Mariko’s brother and sister celebrated their eighteenth birthdays a week before their June 1944 graduation from the Federal High School, and both Tomeo and Kaminari had decided to leave Crystal City as soon as they could. Kaminari wanted to attend college somewhere to study art. Tomeo hadn’t been as forthright with his plans, only saying that he was considering his options. Certainly no one was expecting him to announce that he wanted to serve in the U.S. military.
He broke the news to Kenji and Chiyo the day after graduation, on the sixth of June, after Kenji had returned from his afternoon trip to the hives. It would also come to be known as D-Day, but of course, none of us in the camp knew anything about that yet. Mariko and I were sitting outside on her doorstep, and I was helping her ponder a chapter in which Calista would encounter a priestess who would either assist or hinder her; Mariko hadn’t been able to decide. We had spent many afternoons that spring thinking up scenes for the book. Mariko never asked me to write any part of it, but she liked hearing my thoughts on how Calista might rescue her kidnapped older sisters.
It was late afternoon and the early June day was sweltering. The Inoues’ triplex faced the north, so their front step was shaded by the building itself at this time of day. We were making a mental list of what the priestess might offer Calista, when we heard Tomeo and Kenji begin to argue. The front door was open to allow for the movement of air inside, and the sounds of their shouting flew over the threshold to our ears. There had been perhaps a quiet conversation going on between the two of them until Tomeo raised his voice first. He said something loudly in Japanese, not quite a yell, but something close to it. Kenji shouted a response, also in Japanese.
Mariko turned toward the house and the open door. Kenji said something else and Mariko’s eyes widened.
“What is it?” I asked. “What are they fighting about?”
“Tomeo wants to join the U.S. Army,” Mariko said, softly, so as not to be overheard.
I felt my own eyes widen. I didn’t think such a thing was possible, that a Japanese American could enlist in the military. It was my understanding that Japanese American men of draft age, except those already serving in the armed forces, had been forbidden to enlist. I hadn’t known that six months earlier, under pressure from civil liberties organizations, President Roosevelt had lifted that ban and created a special infantry unit called the 442nd, comprised solely of Japanese Americans who wished to serve. I would learn later that the army had called for fifteen hundred volunteers for this unit, and ten thousand had turned up at recruiting offices. Some army generals hadn’t wanted the Japanese American troops in their platoons, but the commander of the Fifth Army, in Italy, said he would take anyone willing to fight. The Japanese American men who signed on with the 442nd would end up in Italy, fighting alongside the 100th Infantry Battalion, another unit made up mostly of Japanese Americans from Hawaii. Tomeo would in fact join the 442nd. But that moment was still weeks in the future.
More shouts floated out to us on the front step.
Mariko started translating for me as she eavesdropped with concerned curiosity.
“But I want to serve my country. I want to defend my country,” Tomeo shouted.
“Do you know what you are saying?” Kenji yelled. “Do you know what you must do? You must renounce allegiance to Japan!”
“I have no allegiance to Japan! I was born in America. I’m an American. And I want to defend my country.”
“How can you turn your back on your heritage?” Kenji sounded as if he was about to explode. “How can you dishonor your father this way? How can you even think of doing such a thing? You shame me!”
“I am not turning my back on who I am, my father,” Tomeo answered, in a softer tone. “I know who I am, and I know who you are, and we are not men who would fight for Japan right now. I respect you, I respect my heritage, but I am an American.”
“You dishonor me!” Kenji screamed. “You shame me!”
“No, I don’t. I honor you and your choices. You and Mother chose to leave Japan and come here to America. You chose to have children here who would be American citizens. You chose what you wanted. And now I am choosing what I want.”
From inside the house I heard someone crying. I didn’t need Mariko to translate what that sound was. Chiyo was weeping for her son. And for her husband, too, I supposed.
I looked over at Mariko, wondering what she was thinking, wondering whom she was feeling the most empathy for, her brother or her father. The look on her face was one of bewilderment. She and I had already talked about what it would be like when the twins left, when she’d be the only child in the house, but this was different. Tomeo wasn’t just leaving Crystal City; he wanted to enlist in the U.S. Army. He wanted to join the fight against the nation of his ancestors.
I didn’t know what to say to Mariko in response to this. I’d opened my mouth to ask if she wanted to go swimming, when Tomeo stormed out of the house, nearly falling on top of us. We scrambled to get out of his way. Kaminari was only a second or two behind him. She’d apparently been inside the little house, too. But she must have been only listening. She hadn’t been crying or yelling. She clearly hadn’t been surprised by Tomeo’s announcement. Kaminari surely already knew her twin’s plans. He and she had probably talked about it for weeks, months maybe.
Mariko said something to her siblings as they stomped off that I could not understand. It sounded like a question. She might have asked them where they were going.
Tomeo didn’t look back and he didn’t say anything. Kaminari answered Mariko over her shoulder as she continued after their brother, with soft but urgent words that meant nothing to me. Maybe she was saying, “Please just leave Tomeo be right now, Mariko.” Or “Don’t get involved with this, you still have to live here, Mariko.” Or “Get out of this place the second you can, Mariko.” Tomeo and Kaminari turned down Meridian in the direction of the camp administration buildings, walking fast, heads together.
A new argument began in the house, between an angry father and a devastated mother. Mariko turned toward the sound of her parents’ shouts and then looked back to me.
“Let’s go,” she said, making it clear this conversation was not one she wanted to listen in on.
Mariko scooped up the notebook and we rose from the cement slab.
“They’ve never really known how to talk to each other, my father and Tomeo,” Mariko said as we walked away, as if I deserved an explanation after what we’d just heard. “The culture is so very different here in the West between fathers and their children than the world my father grew up in. My father has always expected Tomeo to do exactly as he says with never a complaint, but that’s not how American sons treat their fathers. Tomeo looks Japanese on the outside, but on the inside, he’s an American. Just like me. I can see why he wants to serve. If I was him, I would, too.”
I just stared at her as we walked. I didn’t think she was like Tomeo. Mariko was good-natured and funny and kind, and Tomeo had always seemed broody and aloof. But then, these were also merely outside characteristics, just like their black hair and golden complexion and slanted eyes. Inside, Mariko and her brother were Westerners. Mariko didn’t act like her brother, but she thought like he did.
We went to my triplex, where the stoop was only half in shade. We spent the next hour fanning ourselves with folded pages torn from an expired Montgomery Ward catalog and not working on the story at all. Instead, we imagined what we’d be doing if we were eighteen at that very moment, like the twins were. Mariko said she’d leave Crystal City to go to Manhattan and work for the New York Times. She didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles after all. She’d start in the mailroom if she had to, while she took journalism classes at night. Then she expounded on what kind of apartment she’d have near Times Square and all the plays she would see, and how she’d need a warmer coat.
“And what about Charles?” I asked, wondering if he figured into her imaginings of the future, especially if she still wasn’t allowed to return to California.
“Well, if you and I were eighteen right now, he’d be eighteen, too. He’s already told me if the war’s still going on when he’s old enough to enlist, he’s going to fly fighters. So he’d be in flight school right now learning how to dogfight and do barrel turns. I’d be writing him letters and spraying the envelopes with perfume and putting lipstick kisses where I’d sign my name.”
We mused silently on these happy but hard-to-fully-imagine thoughts of being eighteen, in New York City, and her writing love letters to a boy she’d not yet kissed.
“Where would you go?” Mariko asked me a moment later.
I didn’t know where I would go if I could leave Crystal City. The horizon seemed endless, even sitting on a dusty step in a scorching-hot detention camp. “I could come with you, couldn’t I?” I replied. “Maybe I could get a job at the newspaper, too.”