Days in the bullpen were tedious but tolerable—there was a weekly delivery of cigarettes and newspapers, something to read at least. Taizo was stunned to see the lurid lies they printed about Tule Lake while blissfully unaware of the bloody truth. Mail service also resumed, though outgoing mail was heavily censored; Taizo finally received the letters Etsuko and Ruth had been writing, as well as a note from Jiro, worried and frustrated because the Army refused to allow him to visit his own brother.
He replied to Jiro first, saying that under no circumstances should he tell Etsuko her husband was a prisoner: he was deeply ashamed to be here and refused to have his family dishonored. Then Taizo wrote Etsuko, telling her not to worry; the stories about Tule Lake were overblown. He apologized for not replying sooner but he had a cold—true enough; he had begun coughing yesterday—and that all was well.
* * *
Ruth felt immense relief upon receiving the letter, but Etsuko fixated on Taizo’s cold and on a subtle unsteadiness in his handwriting. “He is still not well, I can tell. We should send him some cough syrup and lozenges.” Ruth agreed—it gave her mother something to do—and at the camp’s co-op store bought him cough medicine, Vicks VapoRub, and a pair of long underwear. They boxed it up and sent it with a long letter from Etsuko and two shorter ones from Peggy and Donnie that consisted of crayon drawings of Grandpa, a bright sun shining in a paper sky, and two valentine-red hearts.
December arrived in Manzanar bearing an unexpected gift: snow. Manzanar’s children—many of whom had never seen the stuff before—bundled up in peacoats and happily jumped into snowdrifts, learning quickly how to pack and toss snowballs, construct snowmen, and use scraps of plywood as passably good sleds.
December brought snow to Tule Lake as well, as well as a frigid mass of blustery air that kept people indoors during the day and at night seemed to rest on Taizo’s chest like a block of ice. His cold had worsened, his cough now a deep rattle in his chest, and the medicines from Etsuko did little to alleviate it. The long underwear made scant difference when those wintry gusts bellowed through the tent at night.
Finally, at least, the prisoners were receiving proper medical attention. When Dr. Mason took Taizo’s temperature—103 degrees—and saw his blood-streaked sputum, he immediately had Taizo transferred to the camp hospital and put him on penicillin, though the new antibiotic was in short supply, as was much else. Due to the Army’s demonstrated inability to manage a camp the size of Tule Lake, there were now frequent shortages of medicine, milk, food, hot water, fuel—some children were even barefoot for lack of shoes.
Inside a heated building, lying on a soft bed, Taizo was perversely grateful to the cold that brought him here. But Dr. Mason told him it wasn’t a cold but bacterial pneumonia (brought on, he neglected to mention, by the squalid, freezing conditions in the bullpen). The word “pneumonia” sent a shiver through Taizo as he recalled his six months abed with the “winter fever” when he was twelve.
“Am I”—his shortness of breath punctuated the question—“allowed visitors?”
“It depends on their age and health,” the doctor replied.
In the end, there was only one person he could ask for.
“Jiro,” Taizo said, chest rattling as he took another breath. “Brother.”
The doctor allowed a short visit. When Jiro arrived the next morning, he paled to see Taizo in bed with the same illness that he, Jiro, had inflicted upon him fifty years ago. But his brother looked so much worse now.
“Taizo,” he said softly. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Taizo said. He took a breath. “Warmer.”
“It is unconscionable what they did to you in that stockade,” Jiro said angrily. “Everyone in camp knows what they did. They are only putting prisoners in barracks now because they are afraid of being found out!”
“What is done—” Taizo burst into a wracking cough, and Jiro flinched to see bloody spittle trickling out of his mouth.
A Nisei nurse hurried over and wiped his chin with a towel. “Don’t make him talk too much,” she advised Jiro, who nodded.
“Taizo, answer me with a nod or a shake of the head. Shall I tell Etsuko that you are sick, in the hospital?”
At first Taizo shook his head, then thought better of it and nodded.
“But I should not mention the stockade—how you fell sick?”
Taizo shook his head vehemently. “Tell her,” he said, then, out of breath, waited for some more air and went on, “caught—outside. Must never—know—” He paused, then, summoning the strength and will to go on: “She would—blame herself. For not—being here. It would—haunt—her.”
“I understand.”
“Tell her I love her.”
“I will. I promise.”
Taizo nodded gratefully.
Tears welled in Jiro’s eyes. “My brother. Twice I have brought this fever upon you. I would give up my own life to take back the letter I wrote, selfishly asking you to join me. I am not asking for your forgiveness; I don’t deserve that. I only ask that you believe me when I say: I am so sorry, Taizo.”
Taizo was touched by Jiro’s contrition and by the obvious love in his eyes. It reminded him of something, an old proverb …
He said, “Koi to seki to wa kakusarenu.”
Jiro laughed. He knew the proverb:
“Love and a cough cannot be hidden.”
Taizo smiled and put his hand on Jiro’s, unafraid to show his own love. Nothing else mattered anymore.
* * *
When word of Taizo’s death arrived in that first week of January, it came as a cold, cruel shock after the sunny letter he had sent just weeks before. Had she not been given that false hope, Etsuko might have borne the news with some measure of composure; now she simply broke down, shudders of grief wracking her small body. Ruth had to rein in her own anguish to offer what strength she could to her mother. That night she stayed again with Etsuko, though neither of them fell asleep for hours; they spoke of the man they had both loved, his strength, his kindness, his humor. Snowball seemed to sense their shared sorrow and kept her distance, curled up on a pillow on the floor. Finally Etsuko drifted to sleep, leaving Ruth still wide awake. Her grief was a storm, a driving rain falling too fast to be absorbed; but beneath the sodden earth roiled a core of fiery lava, her anger at the actions of the country that had taken everything from her father. The storm would pass, but the anger would continue to burn like lava within the hard mantle of her heart.
Chapter 13
1945
Mitsuye Endo was a twenty-two-year-old Nisei woman fired in 1942 from her position as a clerk with the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento due only to her Japanese ancestry, then interned at Tule Lake and, later, Topaz War Relocation Center. She was an American citizen who had never been to Japan, did not speak Japanese, and had a brother in the United States Army. Civil rights attorneys James Purcell and Saburo Kido (then president of the Japanese American Citizens League) persuaded her to be a legal “test case” and filed on her behalf a writ of habeas corpus holding that as a loyal citizen, her evacuation and detention were unconstitutional.
On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court issued their opinion that “whatever power the War Relocation Authority may have to detain other classes of citizens, it has no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure.” The Roosevelt administration, given advance notice of the Court’s ruling, sought to preempt it by rescinding—the day before, December 17—the exclusion order for Japanese on the West Coast and announcing that all relocation centers would close by the end of 1945. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced the news on the radio that night, and the next evening, at Manzanar, meetings were held in every block to elaborate on the new policy and to answer any questions residents might have.
Ruth, Frank, Horace, and Rose were among the skeptical populace gathered in their local mess hall, listening to a WRA official wearing hornrim glasses read a statement from Director Myer explaining that “all persons of Japanese ancestry, unless there are reasons in individual cases, can return to the West Coast effective after midnight, January 20, 1945.”