhaps he liked her in that way that boys like girls; she’d caught him staring at her often enough, well after the project on the Incas had been presented and they no longer had a reason to be talking to each other outside the classroom.
There was no question that she liked him. He wasn’t like the other seventh-grade boys, who still acted like they were in elementary school, picking fights and teasing the homely girls and pushing one another around and laughing like it was how they really wanted to be treated. Charles was nice to their teachers, was unkind to no one, said clever things, always knew the right answer to every question. She liked him a lot. She also knew if he was to be her boyfriend it would have to be a secret kept from her parents—because he wasn’t Japanese—and this thought thrilled her: a secret love affair with a boy who looked like Gary Cooper.
Her friends had watched as she wrote on the same note, Yes, I want to be your girlfriend!
“Put Xs and Os!” Sharon had said.
“Put lots of hearts!” Patricia had chimed in.
“I’ll put just one,” Mariko had replied, drawing a carefully penned heart next to her answer. “If there are going to be hugs and kisses, I want them to be real ones.”
This had set her friends to laughing and more squealing with admiration at her good fortune. Mariko had never been kissed before. Her twelve-year-old compatriots hadn’t, either. But they’d imagined it plenty of times.
Mariko knew there had to be another note in her locker that Monday morning, the eighth of December. She and Charles were going steady now, weren’t they? So of course there had to be a note. She had to see what it said. Maybe he wanted to meet up with her in the cafeteria or sit by her in science class or walk her home. She had to go to school that day.
“Please let me go,” she had asked her father.
“No,” Kenji had replied in Japanese. “That is impossible. You will not leave Little Tokyo today. Do you understand? Everything is different now for us. You can work on your studies here in the apartment or in the store. You will not leave Little Tokyo today.”
His tone had been resolute, and she knew there would be no changing his mind. She didn’t think he was right, that everything was different now for them. They were Americans. They’d had nothing to do with what had happened at Pearl Harbor. It was very sad, what happened to all those sailors and their ships. Very sad. It made her heart ache to think about it. But it had nothing to do with them. Her father was wrong.
She had hoped that Sharon or Lupe would come by after school to see if she was sick. Or to tell her that they had seen Charles Kinwood and he’d asked about her. But they didn’t come. There was a telephone in the store that she was not allowed to use unless it was an emergency. She asked her father if he would let her use it just this once to call a friend and he said absolutely not. No one was to use the phone for the foreseeable future. For any reason.
An hour later, at four o’clock, Mariko asked her mother, not her father, if she could walk the three blocks to Patricia’s house. She was bored, and Patricia lived in Little Tokyo, so she wouldn’t have to leave its boundaries. Chiyo had been distracted by the influx of customers and neighbors and friends coming into the shop to talk about President Roosevelt’s address to Congress earlier that day. War had been declared on Japan. Chiyo said yes, in a hurried tone and with a tagged-on command that Mariko be gone no longer than an hour. Mariko left the store thinking that perhaps her mother wanted her to leave for a little while so that she could speak openly with their neighbors about the dreadful state the world was in.
The streets of Little Tokyo were less busy than usual, but still the air was charged with energy. There were unfamiliar cars on Central Avenue and First Street, which were the main thoroughfares, and Caucasian men in suits and hats were getting in and out of them, consulting papers in their hands, walking into shops with long strides, as though they were in a hurry to buy something.
Patricia, whose father was an electrical engineer who worked outside Little Tokyo, lived in a well-maintained duplex on South San Pedro Street. Mariko had been to her friend’s house many times. Patricia was the oldest of four girls, and her mother, who was half American, half Japanese, was a dance instructor, and sometimes she would allow Patricia and her friends to attend her classes at her little studio on Second Street for free. Patricia’s family lived in one of the nicer homes in Little Tokyo, with its trimmed front yard and year-round flowers in terra-cotta pots. As Mariko neared the house, she could see there were none of those strange cars parked at the curb. In fact, Patricia’s end of the street was uncharacteristically quiet. She rapped on the door and waited, but there was no answer. She rapped again. A few seconds later Mrs. Hsiu, the elderly Japanese woman who lived next door, and who must’ve heard her knocking, opened her own front door and poked her head out.
“They’re gone,” Mrs. Hsiu said quietly in Japanese, as though there were people hiding in the perimeter bushes waiting to pounce on her.
“Gone where?” Mariko asked.
“They’re gone,” the old woman said, this time emphasizing the second word so that it was clear what she meant by it. Patricia and her family had left Los Angeles. Fled.
Mariko stepped over from Patricia’s front doorstep to Mrs. Hsiu’s.
“What do you mean? Where did they go?” Mariko said as a strange anxiety fell across her.
The old woman leaned over Mariko so that she could whisper in her ear even though the two of them were alone on the street.
“They’ve gone to an aunt’s house in Nevada. Don’t tell anyone, Mariko. If anyone asks you, you don’t know where they went.”