The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (3 page)

Crossing First Street, a Japanese businessman hurried toward Sumi’s building. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and a broad-brimmed hat and carried a Christmas package tucked under one arm. Two small children walked by his side, each clutching one of his hands. The man’s gaze was lowered and his children’s faces were blank.

Sumi’s mother, Nobu, shouted at Sumi to stay away from the window and to stay indoors. “It’s very dangerous,” her mother told her in Japanese. Her mother need not have worried; Sumi had no desire to leave the apartment. The sight below had the dark, unreal quality of a Martian invasion, something impossible to believe.

Meanwhile, Nobu and Sumi’s father, Tom Utsushigawa, a photographer who owned the apartment building at 244½ East First Street, moved quickly through the two-story building. They went door-to-door—to the beautiful Japanese dancer on the first floor, next door to the somber Japanese lawyer. They pounded on doors and in feverish Japanese shouted to tenants to remove portraits of the Japanese emperor and the royal family from the walls of their apartments. Inside, the residents were just learning the news from Hawaii. “Quickly,” Tom warned. “Protect yourselves.” Suddenly, being Japanese in America was dangerous.

None of it made any sense to Sumi. She found herself on the other side of an invisible line that she had not drawn. While her parents were issei, immigrants born in Japan, Sumi was a nisei, born in America. In every way, she fit the stereotype of the nisei, the second-generation Japanese who worked hard to become “100 percent American.” Unlike her mother, Nobu, who wore her long sheet of black hair in a chignon at the back of her neck and took small, delicate steps through the apartment, Sumi wore her hair in
bedraggled pigtails and had the gait of an awkward pony. She talked in California slang: “What you guys this and what you guys that?”

She had been born on August 14, 1928, in Los Angeles. That was the year Walt Disney debuted Mickey Mouse, the madcap cartoon character that became Sumi’s childhood hero. Her teenager’s closet was filled with Mickey Mouse T-shirts, caps, and sweaters. Her friends gave her Mickey Mouse pins for birthday presents. She said the Pledge of Allegiance at Central Junior High School, located only six blocks from her apartment. She celebrated the Fourth of July. A young American teenager, she had, until this day at least, been naturally optimistic. Now Sumi tried to make sense of the uncomfortable reality that her own country—America—was at war with the homeland of her parents.

Within two hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, FBI agents had swarmed through the narrow streets of Little Tokyo and placed Japanese leaders in handcuffs, leading them away from their friends and families. A physician who lived in Sumi’s building was among the first arrested. His wife, known as Battleship Mama, had entertained members of the Japanese navy in their tidy apartment, decorated with furniture from Japan. When young Japanese seamen, far from home, visited Los Angeles, she invited them to her home and performed the tea service, stirring green tea into exquisite small cups. These events for sailors were an innocent act by a traditional Japanese woman well schooled in hospitality. But what once seemed a courteous, sympathetic tie to her homeland was now perceived as subversive, reason enough for her husband’s arrest.

Over the next few days, the Japanese bank branches in Little Tokyo closed. Suddenly, Sumi’s parents were penniless because the US Treasury had frozen all bank accounts of anyone born in Japan. The vegetable markets along Central Avenue were shut down. Even Fusetsu-do, a Japanese sweetshop, where Sumi and her friends bought fortune cookies, was padlocked. Rumors flew through the streets. People were picked up by the FBI for having feudal dolls or playing Japanese music. Families buried ancient Japanese swords,
jade jewelry, and other family heirlooms on the banks of the Los Angles River.

The day after the attack, the
Los Angeles Times
declared California “a zone of danger” and said it was the duty of alert citizens “to cooperate with the military authorities against spies, saboteurs and 5th columnists.” The term
5th columnist
, which originated during the Spanish Civil War, was used to describe domestic disloyalty, and applied to anyone suspected of sympathizing with enemies. By the early 1940s, it was shorthand for sedition. The
Rafu Shimpo
, a Los Angeles Japanese newspaper founded in 1903, closed that day; however, on the next day, the newspaper resumed publication, publishing two pages in English only. The inside pages, usually in Japanese, were now blank. The government officially censored news printed in the Japanese language. In an editorial in English, the newspaper called upon Japanese Americans to fully support the war effort. “The treacherous infamy of Japan’s attack upon the United States has united the minds of all Americans, regardless of race, color or creed,” wrote the editors. “Fellow Americans, give us a chance to do our share to make this world a better place to live in!”

The next day Sumi was frightened as she walked to Central Junior High School. She worried that the angry white men might return to her neighborhood and take out their rage against her and her friends.

Her school was a melting pot of blacks, Caucasians, Japanese, Chinese, the children of immigrants from all over the world. Sumi’s best friends were whites, blacks, and other Asians. She had never felt uncomfortable at Central Junior High School. Many students had parents who were from some place other than America.

On this day, inside the halls of the school, the white girls shot her lethal looks and turned their backs. Sumi willed herself to take it in stride. After all, she was an American citizen, born in Los Angeles. On the walk home, a group of Filipino boys spit at her shoes, wrestled her to the ground, and pinched her ears. “Dirty Jap,” they said. On the same day as Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces had also attacked Hong Kong, Wake Island, Guam, Malaya, and the Philippines. In
retaliation, the Filipino boys struck back at Sumi, who covered her face and picked herself up from the ground. Her first thought was “Why are they calling me a Jap?” Then it dawned on her: in their eyes—and in the eyes of other Americans—she was one.

Japan was the country of her parents, a series of tiny islands, far from the grid of Los Angeles’s crowded streets and the sparkling coastline of Southern California. Sumi understood her parents were torn between their mother country, Japan, and the country they had chosen as their own. They were born in Japan, but by law were not allowed to become US citizens. In 1924, concerned about the competitive threat of Japanese workers in the California agricultural industry, the United States passed the Asian Exclusion Act, making it illegal for Japanese immigrants to be citizens.

Sumi’s father’s first name was Tokiji. His memories of Japan weren’t happy. He was born on April 25, 1877, in Miyagi-ken, Japan, to a farmer. His mother abandoned the family when he was only three years old. His father, unable to bear the sound of his son’s cries for his mother, soon left him on the doorstep of a Buddhist temple. The punitive monks fed him scraps and beat him with sticks when he disobeyed. When Tokiji was sixteen, he set his sights on a better future and came to the United States. He brought only what he could carry, a knapsack with a change of clothes.

His first job was as a janitor for the famed Belasco Theater, a historic twelve-hundred-seat playhouse with a huge gilded dome at 337 South Main. He worked for Edward Belasco, the manager of the theater, who gave Tokiji a nickname that was easier for Belasco to pronounce: Tom. Belasco considered Tom a hard worker who was much smarter than the usual janitor, someone who might have other uses. One day Belasco gave Tom a box camera. Soon, Tom mastered the art of taking and developing photos and Belasco put him to work as the theater’s publicity photographer. In those days, the Belasco was popular among Hollywood actors, and many of the plays and musicals performed on its stage later became movies. Tom photographed Lionel Barrymore, Joan Bennett, Tallulah Bankhead,
and other famous actors of the day. Some of the photos appeared in the
Los Angeles Times.

By the early 1900s, Tom was well established in Los Angeles and wrote to his father to help him find a wife. His father made the necessary arrangements with Nobu’s father, as was the custom in Japan. After a series of letters back and forth with his father, Tom went back to Japan, met Nobu for the first time, and was married. He returned to Los Angeles alone to prepare for his wife’s arrival. In a few months, he sent money back to bring Nobu to America. She arrived at Terminal Island, an isolated beach located across from San Pedro, a suburb south of Los Angeles that served as the immigration point for first-generation Japanese in California.

In Nobu’s first glimpse of America, women were tanning themselves on the beach to the sound of the surf. Nobu, whose skin was pale white, wanted to fit in, so she placed a white towel on the sand and warmed herself with the rays of the sun.

In a few hours, Tom arrived on the beach with a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy. He’d expected Nobu to have beautiful white skin, so highly prized among Japanese men. Instead, her face and arms were bright red. Disappointed and angry, Tom threw the flowers and the candy into the sea. Nobu picked herself up off the beach and followed Tom. Thus began her marriage.

Tom also expected his wife to be subservient, but Nobu was independent-minded and found ways to successfully navigate her new world. Once settled in Little Tokyo among the safety of other Japanese immigrants, Tom, already successful as a photographer for Belasco, bought the building. But it was Nobu who swept the floors, arranged for repairs, collected rent, and resolved disputes among tenants. She kept the books. When Tom decided to open a photography studio of his own in their apartment, Nobu recruited clients and made appointments. During photo shoots of families, Nobu shyly dangled puppets and other toys in front of children to make them smile.

Although Little Tokyo had seven other Japanese photographers,
Tom was the pioneer and the most in demand. He was short—only five feet three inches tall—but he was strong and carried himself with the demeanor of a dandy. His suits were handmade specifically for him by the tailors in Little Tokyo, who used the finest wool for suits and Japanese silks for shirts. Nobu packed away her Japanese robes and soon began to wear American-style A-line skirts and dresses with sleek lines and square shoulders. On a shelf in her closet was a row of hats with broad brims and sturdy shoes with square heels. Their apartment was filled with fine antique porcelain objects, Oriental rugs from Japan, and expensive furniture. They owned a 1930 black Hupmobile, a flashy, four-cylinder roadster that sold for about $80 and was advertised as “the best car in America for the smallest amount of money.”

Before Pearl Harbor, the only shadow over the Utsushigawa family was that Tom wanted a son, but Nobu had produced three daughters. Sumi was the last of the three, ten years younger than her oldest sister and eight years younger than her second sister. A proud Japanese man who considered himself the emperor of his own house, Tom was angry that he had no heir, no “number one son,” to take over his business. He was occasionally dismissive of his daughters and did his best to ignore them by staying busy with his photography. On the day war was declared, Sumi’s two older sisters were on a trip to Japan, visiting grandparents. Sumi was the only girl at home. As a young child, Sumi understood that when her father looked at her, all he could see was his desperate wish for an heir. On the other hand, her mother treated her as if she were an only child, lavishing affection. But in the eyes of Tom and her two sisters, Sumi was too American in her manners and demeanor, not submissive enough—or, in a word, spoiled.

In the three months after Pearl Harbor, many Japanese men from Little Tokyo were arrested. Still, no one came for Sumi’s father. Mistakenly, her father believed he would avoid arrest.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he told Sumi, speaking in Japanese. “This is America. They don’t put innocent people in jail here. Don’t worry.”

Nonetheless, Sumi began to listen for the sound of shoes on the steps to the family’s apartment. The knock on the door finally came on March 13, 1942—Friday the thirteenth, an unlucky day in America and perhaps an omen. Sumi was in school, going through the motions of her seventh-grade classes. Little did she know that it would be her last day at Central Junior High School.

At the end of the day, Sumi shuffled up the iron steps of the apartment building. On the second floor, she noticed that the front door was open. She paused. Her mother was seated at the dining-room table with her head in her hands. When Nobu looked up, she had a frozen smile on her face. Nobu was almost always cheerful. She laughed easily and never complained. Even at thirteen, Sumi could see through her mother’s mask—she was terrified and disoriented.

Sumi walked through the plundered apartment. Drawers had been dumped onto the living-room floor. Chairs were toppled. Piles of photos were everywhere. Her father’s good clothes were strewn in the bedroom; the contents of the kitchen cupboards were spilled on the counter.

“Mama,” said Sumi. “Was Papa arrested?”

“Yes,” said Nobu. “Five FBI men came. They took Papa away.”

Nobu spoke no more. Eventually, Sumi learned that her father had walked to the vegetable market to buy some produce. When he came home, the five agents were waiting and arrested him immediately. As was the case in most arrests of enemy aliens, there were no charges, no reason given for his arrest except that Nobu had donated $200 to a Japanese school, Dai Ichi Gakuen, in Little Tokyo. After his arrest, Tom was given an internment serial number: 25-4-3-610.

On the street, notices announcing forced evacuation were stapled to telephone poles and on the backs of bus-stop benches. Nobu read only Japanese. Sumi studied the tiny black-and-white English print on the notices and took charge of preparing to leave. Mother and daughter worked side by side silently, packing kitchen goods, clothes, and family photographs. The frozen smile never left Nobu’s face. They sold some of the furniture to junk dealers and put most
of the rest of their belongings into one room before hammering the door shut. They packed one suitcase each. All the while they waited for word of where they would be relocated and word from Tom.