Applause and cheers erupted from the crowd.
The official went on to stress that the relocation centers will “remain in operation for several months” and that school “will be continued through the current school year. This will enable families with school-age children sufficient time to plan their relocation so that the pupils may reenter school in their new communities at the beginning of the fall term.” He noted that the lifting of exclusion came at an opportune time since “there is a good demand for workers in war plants, in civilian goods production, and on the farms.
“Special funds have been provided by Congress for the assistance of needy people who have been displaced from their homes by restrictive governmental action…” He finished: “The WRA feels wholly confident that no evacuees will be deprived of adequate means of subsistence by reason of the closing of the homes. Signed, D. L. Myer, Director.”
After further applause, the official opened the floor to questions.
Ruth shot to her feet before anyone else and raised a hand.
“Yes,” she said, “I have a question.”
Something in her tone made Frank think: Uh oh.
“Yes, ma’am, go ahead.”
Ruth asked, “Is that all?”
The official blinked like a startled owl. “Pardon me?”
“I said, is that all?” she repeated. “No apology? No ‘We’re sorry we tore you from your homes and destroyed your businesses’? No ‘We’re sorry we put you in prison camps with machine guns pointed at you and your children twenty-four hours a day’? Or”—and here her voice broke—“‘we regret the death of your loved ones who would still be alive today had they not been brought to this godforsaken, goddamned pisshole in the middle of nowhere?”
Her shouted words—and her use of profanity, quite indecorous for a Nisei woman—shocked and silenced everyone in the room.
Frank took Ruth gently by the arm, saying quietly, “Okay. You’ve made your point. Let’s go home.”
Moving like a sleepwalker, Ruth allowed herself to be escorted outside into the chill winter night. The frigid air quickly sobered her, bringing with it a cold draft of embarrassment. She started for their barrack, but only got as far as the latrine before she broke down weeping. Frank wrapped his arms around her, whispering softly, “It’s okay. You’ve had to hold it all in—for the sake of the kids, your mother—but you can let it go now.”
Between sobs she said, “I—can never—let him go. Never!”
Frank knew there was nothing he could say or do but to hold her. He felt the same grief—for Taizo, for Slugger, for their old lives left shattered at the side of a road none of them had ever expected to travel—but fought back his tears so he could remain strong for Ruth. He would cry those tears later, and knew that Ruth would be there to be strong for him.
* * *
The residents of Manzanar now found themselves unexpectedly free—but to do what? The war was still on, Japan had yet to be defeated, and anti-Japanese feeling still ran high, especially in California. This was luridly illustrated, in January of 1945, by newspaper accounts of one Sumio Doi, a young Nisei whose family was the first to return to California from Amache Relocation Center in Colorado. With two brothers in the U.S. Army, it was up to Sumio to ready the family farm in Auburn in time for harvest. Four men and three women—one himself a soldier, AWOL from the Army—attempted to burn down, then dynamite, the family’s property. Shots were also fired into the Doi home. The local sheriff posted a guard at the Doi farm, suspects were arrested—but despite signed confessions from all defendants, two juries, one state and one federal, chose to acquit them.
Is it any wonder that many of the remaining internees at Manzanar actively resisted the idea of leaving the camp that had become a safe harbor?
Among these were Ruth’s neighbors, the Arikawas. There was now a gold star above two blue stars on the white service flag that hung in their window: in July, Frank Arikawa had been killed in action on the Italian front, the first service casualty from Manzanar. Though they grieved for their son, Teru and Takeyoshi were proud he had died serving his country. Every day as Ruth passed their window, she thought of the courageous soldier in the photograph whose face she would never see in life. She also thought of Ralph, whose 442nd Regiment was distinguishing itself in battle—three months ago, in France, the 442nd had rescued more than two hundred members of the Texas “Lost Battalion”—but was paying for it with such a tragically high number of casualties that it was sometimes called “the Purple Heart Battalion.”
Every day Ruth thought of this. Every day she repressed her dread. Now she asked Takeyoshi Arikawa about his family’s plans to relocate.
“I would like to take my family home,” he admitted, “but there are too many people in Los Angeles who would resent our return. These are troubled times for America. Why should I cause this country any more trouble?”
That response was so Japanese in its self-effacement that it almost made Ruth laugh. She herself did not give a damn about troubling a country that had exiled her family to a concentration camp.
But Ruth and Frank did decide, for the kids’ sake, to wait until after the end of the school year in late May. Meanwhile they applied for “relocation subsistence grants”—twenty-five dollars per person, plus three bucks a day for travel expenses, and the WRA picked up the tab for transporting their personal property. It wasn’t much compared to all they had lost, but Frank and Horace had worked jobs at Tanforan and Manzanar at sixteen dollars a month and had saved about three hundred dollars apiece. Etsuko’s frozen assets in Sumitomo Bank would soon be wired to her too. And the men hoped to find employment as quickly as possible.
Regrettably, there would be two fewer friends to go home to; their one-time neighbors, Jim and Helen Russell, had moved to San Jose, California, where Jim had taken a new job. In a letter Jim offered to drive all the way to Sacramento to pick the Watanabes up at the train station there; Frank thanked him for his generosity but told him they would manage on their own.
At the end of February, WRA Director Dillon Myer himself came to Manzanar to address a capacity crowd. Ruth promised Frank that she would absolutely, positively not swear at anyone. She was expecting only more of the same dry policy statements, but Myer surprised her with his candor about anti-Japanese prejudice in California:
“These are the people who have been working against you for the past forty years,” he said bluntly. “They are the ones who are now occupying your homes, operating your farms and other types of business, and making plenty out of it. And they are the ones who fear your competition.” He said “race-baiters” like these were trying to intimidate evacuees into remaining in the camps and were hoping for “eventual deportation of all Japanese after the war.” He said such campaigns were just so much “bluffing” and encouraged the evacuees not to give in to their bullying.
It was a very heartening talk for many, Ruth included, and it had its effect. In March of 1945, 158 people left Manzanar to relocate, while another 603 made plans to do so.
It was in March, over lunch at the mess hall, that Horace unexpectedly brought up the possibility of leaving sooner rather than later.
“It’s just that if we wait to leave until the end of May,” he pointed out, “the harvest season will be over. If we leave, say, in mid-April, I might stand a chance of finding harvest work, in Florin or elsewhere.”
“I don’t like the idea of taking our kids out of school either,” Rose conceded, “but at this age, it won’t make much difference to them, and the money Horace might be able to make could make a big difference to us.”