Indeed, the protestors were becoming more belligerent—inching closer to the soldiers, hooting at them. A few yelled “Banzai!” and in response some MPs shouted back, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” A sergeant barked at his men, “Hold your ground!” Most of the soldiers looked young and scared, flinching when people threw stones or lighted cigarettes at them. An Army captain ordered the crowd to disperse, but they ignored him and kept needling the soldiers like little boys poking sticks into a nest of scorpions.
Satoru was right. This was looking very bad.
The captain tried to reason with the protestors, speaking at some length, but when protestors threw large stones at him, he retreated behind the line of MPs. He repeated the order to disperse, but the crowd only jeered.
At the captain’s signal the soldiers started putting on gas masks, then began throwing tear gas canisters into the crowd. Stormy clouds of white smoke erupted behind the protestors and within seconds they were choking on the gas filling their lungs and stinging their eyes. The crowd dispersed, scattering in all directions—but some at the front of the crowd surged forward in panic, toward the line of soldiers.
Suddenly the air was torn by the jackhammer noise of machine guns and shotguns—at least two dozen rounds ripping into the crowd.
“Jesus Christ!” Ralph shouted.
Shotgun rounds tore into a young man—he looked like a teenager—a red fog briefly enveloping his torso as he fell, facedown, onto the ground. At least ten other people, most of them running away, also fell.
“Oh God!” Ruth cried. “No!”
Most protestors were fleeing for their lives, but a few were fighting back. They opened the driver’s side door of a parked car, released the parking brake, then pushed it forward, sending it speeding toward the military police. The car clipped off the northeast corner of the police station but kept bearing down on the line of soldiers. An MP fired a short burst of machine gun fire that blew out the car’s tires; it veered and crashed into an Army truck.
The remainder of the crowd now fled, leaving behind almost a dozen broken bodies beneath a wreath of smoke.
Ruth and Ralph stared in shock.
“Shit,” Ralph said softly.
Soldiers hurried to the fallen and began carrying them into the police station, presumably for first aid.
“We’d better get out of here,” Ruth said. “If we’re found in here, everybody in camp will think we’re spies—inus.”
They hurried up First Street, along with scores of others fleeing the violence. At the first intersection they turned right onto B Street. The wind carried the distant wail of an ambulance siren. But though most people were trying to escape, there were also angry groups shouting “Kill the inus!” Ruth and Ralph gave these a wide berth. Ruth wondered how it had come to this, how it was that they could be running for their lives from both the U.S. military and their own people?
A searchlight beam swung toward them and they ducked, missing it by inches. An Army jeep bristling with armed soldiers barreled up Fifth Street, causing Ruth and Ralph to fall back until it passed; when it had, they ran across the next firebreak until they reached Fourth Street, where Ralph had to stop, prop himself up against a barrack wall, and catch his breath.
“Where the hell are we?” he said between gasps. “The Russian front?”
“It’s cold enough,” Ruth agreed. “Are you going to be okay?”
He nodded, took a last gulp of air, and they continued running.
Mess hall bells began pealing all over camp, summoning people to meetings, even now. There was a very wide firebreak between Sixth and Seventh Streets and as they raced across it, Ruth felt exposed and vulnerable.
They made a beeline for Barrack 3. Ruth yanked open the door to her apartment and she and Ralph rushed in, slamming the door shut behind them.
The lights were off but everyone in the room—Etsuko, Frank, the children—were wide awake. How could they fail to be, Ruth realized, with the world turned upside down outside their walls?
“Mommy, Mommy!” Peggy cried, running to her mother and wrapping her arms around her legs. “You’re back!”
Donnie, too, ran up and embraced her. “Where were you, Mommy, why is there so much noise?”
“It’s all right, sweeties,” she said, wrapping her arms around them.
Snowball sidled up and rubbed her head against Ruth’s leg.
“Honey, thank God,” Frank said softly. “Where were you? I wanted to go look for you but didn’t know where to begin.”
“Later,” she told him, then, to the kids: “You two are up way past your bedtime. Time to go to sleep, okay?”
But though she tucked them in, the commotion outside, the constant knell of kitchen bells and the keening of ambulance sirens, kept them awake and afraid. Finally, Ruth gave them each less than a teaspoon of Frank’s cough syrup, and the codeine in it had them kayoed within minutes.
The adults went to the other side of the small apartment, Ralph and Etsuko sitting in chairs, Ruth and Frank side by side on the cot. Ruth and Ralph explained where they had been and what happened, tears again filling Ruth’s eyes as she recounted the shootings. “I’m sorry,” she told Frank, “I know it was dangerous, but I had to find Ralph.”
But Frank just nodded and draped his arm across her shoulders. “Of course you did. I’m just glad you’re both safe.” He looked at Ralph. “Are we safe? Do you think they might come after you?”
“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “I don’t think so, but after all I saw tonight, I don’t know anything for sure.”
Frank looked thoughtful, then got up, picked up a makeshift crowbar fashioned out of scrap metal, and gripped it firmly. “Someone should stand guard, just in case,” he said. “I’ve been asleep for nearly half the day, so I’ll take first shift.”
Etsuko stood. “I will tell Taizo and Jiro and Horace. They will want to arm themselves as well.” She gave Ruth a kiss. “You are a good sister, butterfly.”
Ruth tried to sleep, but as exhausted as she was, she couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes she saw that young man, wrapped in a shroud of blood and falling, falling forever in her memory.
* * *
His name was James Ito: seventeen years old, from Pasadena, shot through the heart and abdomen and pronounced DOA at the Manzanar hospital. The other fatality was Katsuji “Jim” Kanagawa, twenty-one, from Tacoma, Washington. Dr. Goto had labored to repair the perforations in Kanagawa’s stomach, lung, and pancreas, but he died of bronchial pneumonia five days later. Nine other men, ranging in age from twenty to fifty, recovered from bullet wounds. Dr. Goto’s report stated that all of the wounded but for James Ito were shot in the side or back, indicating they were running away. When the Army told Goto to change his findings, the doctor refused—and was summarily fired and transferred to another camp.
Two soldiers—privates Ramon Cherubini and Tobe Moore—had been the ones to start shooting, firing their weapons into the crowd as parts appeared to be advancing on them. Authorities determined that they acted in self-defense, and they were not prosecuted.
Well into Monday morning, Manzanar was in a state of barely contained chaos. Martial law was declared; meetings were broken up by MPs with tear gas. Throughout the night there were attacks on suspected inus.
Army reinforcements and California State Guard troops were called in to keep order. There were scattered work strikes. Schools closed. Many pro-American Japanese sought protective custody in MP headquarters, and by Wednesday sixty-five people—including Fred Tayama and Free Press staffers Chiye Mori, Satoru Kamikawa, Joe Blamey, and Ted Uyeno—were removed from Manzanar for their own safety. Jobs were found for them in nonmilitary zones in the Midwest and Northeast as part of the WRA’s “work furlough” program that allowed evacuees out of the camps if they relocated from the West Coast. Fifteen men thought to be the prime instigators of the riot—including Harry Ueno, who had been sitting in a jail cell the whole time—were ultimately sent to Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California.