Emi knew her mother would never say that the Japanese could be wrong, but nothing felt right about what was happening. She knew that the bombs and torpedoes had mostly killed military men, but the radio reports said civilians, too, had died. Emi imagined herself walking alone, peacefully, somewhere as beautiful as Hawaii, and suddenly being blasted to her death, burned alive. She reached for her mother, knowing sleep was not coming soon. They were both aware that the entire country was now incensed, with intense hatred toward Japan.
The women spent a week locked inside their apartment, and no contact with Norio was allowed. They left the building only for short walks in the company of an FBI agent named Mark Rhodes, who was assigned to guard them. As Keiko predicted, though their freedom was gone, they were treated very well by Rhodes, who liked to talk about his love of teriyaki chicken and his children who lived in the Florida Keys with their no-good mother.
After a long week, Emi and Keiko were transferred along with the other diplomats’ families to the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, a handsome Western-style stone building with a gold chrysanthemum adorning the front, where they were reunited with their husbands and fathers. The heavy steel gates were locked behind them as soon as the families were safely inside, since angry demonstrators had gathered nearby. The diplomats and their staff had not left the embassy since the news had broken.
“I’m in shock more than anything,” Norio said to his daughter when she was finally allowed to see him. He looked desperately in need of a shower and a change of clothes. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair, usually pushed back neatly with Brylcreem, and styled with a small wave on top, was falling across his forehead in every direction.
“But why did we attack Pearl Harbor?” asked Emi. “Did you know they were going to? The newspaper said over two thousand people died. Two thousand.”
“No, Emi. Not another word,” said Norio sternly, his white shirt stained and his custom-made suit wrinkled at every crease. His body, tall and straight like his daughter’s, was hunched with exhaustion. He repositioned his round metal glasses on his straight nose and repeated himself.
After a week in the embassy, living on top of each other and sleeping on makeshift beds, they were told that they’d be moving collectively to a luxury hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, a rural town in the western part of the state, and that they would stay there until they sailed back to Japan. “But that could be in months,” a State Department official warned.
“Months!” said Emi as she collected her things and tried to make her hair look less oily at the crown. Her mother gave her a small wool hat, and she pinned it on, and pinched a little life into her cheeks with her cold hands.
“They don’t know precisely what will happen yet. Don’t panic,” said Keiko as she helped her daughter.
“I know what will happen,” said Emi. “We are about to become the new face of public humiliation.” Outside, they could see that a crowd had again gathered on the busy street, waiting to watch the imminent Japanese exile from the city.
When the embassy assembled everyone to leave, transferring them to idling buses to head to the train station, the demonstrators, mostly men dressed nicely in handsome winter coats and hats, let out a few angry shouts as soon as the front doors opened. Their hateful tone threw Emi off, the jeers causing her to trip over her mother’s valise, but it was nothing like what they faced when they arrived at Union Station.
Emi had worn her nicest traveling dress and cashmere coat with a fur collar, the same one she had worn when she’d first set foot on the luxury steamer to the United States. Her hair was dirty but covered and her shoes were shined, the heels not scuffed at all.
But all the people watching them at Union Station seemed to care about was the shape of their eyes.
She could see kids pulling their eyes at the corners, making them thinner and then laughing hysterically while their parents did nothing, at best. At worst, they shouted angrily at the group, drowning out their children’s laughter, using slurs Emi had become familiar with in the past few weeks. Japanazi. Blast the Japs. Yellow peril. Emi heard them all, coming from people who looked like the girls she had gone to school with, or their parents. Behind her, her own parents walked next to each other, her father ignoring the jeers and commenting on the handsome gold and white coffered ceiling of the station. He even pointed out a few birds that had made their homes in the carved pockets of plaster.
The FBI agents hurried them through the large station, telling them to board the private train that would take them to the Homestead Hotel.
Exhausted from having to remain stoic in the face of such hate—something her parents excelled at and she did not—Emi closed her eyes once she was in her seat, imagining that she was the type of person who could have spit in her hecklers’ faces. As sleep almost caught her, the corners of her mouth went up slightly. Wasn’t she that person? A little bit? She thought back to 1938. To Vienna. She had been then. It was just that she would never do anything to harm her father’s position. When she was with her parents, in the presence of the ambassador, she knew to play the part of the obedient daughter. That’s what they expected of her and she understood why. But in those moments where she was tried, and alone, she was the person who could slap someone right back.
Emi fell deeply asleep as the train whistled into Virginia, not waking up until the wheels slowed for their descent into Hot Springs.
“What a strange place,” Emi said as she looked out the window at the bare oak and maple trees, their branches frozen and unmoving against the gray sky. “Why would they put us out here? There’s nothing but trees.”
“I believe it’s called the countryside,” said her mother. “Not ‘nothing.’?”
“They’d put us in a cave if they could,” she heard one of the wives say, an American with soft blond curls and a wonderful command of Japanese. “But then the American diplomats might get thrown into a ravine in Tokyo. So instead, we are here. You’ll see. It’s actually a very luxurious hotel. I stayed here with my parents as a girl.”
Her husband told her to stop gossiping, and before the train had come to a stop, the entire Japanese diplomatic community was on their feet, trying to ignore the fact that there were FBI agents and State Department employees hovering around them.
“I’m sorry to say,” the senior State Department official in charge announced before anyone had stepped off the train, “but we don’t have enough cars for all of you.” He ran his fingers through his gray hair nervously. “There are some people—people who live in town—who are waiting outside . . . who have come to watch all this. So for everyone’s safety, the men will walk together to the hotel and the women and children will take the cars.” They heard the train doors open and they were told that they could all disembark.