AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although the following short story is fiction, it is based on my mother’s battle against the Department of Justice to receive her reparation and apology for having been incarcerated at the Jerome concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II. I dedicate this story to those who worked tirelessly for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and I am especially thankful to everyone who fought for the individuals like my mother, who had been expelled from the U.S. in a hostage exchange, so that they could be included in that landmark legislation. The photos are of the correspondence from the federal government that I discovered in my mother’s belongings after she had passed in 2013.
* * * * *
“Can you believe this?” Mom asked as she shook a piece of paper at me, her voice infused with ire. I looked at her with a sympathetic yet confused expression that must have invited explanation, but instead she simply plopped herself next to me on the living-room sofa and handed me the letter.
Written on official stationery from the U.S. Department of Justice, it was in reference to the reparations being given to those of Japanese descent who, like my mother, had been incarcerated in a “relocation” camp during World War II. Apparently, she had been ruled ineligible for any redress even though she and her family had been uprooted from Honolulu and shipped to Arkansas, where they were forced to live on snake-infested swampland in hastily constructed barracks.
I was trying to think of how to respond, what words might help bring comfort to my mother’s agitated state. Did she want gentle sympathy, or would she prefer my being similarly outraged? But before I could say anything, she added, “They actually rejected me,” her face scrunched in anger. “Tell me, what kind of government gives something then snatches it away? Who does something like that? The nerve!”
In all my life, I had never heard my mother swear or even utter slightly off-color words. She rarely raised her voice in public, and considered smoking or drinking too unladylike for her tastes. Whenever her patience was tested, she’d subconsciously switch to Japanese, but even then her choice of words were G-rated: yakamashii (be quiet!) or jama ni naru (pest!). At worst, she might label someone as baka (fool) and exclaim dame (hopeless), but that was about it. In English, the worst I ever heard her refer to anyone was “stupid.” She’d never even say “shut up” or “damn,” and using the f-word was well beyond her limits of decorum. But the way she just spat out “The nerve,” I knew what she really meant: The fucking nerve!
Ironically, at first Mom had no interest in applying for the $20,000 reparation that had been provided for by The Civil Liberties Act of 1988. At the time, I was incredulous, because the money was a mere drop in the bucket of everything her family had lost. But when I repeatedly urged her to apply, her response was always, “It’s all in the past,” or “That was such a long time ago.” And this unforgettable gem: “I don’t really need the money.” My mother actually said that, even as she relentlessly clipped coupons, reused Ziploc plastic storage bags, and darned Dad’s socks—all so she could eventually save enough money for a trip to visit her older brother, my Uncle Yuki, whom she hadn’t seen in more than forty years. Since the war’s end, the Matsumotos had been fractured across an ocean, with Mom, Dad, and I living in Honolulu and her older brother and his family in Tokyo.
Yet anytime I would argue with Mom to apply for the reparation, she would always end the discussion with some variation of shikata ga nai, loosely translated as “it can’t be helped,” as if the wartime racial hysteria was a natural event, like an earthquake or hurricane. Eventually, I stopped nagging her about it, resigning myself that those wartime memories were too painful for my mother, and that what she wanted most was to forget about that turbulent time in her life.
One day, though, after I had picked her up in Chinatown, where she had been shopping for some fish and vegetables, she asked me to head toward an area near Aala Park. As we drove around that neighborhood, near the edge of downtown Honolulu, she asked me to make a turn here and there while she kept looking out the window, searching for something. “I can’t figure it out,” she finally said.
“Figure what out?”
“Where our home was. It was a beautiful plantation-style house with three bedrooms and a long lanai that wrapped around the front.”
We circled around several times but Mom was utterly lost because the streets had all been changed since the war. The only thing familiar to her now was Nuuanu Stream, flowing at the edge of Chinatown. “Yuki and I used to catch tadpoles and opae shrimp there when we were kids, and we’d walk over to the Toyo Theatre for Saturday matinees. We really had such a carefree childhood. Now, though, I really don’t recognize anything here, but our house must have been somewhere there,” she said, pointing toward one row of Kukui Garden’s three-story apartment buildings. With a wry smile, she added, “Well, somebody must have been really happy.”
“What do you mean?”
Mom explained that, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and Grandpa had been rounded up by the FBI, Grandma thought it best to convert all the family’s wealth into tangible goods. So she and Mom went on a shopping spree at the jewelry stores in downtown, buying pearl necklaces, jade pendants, and gold bracelets. They then wrapped the jewelry in habotai scarves, packed the items into tin cans, and buried them deep in the backyard.
“Maybe the cans are still there,” I said.
“We didn’t buried them that deeply,” she laughed, half-heartedly. “I just hope some poor construction workers found the jewelry, instead of some rich haole developers.”
That drive months ago around Mom’s old neighborhood might have triggered more than just feelings of nostalgia; it may have also stirred up past bitterness as my mother thought about what her family had endured during World War II. Not only was Grandpa shipped to a federal prison in Santa Fe while the rest of the family was sent to Arkansas, but the government had resisted any pleas to reunite the family unless they agreed to be sent to Japan in an exchange of civilians. This was in 1943, during the height of the war.
At that time, the federal government was desperate for the return of U.S. citizens who had been stranded in Japan and other parts of Asia when the war broke out, and my grandparents, my mother, and her older brother, my Uncle Yuki, were swept up in the one-for-one exchange. Adding insult to injury, the federal government referred to this barter of human bodies as a “repatriation,” which was an outrageous misnomer. My mother and Uncle Yuki were both born and raised in Hawaii; they had never even set foot in Japan before.
That day, holding Mom’s rejection letter while sitting with her on the living-room sofa of my parents’ home, I didn’t yet fully appreciate her outrage. Unfortunately, I tried to lighten her mood by playfully teasing her, “Well, you didn’t even want the reparation in the first place anyway,” but this was the exact wrong thing to do. Mom snatched the letter from my hand and exited the room without saying a word.
* * * * *
In the ensuing months, I never once brought up the subject of the reparations, figuring it was best to let Mom initiate any discussion of that painful topic, should she choose to. Eventually, over time, I had even forgotten about her rejection, but all that changed on election day 1994.
Ever since I could remember, my parents always took voting very seriously. On every election day, they would dress up, with my father in one of his finest aloha shirts, a nice pair of slacks, and polished dress shoes, and my mother usually in either a beautiful muumuu or an elegant blouse and skirt. They would look like they were going out for a fancy dinner at an expensive restaurant in Waikiki, rather than heading up the street to their polling location. As a kid, I thought that everyone had to dress up to vote, like going to a formal church service. Only later did I realize that it was my parents’ way of showing full respect to the tenets of democracy. They never took for granted their right to vote, perhaps because their citizenship had been so egregiously challenged during World War II.
Unfortunately, on election day 1994, when our country was deciding between a second term for George H.W. Bush or an abrupt change of course with Bill Clinton, I was running late because of unusually cumbersome traffic on the H-1 freeway. When I arrived at my parents’ home to pick them up to vote, Mom was more than annoyed. And that irritation mushroomed into anger when she saw how I was dressed: t-shirt, shorts, and rubber slippers. She could barely contain herself as she asked, her voice saturated in equal parts reproach and sarcasm, “Are we going to the polling site or to the beach?”
“Geesh, Mom, give me a break. Traffic on the freeway was horrendous.”
“I don’t care. We are voting for our next President. This happens only once ever four years. Show some respect next time!”
I was taken aback by the pure intensity of her voice, which had quickly reduced me to a young boy in elementary school. The truth was that I had taken the day off from work and had promised Dad that I’d help him with yardwork afterward, so I hadn’t thought to dress up. But I wasn’t going to argue with Mom, especially when she was in such a foul mood.
Later that day, after Dad and I had finished pruning some bushes, he brought a couple of beers for us to enjoy while we relaxed on the patio. It was a sunny, splendidly warm day, and we were both soaked in perspiration. We sat in silence for a while, looking at the backyard, admiring the results of several hours of our hard labor. Then, as Dad returned from the kitchen with some pupus to munch on, he said, “Don’t mind your mother. She just got some bad news yesterday.”
“Oh no, from the doctor? Is she okay?”
“Sorry, nothing like that. She’s as healthy as ever, but she got another letter from the U.S. Department of Justice. Her appeal for the reparation was denied.”
“What? I didn’t even know that she had appealed the rejection.”
“Yeah, she even hired a lawyer to help her, and she had to submit all kinds of paperwork, this document and that file. It was so humbug, but she was really hopeful and then, after several years of bureaucratic bullshit, she was denied again.”
“What was the reasoning?”
“Something about her being ineligible because she went to Japan during the war.”
I stopped eating the tako poke. “But she didn’t just go there. She was sent there.”
“I know, but that was the excuse. Your mother was furious when she read the letter. I’ve never seen her quite like that.”
“I don’t blame her. To be slapped in the face once was bad enough, but then to be slapped twice?”
My father took a big gulp of beer. “I know you meant well, but now I really wish you hadn’t encouraged her to apply for the reparation.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Dad, you know that Mom has the right to every single penny of that $20,000. I mean, really, after all that her family lost during the war, and I’m not talking only about their possessions and property.”
“I know, I know, but I’m just afraid that she won’t be able to let this go.”
“Well, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”
Dad laughed, “You have no idea how hard-headed your mother can be.” Then, after grabbing two more beers for us from the kitchen, he began telling me something I had never heard before—the story of how he and Mom met in Japan after the war, when he was working for the U.S. occupation forces as an interpreter. After months of courtship, they were married, and the plan was for Dad to return to Hawaii first, to find a home for them to live, with Mom following several months later.
But when Mom arrived in Honolulu, where she had been born and raised, she was abruptly detained by the immigration officials. Much to her horror, she learned she had somehow been stripped of her U.S. citizenship. In stunned silence, she listened as an immigration official explained that she had unwittingly renounced her citizenship by moving to an enemy country (Japan) during the war. To make matters worse, the Japanese government had declared her a non-citizen as well, even though she was the child of Japanese nationals. The bottom line: Mom had become a stateless person—literally a woman with no country to call her home.
For more than a week, Mom was held at a detention center on Sand Island in Honolulu Harbor while the authorities tried to sort out what to do with her. During that time, Dad visited her every day, pleading with her to register as a resident alien. Then, later, she could apply for U.S. citizenship using their marriage to bolster her case. But Mom was resolute. She would reclaim her citizenship based on the merits of her case, and that was that.
While Mom was in bureaucratic limbo, Dad’s brothers and sisters took turns accompanying him on his visits to Sand Island, trying to convince her to give up her seemingly quixotic battle. They were all worried because Mom was so young, only in her early twenties, and appeared so delicate. Also, they were afraid for her after hearing that many of the Sand Island detainees had lice, tuberculosis, and other communicable diseases. Eventually, even Dad’s mother went to visit Mom in hopes of convincing her to change her mind. I had to wonder what my paternal grandmother thought. In all likelihood, she expected her future daughter-in-law from Japan to be a dutiful, docile young lady. And yet there was Mom, defiantly fighting the U.S. government over her citizenship.
Eventually, the immigration officials conceded that, because she was a minor when she was sent to Japan, she had not actually renounced her citizenship. After all, what was she to do, remain in Arkansas by herself while her parents were shipped to Japan? She had to go where her parents went, and she shouldn’t be penalized for that. It was a sweet victory, and from that day on Mom never took her citizenship lightly.
I sat there on that cloudless day, soaking in everything Dad just told me. “So that’s why Mom was so mad this morning.”
Dad nodded, “You know she’s never, ever missed voting. I remember once, this was before you were born, she was so sick with the flu and our house was almost flooded from a violent tropical storm. She still insisted that we vote, even though the election that day was only a local runoff for city councilor.”
“Whew, I guess that’s why she really didn’t appreciate me showing up late this morning the way I was dressed.”
Dad chuckled, “No, I don’t think she appreciated that at all.”
© 2024 Alden M. Hayashi
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