The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (35 page)

Carmen Higa Mochizuki, a Japanese Peruvian who’d been incarcerated in Crystal City for two years, was on the ship as well. Carmen stayed near the top deck with her mother and siblings. She saw little of her father, whose quarters were belowdecks. Her twenty-three-year-old brother was not with them on the voyage. After her father and brother quarreled in Crystal City, her brother joined about two hundred other Latin American internees from Crystal City who were paroled to Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, a large producer of canned and frozen vegetables. The wages at the factory were low—fifty cents an hour for starting pay—and the hours were long. In effect, the workers lived in bondage. However, as Carmen made the long voyage to Japan, she suspected that her brother’s decision to stay in America was correct.

On December 22, fourteen days after the ship left Seattle, Christmas
gifts from the American Friends Service Committee were delivered to the women and children. “There we were in the middle of the ocean,” remembered Sumi. “The gifts arrived from the Quakers, a kerchief for my mother and a small doll for me. I couldn’t believe it. They sent Christmas gifts to us in Heart Mountain as well. Now they sent them again. How in the world did those Quakers find us?” Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Quakers continued their support.

Two nights later, on Christmas Eve, the SS
Matsonia
approached the harbor at Yokosuka, not far from Tokyo. The liner could not make it to shore because the harbor was crowded with sunken Japanese ships.

The next morning, Christmas, it snowed. On the top deck of the
Matsonia
, Sumi huddled with Nobu under a thin wool blanket as neither she nor Nobu had coats. The icy wind ran over Sumi’s skin. Barges were brought to take the repatriates to shore, and the nisei boys from the ship helped transport luggage from the ship to
the barges and then to a warehouse on the dock. Sumi watched her mother climb down a ladder to a barge and made sure Nobu did not fall, then stepped onto the barge herself.

In addition to the barges that carried the repatriates, the bay was crammed with many sampans with flat bottoms, sharp sterns, and large bows. The Japanese boatmen pleaded with the passengers still on board the
Matsonia
to throw them fruit, candy, cigarettes—anything from America. The cries of the Japanese boatmen were the first indication for Sumi’s father—and many of the other issei from Crystal City who were stubbornly loyal to Japan—that Japan had indeed lost the war.

One of the teachers from the Japanese School in Crystal City called out to a boatman who approached the ship. The two men, one an educated issei from America and the other an unassuming Japanese fisherman, had a conversation overheard by both Sumi and Carmen Higa Mochizuki. Both of the teenage girls were so surprised by the conversation that they later took notes about what they heard.

“Hey,” said the boatman, “sell me
some American tobacco, snacks, anything.”

“Well, let me see,” said the teacher from Crystal City. He searched his pockets, found an orange, and tossed it to the boatman.

“Thank you very much.”

“Hey, did Japan win?”

“No, no, no. We lost.”

“Ha ha!” the teacher said, unable to believe the truth. “Japan won, didn’t it?”

“No,” thundered the boatman, clearly exasperated. “Japan
really
lost.”

“Quit kidding.” A stricken shadow now crossed the teacher’s face. “Japan would never lose. It surely won. I came because Japan won.”

“Lost, lost,” screamed the boatman. “You are a fool.” The boatman threw the orange back to the teacher. “All of you on this ship”—the man shook his fist in
the snowy air—“you’re all stupid. Japan is a defeated country.”

The barges took the repatriates from Crystal City up a narrow channel at the southern end of Tokyo Bay to the dock at Uraga. The wind blew hard and children in the barges cried. Sumi glanced at her father, Tokiji, and saw his jaw drop. His dark eyes looked surprised. He had expected to be greeted with Japan’s Rising Sun flag and cries of victory. Instead, the boatman confirmed his worst fears: America had won. Slowly, the realization of his mistake began to sink in. “A part of my dad died that day on the barge,” recalled Sumi. “Everything he’d believed in was suddenly gone.”

On the dock, Sumi saw children from Saipan dressed in cotton dresses trembling in the cold. They had no warm clothes. In the distance, she saw clusters of Japanese men gathering driftwood to build fires.

Three rows of Japanese women dressed in white robes bowed deeply before the new arrivals from America.
“Sumimasen,”
they said. “I’m so sorry.” Over and over the women prostrated themselves and murmured apologies.
“Makemashita,”
they cried. “We lost.” Tokiji
stared at the lines of grieving women, offering their blatant laments.

Back in the United States, Associated Press photographs showed the arrival of the repatriates at Uraga. Over a photo of women and children aboard the
Matsonia
, a banner headline in the
San Antonio Evening News
, expressing the anti-Japanese bias of the times, read, “Japs Are Repatriated from Internment Camp in Texas.” Another photograph in the newspaper showed a sick Japanese woman being carried on a stretcher from the ocean liner to the dock on Christmas Day. Other photos show the barges that carried Sumi and her family and all the others from Crystal City to shore.

From the dock, the repatriates were herded onto buses and driven three miles to the Uraga Evacuation Camp, formerly used as a Japanese naval barracks. Sumi and the others slept on straw floor mats on the second floor of a two-story wooden structure. The bathroom was on the first floor, and the stench from the toilets filled the air.

The barracks were dark, and Mas Okabe remembered that he used birthday candles to light his way to his mat. Across the barracks, Min Tajii, a slightly older teenager from Crystal City, also lit a candle and saw dead bodies stacked several feet high, as if they were wood. Min asked when the bodies would be removed and was told that nothing would happen until a truck became available to move them. Min stayed in the barracks for a week, and the truck never came. Sumi also saw the bodies and was told that due to a fuel shortage there weren’t enough trucks to remove them.

When Sumi arrived, she was given a gray blanket that offered little protection from the cold. In the dark room she huddled with her parents and a few other families. That night they ate the husks of some grain, weak miso soup, tea, and a few tangerines. It was still Christmas and everyone shared memories of happier Christmases in the distant past. A few in the group sang Christmas carols, but Sumi was too cold and hungry to join in. On this long, silent Christmas night, Sumi wondered if she might freeze to death.

The next morning Sumi and the other repatriates formed lines
outside near a group of tables. One by one, they were served breakfast:
karasu mugi
, a tasteless bowl of barley husks. For dinner, they ate
nuka dango
, a dumpling made from bran flour, also tasteless. For the following few days, Sumi subsisted on a few hard dumplings, which stuck in her throat, and as much hot tea as she could find.

In the barracks, families gathered in groups according to where they planned to settle in Japan. For instance, Mas Okabe’s family’s destination was south of Uraga to a farm owned by his uncle near the city of Nagoya, a train ride of about 165 miles from the barracks. The Okabe family gathered with others trying to make their way south to small farming villages. In another corner of the barracks, Min Tajii, a teenager from California’s Imperial Valley who had been interned in Crystal City for two years, sat with his father and other families and plotted a route to Hiroshima, more than four hundred miles away. The Tajii family feared what they would find; only four months earlier, Hiroshima had nearly been obliterated by an atomic bomb. Min’s father had no idea whether any of his family were alive. Sumi and her parents had to make their way north to Sendai. Sumi’s sisters were living with Nobu’s oldest brother. Five other families from Crystal City also had relatives in Sendai and gathered to plan the 220-mile journey.

Seven days after their arrival in Uraga, Sumi, her parents, and the other five families from Crystal City left the barracks, each with a suitcase tied to his or her back. They took a truck to a streetcar that carried them to the train station. There, long lines of anxious people waited for trains that did not arrive on schedule and often didn’t arrive at all. The atmosphere was utter chaos. Sumi and her friends spotted a cluster of American MPs, approached them, and struck up a conversation. The MPs, surprised that these were Japanese American teenagers from Crystal City who spoke English, offered to help them. The MPs asked a conductor to move enough passengers off a train to make space for them. “We didn’t even have to buy a ticket,” remembered Sumi. “We just boarded the train and
headed for northern Japan.” The gesture by the MPs, a small but significant act of kindness, was a reminder of home and that she was still a Japanese American, and that meant something to the MPs.

The windows of the train were broken and flurries of snow filled the car and soon melted in a circle around Sumi’s feet. She and the others covered themselves in wool blankets. As the train passed Yokohama, Japan’s second-largest city, Sumi saw with her own eyes the destruction left behind by the American attack on the city on May 29, 1945. In a daylight strike by the 468th Bombardment Group, five hundred Boeing B-29s dropped hundreds of incendiary bombs on the heart of Yokohama’s industrial area. From the window, Sumi saw miles and miles of burned land and rubble. The snow added to the somber misery of the scene, which seemed incomprehensible to Sumi, who said, “It was something I couldn’t take in. No camera could capture what I saw. No words can describe how disappointed I was not only in Japan but the reality of war itself.”

Many tracks along the way had been bombed. Passengers, including Sumi and her parents, often had to stop, disembark, and make the long walk to the next station. They witnessed a confusing mixture of chaos and ordinary scenes. Children played on the roads, sometimes picking up cigarette butts to trade for rides. Old women lay dead in some of the train stations, and everywhere people were hungry and homeless. Yet in small towns, geishas performed traditional dances, and outside Buddhist temples, long lines of people formed, many chanting and sobbing. GIs lined up in front of churches as well.

When the train pulled into Ueno Station in Tokyo, it was filled with people who were not there to board trains but because the station had a roof and offered a place to sleep. People took mats from their backs and spread them on the floor to lie on and covered their bodies with newspapers, like sheets.

The train stopped several miles from the station in Sendai. Sumi and her family walked in the direction of Nobu’s eldest brother’s home. Prior to the outbreak of the war, the center of Sendai,
located inland of the western Pacific Ocean, was filled with trees and plants and looked like a lush forest. On the day of their arrival, Sendai looked nothing as Nobu remembered it. The ancient architecture of the old city had been destroyed by American aerial bombardment.

On the edge of the city, Sumi’s family walked through shattered rice paddies and fruit orchards and finally reached the home of Nobu’s brother. Both of Sumi’s older sisters were there. Nobu and Tokiji had not seen their older daughters in almost five years, and they greeted each other with relief and gratitude.

Nobu’s brother and sister-in-law had little to offer but welcomed them. Nobu introduced her sister-in-law to Sumi as Aunt Tetsu, and Sumi and Tetsu soon formed a bond. Tetsu taught Reiki, an ancient Japanese healing technique, at Tohoku University in Sendai. The word
rei
in Japanese means “God’s wisdom,” and the word
ki
means “life force energy.” Reiki practitioners lay hands on their subjects and use specific hand positions to restore energy and healing. Unlike many of her friends from Crystal City who were making their way across Japan, Sumi found an orderly and peaceful home, a balm for her exhaustion and trauma. For Sumi, Tetsu’s mastery of Reiki was yet another example of
gaman.
“Reiki was a great practice of healing,” recalled Sumi. “My aunt gave me a great gift. I didn’t know it at the time, but Reiki would become a big part of my life.”

More than three hundred miles from Sendai, Mas Okabe and his family had arrived at his uncle’s farm near Nagoya, a large city that was the center of the Japanese aircraft industry and had been a target of repeated Allied bombing. One-fourth of Nagoya had been destroyed by the time Mas and his family arrived. The uncle was not happy to see his brother or his family. “There was nothing to eat and there was really no room for us,” recalled Mas. “My brother and I found jobs in Tokyo shortly after we arrived. We left our parents behind and made our way to Tokyo.” The separation from their parents was difficult for Mas and his brother. Neither of them was fluent in Japanese, and food was scarce in Tokyo as well. “My
brother and I worried about our parents day and night. It was just a terrible time.”

Carmen Higa Mochizuki had never been to Japan.
She was born in Peru and grew up speaking Spanish. Though she attended the Japanese School in Crystal City, nothing prepared her for the journey from the camp in Uraga to the birthplace of her parents.
Their destination was the island of Okinawa, the scene of a battle that had lasted eighty-two days, the fiercest and bloodiest fight of the Pacific war. Some 287,000 American troops and 130,000 Japanese soldiers fought in the battle, code-named Operation Iceberg by the US Army. By the time Carmen and her family arrived six months after the battle ended, the island was a wasteland. An estimated one-quarter of its inhabitants, humiliated by defeat, committed suicide.

Carmen’s family moved into a small house with her father’s brother, his wife, and six children. Carmen was one of nine children in the house and conditions were miserable. Her aunt resented their arrival and took out her resentment on Carmen’s mother, who spent long hours cleaning the house, doing laundry, and scavenging for food.