Sweet Jesus, Sis, we never expected anything like this. We shot the locks off the prison gates and all these people struggled to get to their feet. They were wearing black and white striped prison uniforms and round hats, just like you see in the movies—but you never saw this in a movie. They were walking skeletons, nothing but skin and bones, with sunken eyes that bored right into your soul. They were so weak from hunger they could barely shuffle out of the camp, and you could only give them tiny bits of food or water because they’d been starving so long their bodies had forgotten how to handle solid food.
One Polish woman was afraid, she’d never seen people with Japanese features and she couldn’t understand the pidgin some of the guys used. One of my buddies got down on his knees in front of her and said, “From my God to your God, we are your liberators.”
Too many of them died, even with medical attention. I cried myself to sleep that night.
But by the time she received this letter, Ruth had already seen the Nazi atrocities for herself—in the movies.
At the Alhambra Theatre in Sacramento, Ruth, Frank, and Etsuko watched the first newsreel footage out of the death camps, luridly titled NAZI MURDER MILLS!—and yet that was not hyperbole. The Watanabes and a mostly white audience took in grisly images of what the narrator called Nazi “hellholes.” First they saw American POWs—emaciated, starving, with ugly untreated wounds—rescued from a German POW camp. Then came the slave labor and extermination camps, like Buchenwald. Ruth flinched at the sight of burned corpses stacked like kindling and a single lifeless foot extruding from a lime pit. The handful of survivors bore the livid scars of torture racks. And then there were the furnaces, many no bigger than bakery ovens, where both the dead and the living were cremated. “Don’t turn away, look!” the narrator demanded of his audience, the oven door open to expose the skulls inside, skulls that once had human faces and housed human souls.
They said nothing to one another on the drive back to Florin, and only years later would they realize that they all shared the same thought at the same time: whatever they had suffered at Manzanar, it could not compare to the suffering and brutality they had witnessed that night. Ruth resolved never to gripe again about what she had endured in the war. It seemed … disrespectful. So many millions dead, but she was alive. Her mother, her children, her husband, they were alive. Her father was gone, but felled by a bacterial infection, not gassed in an oven. That night she buried her anger deep inside and put on her outside face tight enough to choke her.
And judging by the silence of everyone in the car that night, Frank and Etsuko had come to a similar conclusion, for neither of them would so much as mention the names Manzanar or Tanforan again—not for many years.
* * *
By midsummer more evacuees had returned to Florin, some to flourishing farms and some to ashes. Slowly the town began to regain a bit of its prewar character, with new stores readying to open and old neighbors returning to greet one another. After working the Tsukamoto farm, Horace was able to negotiate a fire-sale purchase of an abandoned farm nearby.
But aside from a few odd jobs, steady employment eluded Frank. After mentioning this in a letter to Jim Russell—now a superintendent with a dried-fruits cannery—Jim wrote back urging Frank and his family to come to San Jose:
I can get you a job, easy, in the packing shed, and there could be room for advancement. The company’s on solid ground and now that the war’s almost over they’re looking to expand. And there seems to be a more welcoming attitude here toward returning Japanese—a group called the Council for Civic Unity of San Jose has even converted the Japanese Language School into a hostel for temporary housing of all the families returning to Santa Clara County, though you’re welcome to stay with us until you find a place of your own.
Ruth was moved by Jim’s offer but a little dubious about the nature of the work. “They sell dried prunes?”
“Among other things. Their products are in all the national stores; the brand name is Sunsweet.”
“But Frank—owning a restaurant, that was your dream.”
He just shook his head at that. “No. My dream—from the moment my folks lost their farm—was to have a home again. And whatever job gets us a roof over our head and food on the table is what I want. My dream is you and Donnie and Peggy and Etsuko, too, if she wants to come with us.”
Ruth kissed him. “I love you. I’m willing to take a flyer if you are.”
Frank seemed genuinely happy to write Jim and accept his offer.
This put Etsuko at a crossroads, but she had little difficulty deciding which path to take. When Horace and Rose invited her to live with them, she replied politely but candidly:
“Haruo, I love you and your family. But I cannot live in Florin. There is nothing here for me but grief.” She promised to visit often—San Jose was only a hundred miles away, after all.
Once again the Haradas prepared to move, but before they could, the Japanese community was rocked by one more seismic shock.
* * *
“Sixteen hours ago,” President Truman announced in a radio address to the nation on August 6, 1945, “an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base … The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.
“It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East…”
Hiroshima Prefecture had been a major source of Japanese immigrants to the United States and many had settled in Florin—including Cricket’s father, Nobu, who came from Onomichi Town in the southeast corner of the prefecture. Nobu was concerned for his relatives in the city of Hiroshima, but the scope of the damage done to it did not become apparent for days, until a thick pall of dust caused by the massive explosion finally lifted. What was left standing—and what wasn’t—stunned the world.
Newspaper headlines shouted:
HIROSHIMA POSSIBLY WIPED OUT—BLINDING FLASH VAPORIZED BUILDINGS
BOMB ERASES 60 PER CENT OF HIROSHIMA—
4-SQUARE-MILE AREA COMPLETELY WIPED FROM MAP
150,000 KILLED BY ATOM BOMB
For many, the first reaction was one of utter disbelief.
“How could one bomb do all that damage?” Cricket’s husband, Mitch, scoffed as his family and the Haradas gathered around the radio for the latest news. “Vaporizing buildings? That’s like something out of Buck Rogers!”
“This is all propaganda designed to cow Japan into surrendering!” Nobu insisted, refusing to consider the terrible alternative.
Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb leveled the port city of Nagasaki, home to a quarter of a million people. The headline in the San Francisco Examiner declared:
NEARLY ALL IN CITY KILLED
Now there were no denials from Nobu, only tears. He feared for what might have happened to a beloved aunt and uncle who lived in Hiroshima.
Six days later, the Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally. The front page of the Los Angeles Times featured a drawing of a tattered Japanese flag and, in a headline almost as large:
PEACE!
But so many in Florin could feel no peace. Soon letters began arriving from Japan telling of the unprecedented destruction to Hiroshima—and of deaths unlike any in human history. The men and women who were outside were incinerated instantly, the heat of the blast etching their silhouettes in concrete, leaving behind only wraithlike shadows. Many of those who survived the initial blast were soon soaked in a “black rain” that stormed down soot, dust, and invisible roentgens of radioactivity that first sickened, then killed them all.
Nobu’s aunt survived, but his uncle died in the blast; there wasn’t even a shadow left behind. Dying with him in Hiroshima were thousands of American-born Kibei—children sent to Japan for their education, a common and now-tragic practice among the Issei.
Florin’s disbelief and shock gave way to grief, sorrow, and anger. Some Issei cursed America and “the damned hakujin” for what they had done. Some blamed Japan for starting the war. All grieved for cousins, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews they had lost.
Ruth still felt disbelief, as well as horror, at the magnitude of the devastation. “Jesus,” she said to Frank, “all those people. All those civilians…”