“If we are rooming with the Kuriyamas on the Teia Maru, you can just leave me in India,” Emi whispered to her mother as they walked away. “Contracting typhoid and dying alone seems less painful than another month with that pair.”
When the boat finally pulled up to the shore the morning of October 15, the salted warm air wafted up, smelling foreign and thick with humidity, unlike that of even Washington, D.C., or Tokyo. Would anyone try to run from the boat and stay in India? Emi wondered. She looked out at the dark-skinned men on the dock, most of them shirtless and barefoot, busily trying to maneuver the giant ship into position, and was jealous for a moment that they got to live in a peaceful country. Maybe, she thought, she should be the rogue passenger who stayed in India. Keiko’s hand brushed her shoulder and Emi remembered that even though she was twenty-one, as an unmarried woman she wasn’t free to make her own choices.
The Teia Maru had not yet arrived, so the public spectacle they were destined to create was still modest. All the same, by the time they’d been at anchor for an hour, the crowd of Indians at the dock was growing. The Portuguese officials in Goa, who were helping with the transfer, managed to keep most of the civilians back, but a group of teenagers broke away and ran onto the pier closest to the Gripsholm, waving their hands and screaming. From that moment on, the chaos of the day was in full swing.
When the Teia Maru finally appeared, Emi saw illuminated crosses along the sides, the same as they had on their boat, to help keep them safe from enemy submarines. The men in charge of the switch, all Portuguese military men, didn’t waste any time. They made sure the ships were docked end to end and a short metal walkway was placed between their decks. The Gripsholm passengers were instructed to walk onto their new ship without speaking a word to the Americans leaving the Teia Maru.
“Avoid eye contact,” the Portuguese officials suggested. “It will be much easier if you look down.”
When everything was as organized as possible, the passengers from each ship crossed in two horizontal lines, like ants on a log, with just a few yards separating them on the wide walkway.
It was impossible, Emi and the rest of the passengers immediately realized, not to make eye contact with the Caucasian faces streaming past them. Do they know where we have spent the last year? Emi wondered to herself. Were they in internment camps, too? Do they want to go back to America? She stared at them as they passed by in their tight, orderly line, almost all looking back at her with friendly, exhausted faces. “These are the kind of Americans who would not put Japanese people behind barbed-wire fences,” she whispered to her mother. “They chose to go to Japan. They’ve lived like we have.”
It took more than two hours for all the passengers to make it onto their new boats, but no happy sounds floated out from the Japanese arriving on board the Teia Maru. The Japanese boat, built by the French a decade before, was thoroughly inferior to the Gripsholm. It was smaller, much dirtier, the facilities were rudimentary, and it had a capacity of only seven hundred. One thousand five hundred and three Americans had just disembarked from it and almost that many Japanese had boarded. Emi sighed and leaned against the wall, trying to avoid having her feet trampled and suitcases pushed into her body. The Teia Maru was as packed as the swimming pool at Crystal City after sunset.
As the boat pulled away from the dock that evening, the passengers heard singing from the Gripsholm. Many of the Americans being repatriated were missionaries, and Emi knew from attending Christian church at her schools in Europe and Washington that religious Westerners all knew the same songs. It seemed to be the case on the ship, too, for even as the Teia Maru sailed farther away, the singing on the Gripsholm grew louder, as if more people were joining in. Emi could still hear the song even when their faces were blurred: “In Christ there is no East or West, in Him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide world.”
“Maybe they’re singing that song to us because they’ve seen their luxurious new boat and feel sorry for us on this rowboat,” said Emi.
“You complain too much,” her mother replied crossly, but Emi could tell that she was just as disgusted by the Teia Maru as her daughter was.
When the two went down to their cabin, they saw immediately how much worse this leg of the journey would be. Theirs was a room for two, but four would apparently be sleeping in it, as a pair of straw pallets had been placed on the floor, shoved tightly against the narrow beds. Keiko said that Emi would have to sleep on one of them, even though they were in the room first, and she propped one pallet up temporarily against her own bed to make room for the other passengers, who soon arrived. Emi looked up to see the downcast faces of Chiyo and Naoko Kuriyama.
“Of course,” hissed Emi to her mother when they had unpacked their things and left the cabin. “Why don’t they just have me sleep next to a horse?”
The other problem on the Teia Maru was that while every cabin had a small washbasin—with the water on for two hours a day, from six to seven in the morning and from five to six at night—there were only two real bathrooms on their ship. After just a few hours at sea, the ship smelled worse than a stable.
But Emi and Keiko soon discovered that they were lucky to have a room at all, for many of the men did not. In good weather they had to sleep on straw pallets on the deck; in bad, they were in the hallways. This was problematic not only for them, but for everyone on board because of the threat of fire. As there was so little to do during their long, tedious days at sea, many passengers chain-smoked, and while they were ordered to throw the cigarette butts into the water, they often missed and the straw pallets continuously caught on fire. Adding to the unpleasantness of the journey, the Japanese crew had surprisingly miscalculated how much rice the Japanese passengers would eat compared to the Americans, and by the time their eighty-three-day trip was coming to an end, the only rice that was left was infested with worms.
Because of the poor food and their inability to sleep well in their claustrophobic space, Emi and Keiko could both put a fist in their pant waistbands by the time they were three days out from Japan.