The man grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and viciously slammed him into the wall. “Don’t give us that shit!”
The man with the bat swung it with cruel velocity into Yamasora’s side. His ribs fractured with a sound like a string of firecrackers popping.
Yamasora collapsed like a stringless marionette.
“Stop it!” Taizo shouted. “This is inhuman!”
“Inhuman? That’s funny. Tell that to the fifteen hundred GIs you Japs just butchered at Tarawa.”
The other security man bent down beside Yamasora. “C’mon, Nip, this doesn’t have to be so hard. Tell us what you know about the leaders of your Daihyo Shit Kaka or however the fuck you say it.”
Yamasora responded in kind: “Fuck you.”
The man with the bat bent down and rested the bat on his shoulder like Babe Ruth aiming for a ball—but in this case the ball was Yamasora’s face.
Taizo ran at the man as he swung, grabbing the bat before it connected.
“Goddamn!” the other security man said with a laugh. “This old Jap’s got more balls than the young one.”
The man with the bat yanked it away from Taizo, then swung it into the side of Taizo’s head. Mercifully he would not recall the moment of impact.
* * *
Taizo woke to exquisite agony; he reached up to touch the side of his head, which was swollen, tender to the touch, and caked with dried blood. Hazily he became aware of his surroundings. He felt a chill in the air and heard a moaning that sounded like the cry of an obake, a ghost. Taizo’s head throbbed like a beaten drum, but the cries of the wailing man bespoke pain far greater than his own.
“Taizo? Good, you’re awake. You all right?”
Taizo looked up. Yamasora was sitting beside him, his face battered and bloodied, his arm in a sling made of old rags. Taizo looked around. He was lying on a thin pallet resting directly on the cold ground, his body covered by two even thinner blankets. He and a number of other men were squeezed into a single Army tent; there was no oil heater, and judging by the light it seemed as if night would not be long in coming.
“Where are we?” Taizo asked.
“They call it the ‘bullpen.’ The stockade. Taizo, you shouldn’t have tried to help me. Now you’re in the same miserable boat I’m in. I’m sorry.”
Taizo sighed and said with what he thought was commendable stoicism, “I fear I shall never be able to enjoy a baseball game again.”
Yamasora laughed. “I think that goes for all of us.”
“Who is moaning?”
Yamasora nodded to a man, big as a sumo wrestler, two beds down. “That’s Tom Kobayashi. Officer Martin hit him with a bat so hard that the bat broke in two. He has an open wound on his scalp and is in constant pain.”
“Has he had medical attention?”
“Nope. None of us have. Dr. Mason from the hospital was there at the interrogations, in case a doctor was needed, but he didn’t lift a damn finger.”
Taizo was introduced to his fellow prisoners—all younger than he, most arrested on the night of November 4 and beaten by security officers. Tokio Yamane’s mouth was in bad shape after repeated punches, with only four teeth remaining. Another man was told, “Confess or I’ll make your eyes come out of your head” and then struck brutally in both eyes, each now blackened and as swollen as puffer fish. “They laughed as they hit us,” said Bob Hayashida, who worked at the motor pool. “There were WRA officials there watching and a security guy told one of them, ‘It’s open season on Japs, like to try your hand? It’s like shooting ducks!’”
It was all more than Taizo could take in. His head was still throbbing and he lay back onto his pallet, which was cold as an open grave. He closed his eyes and woke to the sound of mess hall bells ringing.
An MP entered the tent and escorted the prisoners to the Army mess hall for dinner. As Taizo walked, he saw that the “bullpen” was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence covered by wooden boards—so no one could see in?—with armed guards in each corner. In the mess hall Taizo was surprised when told to take a tray and help himself to the ham, eggs, sausages, and hot coffee—and even more surprised that the prisoners sat surrounded by white soldiers who seemed unperturbed by their presence.
That night the wind yowled like a cat, the gusts rippling the canvas of the tent’s walls and causing the tent poles to wobble like fragile saplings. Cold drafts of air blew in through the cracks and the temperature inside plunged below freezing. Taizo wrapped himself in his two blankets, for what little good it did, and did his best to sleep.
* * *
The headlines in the Los Angeles papers only grew more histrionic: PLAN OF TULE LAKE JAPS TO BURN BUILDINGS RELATED, with the story asserting that the internees “heaped oil-soaked sacks of straw about the administration building where they were holding 150 whites” in an attempt to “burn the place down.” Another claimed that TULE LAKE RIOTS MAY HAVE BEEN TOKYO-INSPIRED, “staged by ringleaders on direct orders from Tokyo.” Etsuko was beside herself with fear for Taizo’s safety, exacerbated by the lack of a reply to the letter she and Ruth had written.
The Manzanar Free Press was silent on the subject, so Ruth went straight to the administration office and insisted on seeing the Project Director himself, Ralph Merritt. After ten minutes she was ushered into his office. “My father was one of those transferred to Tule Lake,” she explained, “and we haven’t heard from him in over a week. We’re very concerned for his safety, and according to the papers—”
“Don’t believe the newspapers, Mrs. Harada,” Merritt told her. “Most of what they’ve printed about the incident is just hysterical nonsense. I spoke with WRA Director Dillon Myer about that mass demonstration the papers claim was violent and threatening, and he said that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Yes, there’s been some violence, but the internees didn’t take anyone hostage and no one tried to burn anything down.”
“Then why did Mr. Best call in the Army to take over the camp?”
“I’m not clear on that myself,” he said with a frown. “I can certainly call Colonel Austin and inquire about your father, though I can’t guarantee I’ll get a straight answer. But I can try.”
“Thank you,” Ruth said. “I appreciate that.”
“I remember your father’s case,” Merritt said sadly. “I didn’t want to send him to Tule, but he gave the board no choice. He seemed like a good man hamstrung by his own sense of honor. I’m sorry.”
* * *
Taizo dreamt of his farm in Florin, the fields white with strawberry blossoms in the spring; but then, no, the white wasn’t blossoms, it was snow, and Taizo began shivering in his sleep. He woke to the bitter cold of a late November morning and was grateful when the breakfast bells rang, so he could go inside the heated mess hall and warm himself with food and hot coffee. As they were escorted to breakfast, Taizo noted that the Army had begun expanding the stockade by erecting a barbed-wire fence around five Army barracks. Apparently the soldiers in the barracks were being relocated and these buildings would house the ever-growing number of “detainees,” now approaching two hundred. Taizo longed for the day they would vacate the flimsy tents and sleep on real cots on a real floor surrounded by real walls.