The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (18 page)

During the first exchange, 268 American government officials and 2,500 US civilians trapped in Japan were returned to the United States. Joseph Grew, the American ambassador to Japan, who had been confined to the American embassy grounds in Tokyo since December 8, 1941, was among those on board the
Asama Maru
, which left Yokohama harbor early on June 25. Grew described his emotions in a diary passage: “And then came the greatest of all moments. I awoke at 1 a.m. on June 25th, seeing that something was happening. I looked out of the porthole and saw a piece of wood slowly moving past in the water. We were at last underway, slowly accelerating until the ship was finally speeding at full steam away from Yokohama, away from Japan, pointing homeward. Ah, what a moment that was, even though we had 18,000 miles to cover and seventy days in all before we should pass the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.”

As Grew sailed away from Japan, his counterpart, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, left the port of New York on the
Gripsholm
along with other Japanese officials and civilians. The actual exchange took place on July 23, 1942, in Port Marques, Portuguese East Africa. The Japanese repatriates disembarked from the ship, passed in a line on one side of the dock, and transferred to the
Asama Maru
. The weary Americans, including Grew, filed off the
Asama Maru
, formed a second line, and walked onto the stern of the
Gripsholm
, where they feasted at a buffet and toasted with champagne.

Given the success of the first exchange, the Special War Problems Division identified 7,050 more American civilians still inside enemy lines in Japan, many living in prisoner-of-war camps, and pressed Japanese officials for additional exchanges. The goal was to rescue all Americans from both Japan and Germany. However, negotiations for the second exchange with Japan stalled as each side struggled with the complicated task of compiling passenger lists.

The work was tedious and complex, fraught with conflicting
points of view. On the American side, State Department officials refused to release Japanese internees who they believed were security risks that might help Japan’s war effort. The Japanese government, on the other hand, insisted that it must have the complete authority to choose which Japanese nationals would be returned to Japan as well as the authority to exclude others. During the first round of negotiations, the Americans altered their list to include 580 people explicitly designated by the Japanese. However, 900 others were on the American list that the Japanese had not named. The majority of the 900 were Japanese nationals imprisoned in American internment camps, such as Tokiji, Nobu, and Sumi.

Negotiations stalled. Between the summer and fall of 1942, lists went back and forth between Washington and Tokyo. In December 1942, the issue landed on Roosevelt’s desk. The president was faced with the choice of whether to return to Japan people identified by the FBI and military as dangerous to the American war effort. If he did so, American citizens held in Japan would come home. If he didn’t, they might be held in Japan for the duration of the war. Heavy on Roosevelt’s mind was the high death rate of American soldiers in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.

In February 1943, Roosevelt instructed the State Department to agree to return as few Japanese security risks as possible in return for the greatest number of Americans. A plan was developed for at least three more trades to return 4,500 Americans from Japan and equal numbers of Japanese from America. But in May 1943, Tokyo refused Roosevelt’s offer for additional exchanges and presented an ultimatum: take the Japanese list for a second exchange, or the Japanese would suspend all future exchanges.

After the successful Battle of Midway in June 1942, Roosevelt could afford to reverse his policy. He decided it was more important to bring Americans back home to the United States and instructed the State Department to accept Japan’s demands.

Within the State Department and the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the human chess game continued. In addition to the Japanese
from the United States designated by the Japanese government, ten Japanese merchants from Peru and Bolivia were identified and put on the list, as well as seventy-five Japanese diplomats from Chile, twenty-five from Mexico, and sixty from Canada. The State Department asked for the return of twenty-five US officials in the Philippines and eight hundred and fifty Americans from occupied China.

In September 1943, as Sumi and Nobu waited on the dock in the New Jersey harbor to board the
Gripsholm
, they were oblivious of their small place in the larger context of these world events. Negotiations continued right up until the moment the ship was allowed to sail. In the end, 1,437 Japanese were assembled and ready to board, with only 1,330 slots for exchange. Ninety-seven individuals would be cut from the list.

To their surprise, Sumi and Nobu were pulled from the line by military guards with machine guns. Sumi had no idea what was happening. She had assumed her father was already on board the ship. Now she and her mother were directed toward a group of several dozen Japanese women and children who had also been removed from the line. By then, it was dark. With machine guns aimed at her back, Sumi put one shaky foot in front of the other.

The guards led Sumi and the others to a Coast Guard cutter, which crossed the bay to Ellis Island. They were taken upstairs to a cavernous room. Row after row of Japanese internees slept on Army cots. Sumi and Nobu settled on two side-by-side cots with thin, sheetless, filthy mattresses. Sumi lay awake and listened to the snores, moans, and cries that filled the space.

The next morning, Sumi and Nobu went upstairs to a mess hall, where Sumi ate a bowl of cold cereal with no milk or sugar. By then, she was accustomed to food that did not agree with her preferred Japanese diet.
In Heart Mountain, she had stood in long lines and been served mutton stew, which upset her stomach. By comparison, the cold cereal that morning wasn’t so bad. After a while, a group of Japanese men, including Tokiji, was escorted into the mess hall. Across the room, Sumi saw her father for the first time in eighteen
months and realized he was not on the
Gripsholm
. She and her parents were among the ninety-seven individuals cut from the exchange list at the last moment. Tokiji looked older and much thinner. He and Nobu greeted each other formally, without embracing, as was the custom of traditional issei fathers and mothers.

“Hello, Mama,” Tokiji said with a small bow. Then he turned to Sumi, looking her over carefully. “You grew up. You’re big now.”

Sumi smiled with relief that she and her parents were not on the ship sailing to Japan. It was her first lucky break since the war began.

Not far away, Yae Kanogawa, a seventeen-year-old born in Seattle, Washington, saw her father for the first time since his arrest on the night of December 7, 1941. Like Sumi, Yae was overjoyed about her deliverance from forced repatriation to Japan. Before the events of Pearl Harbor, Yae’s father owned a small grocery on Washington Street in Seattle. Since then, he had been imprisoned in internment camps at Missoula, Montana, and Santa Fe and Lordsburg, New Mexico. Meanwhile, Yae, her mother, and three brothers were interned in Minidoka, Idaho. “I was so happy to see him,” Yae recalled. “The last time he saw me, I was too young to wear lipstick. But that day in Ellis Island, I had on lipstick, and when I hugged him, I smeared lipstick on his face.”

Later that day, Sumi’s family, Yae’s family, and two others on Ellis Island were told by guards that they would be transferred to Crystal City to await another exchange. Since the fathers were prisoners of war and had agreed to repatriate, they could not return to male-only relocation camps. The camp in Crystal City was the one that housed familes, the only available next step.

They stayed four days and three nights on Ellis Island. In the toilsome daily routine they were awakened at 5:30 a.m. for no reason that Sumi could comprehend, because there was nothing to do all day. Breakfast was at 7:30, lunch at 11:30, and dinner at 4:30 p.m. Most of the day, they were confined to the cavernous room with little to occupy their time, and at night they slept there on the uncomfortable cots.

The first Japanese prisoners seized by Americans in battle were housed at Ellis Island. Sumi and Yae noticed that the prisoners kept their heads down and did not make eye contact. Yae wanted to ask if they’d been captured, but her father told her not to talk to them. It was considered a disgrace for Japanese to be captured; their deepest shame was in not committing suicide.

In wartime, train travel was difficult. O’Rourke traveled to New York to expedite the arrangements for the twenty-one Japanese waiting on Ellis Island to go to Crystal City. On September 5, O’Rourke met the group at Grand Central Station, which was crowded with soldiers and civilians. Both Yae and Sumi felt swallowed up in the large space. Their march to the train was carefully choreographed; military guards, one in front of the group and one behind, escorted them to a private car. Some of the onlookers in the station stared angrily at the Japanese; others seemed curious. Both Yae and Sumi remembered the tension in the air and how afraid they felt. It seemed like an eternity before the odd parade of twenty-one passengers filed safely into a single car on the train.

As the train left the station, the shades were pulled down. Sumi settled in a seat beside her mother. Yae sat with her brothers Sei, who was one year older, and Shoji, three years younger. Parts of the train were air-conditioned, including O’Rourke’s Pullman car and the dining room. However, the passenger car for the prisoners of war and their families had no air-conditioning and was dark and broiling.

Sumi thought about all that had happened since her father’s arrest. On May 9, 1942, under the provisions of Executive Order 9068, signed by Roosevelt, she and Nobu had been sent to Ponoma Assembly Camp, located on a fairground in Los Angeles. On August 25, they were put on a train to Wyoming, where they entered Heart Mountain Relocation Camp, a 740-acre camp with a high, barbed-wire fence and nine guard towers.

In Heart Mountain, Sumi and Nobu lived in black-tar-papered barracks in Block 14 with other Japanese women and children. In
the center of the dormitory space was a round-bellied stove fueled by coal. A city kid from Los Angeles, Sumi did not know how to start a fire. When the weather turned cold, she stacked pieces of coal in the stove, struck a match, and waited for the fire to ignite. But the coal did not catch, and after several failed attempts, Sumi lined the bottom of the stove with newspaper and kindling and lit the fire. Soon, the dormitory was warm.

Behind the barracks stretched a laundry line. Nobu washed their clothes on washboards in a central laundry room. Sumi hung the clothes on the line to dry. In the winter, when temperatures dropped to twenty-eight degrees, the sheets and their clothes froze stiff on the line. When Sumi brought them inside to fold, the sheets cracked and ripped. In Heart Mountain, the joke among the teenagers was that even their goose pimples had goose pimples.

Both Sumi and Nobu struggled with the lack of privacy in communal showers. Rather than expose herself, Sumi showered in a bathing suit, and Nobu didn’t shower at all. She wiped herself clean with a washcloth at a sink.

Food was a problem for Nobu, as well, and she didn’t eat much in Heart Mountain. The goulash served in the mess hall made her ill. With the unfamiliar food and her depression, Nobu dropped more than twenty pounds. Sumi, worried about her mother’s health, gathered dandelion greens around the fence line. From them, Nobu made
tsukemono
—Japanese pickles.

In Heart Mountain, Sumi suffered her own bout of fence sickness, triggered by her anger. None of what had happened made sense to her. If Japanese from the West Coast were interned because they were potential spies and saboteurs, why were they any less dangerous in isolated Wyoming? Inside the gate, Heart Mountain was a strange, new world. Sumi was given a test to determine where she would be placed in the camp school. In Los Angeles, she had completed the seventh grade. Sumi was so angry about her internment that she failed the test in Heart Mountain on purpose, but the officials there placed her in ninth grade anyway. “I got promoted
for failing the test,” recalled Sumi. “I never went through the eighth grade at all.” Sumi wanted nothing to do with school, but her mother insisted.

In Heart Mountain, Sumi invented a tough, tomboy persona as an outlet for her indignation. Instead of skirts and dresses, she wore jeans and baggy shirts. She refused to talk in class and allowed her grades to drop. In time, she earned the ire of a gym teacher, a woman who insisted that Sumi keep her hands out of her jeans pockets while doing drills, even on the coldest of days. The teacher thought Sumi’s pocketing of her hands was a gesture of defiance. That winter in Heart Mountain, the teacher made Sumi run laps around the track without gloves, with her hands out of her pockets. Sumi would not be broken and never shed a tear. She ran the drills in the snow with freezing hands. Her satisfaction was in not caring what the teacher did to her.

When she returned to the barracks with frostbite, Nobu sat Sumi down and explained that she was only hurting herself. Beneath the anger, Nobu told her daughter, was the pain of leaving Los Angeles, the loss of her father, and the humiliation of internment. She reminded Sumi of the Japanese custom of
gaman
. Nobu spoke the ancient word as a charge to her daughter: to have
gaman
was to endure the unbearable with dignity and forbearance. It was the Japanese way of managing hardship. Usually,
gaman
required some specific pursuit—the practice of Buddhist meditation, as Nobu did, the art of calligraphy, the performance of the tea ceremony, or martial arts, such as judo or kendo. Tokiji’s pursuit was photography. In other camps, Japanese men carved birds out of wooden crate ends and made lovely lapel pins out of castor beans. The point, Nobu told Sumi, was to find some disciplined way to endure suffering without losing one’s sense of identity, dignity, and purpose. “We have to have
gaman
!”