Each morning, Sunja walked to the police station and handed over three onigin made with barley and millet. If there was money in the budget for a chicken egg, she’d hard-boil it, soak the peeled egg in vinegary shoyu to supplement Isak’s modest bento. No one could be sure if the food ever reached him, but she couldn’t prove that it didn’t. Everyone in the neighborhood knew someone who’d gone to jail, and the wildly varying reports were at best troubling and at worst terrifying. Yoseb wouldn’t speak about Isak, but Isak’s arrest had altered him considerably. Patches of gray smudged his once jet-black hair, and he suffered from intense stomach cramps. He stopped writing to his parents, who couldn’t be told about Isak, so Kyunghee wrote to them instead, making excuses. At meals, Yoseb put aside much of his food for Noa, who sat beside him quietly. Yoseb and Noa shared a kind of unspeakable grief over Isak’s absence.
Despite numerous personal appeals, no one had been allowed to see Isak, but the family believed he was alive, because the police had not told them otherwise. The elder minister and the sexton remained in jail as well, and the family hoped that the three of them sustained each other somehow, though no one knew how the prisoners were being housed. A day after the arrest, the police had come to the house to confiscate Isak’s few books and papers. The family’s comings and goings were monitored; a detective visited them every few weeks to ask questions. The police padlocked the church, yet the congregation continued to meet secretly in small groups led by the church elders. Kyunghee, Sunja, and Yoseb never met the parishioners for fear of putting them in danger. By now, most of the foreign missionaries back home and here had returned to their native countries. It was rare to see a white person in Osaka. Yoseb had written the Canadian missionaries about Isak but there’d been no reply.
Under considerable duress, the decision-making authority of the Presbyterian Church had deemed that the mandatory Shinto shrine ceremony was a civic duty rather than a religious one even though the Emperor, the head of the state religion, was viewed as a living deity. Pastor Yoo, a faithful and pragmatic minister, had believed that the shrine ceremony, where the townspeople were required to gather and perform rites, was in fact a pagan ritual drummed up to rouse national feeling. Bowing to idols was naturally offensive to the Lord. Nevertheless, Pastor Yoo had encouraged Isak, Hu, and his congregation to observe the Shinto bowing for the greater good. He didn’t want his parishioners, many of them new to the faith, to be sacrificed to the government’s predictable response to disobedience—prison and death. Pastor Yoo found support for such ideas in the letters of the apostle Paul. So whenever these gatherings at the nearest shrine took place, their frequency varying from town to town, the elder pastor, Isak, and Hu had attended when necessary along with whoever else was in the church building at the time. However, with his weakened vision, the elder pastor had not known that at every Shinto ceremony, the sexton Hu had been mouthing Our Father like an unbroken loop even as he bowed, sprinkled water, and clapped his hands like all the others. Isak had noticed Hu doing this, of course, but had said nothing. If anything, Isak had admired Hu’s faith and gesture of resistance.
For Sunja, Isak’s arrest had forced her to consider what would happen if the unthinkable occurred. Would Yoseb ask her and her children to leave? Where would she go, and how would she get there? How would she take care of her children? Kyunghee would not ask her to leave, but even so—she was only a wife. Sunja had to have a plan and money in case she had to return home to her mother with her sons.