Allegiance (29 page)

He turns vague. Fingers stroke his red beard. “Official. Stamps and seals.”

“Can you get me one?”

“Hal Morita, maybe,” he says. “I'll try.”

Morita is willing, Opler tells me at dinner that evening. He will come to see me the next morning.

A bugle fanfare wakes me. I stretch under the coarse cotton sheets. Fumiko sings of alabaster cities; she rehearses Puccini. I eat a quick breakfast and take my seat under FDR's portrait. I wait for half an hour, then an hour. Morita is
not coming, I think. It is a surprise when the knock sounds on the door. Then another when I open it to see the serious face of Harry Nakamura.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Harrison?”

“I'm having a meeting.”

He looks over my shoulder. “There is no one else in the room.”

“I'm aware of that.” A pause. “I'm waiting for Hal Morita.”

Harry nods. His hair is uncombed and his shirt rumpled. “And I am aware of that. Would you like to know where he is?”

I step back from the door and beckon him inside. “Yes, I would.”

Harry sits down across the desk from me. “He is in the hospital.”

“What?”

“There was an altercation in his apartment last night. He will live. But he will not be coming to talk to you.”

“The Hoshidan?”

“I do not think so. I think it was men like you. And so I ask again, what are you doing here?”

“I'm advising people about renunciation,” I say.

“Yes, but that is not all. What are you looking for?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“I am a block manager, Mr. Harrison. I am responsible for the safety of my residents. I am doing my job. And you are doing yours, I am sure, but I would like to know just what it is.”

I take a breath. Our interests coincide, I think. At any rate, there does not seem to be anyone else who can help. “Certificates,” I say. “I've heard that people are being offered certificates for renunciation.”

Harry looks at me with a curious expression. “Not just for renunciation. For their land. Do you not know this?”

I ignore his question. “Their land?”

“Aliens are not allowed to own land in California.” His tone is impatient. “That is why the parents' farms are all held in the children's names. But if the children now renounce, there will be no citizen to own them.”

“Can't you just sell them?”

Harry smiles thinly. “We had some experience selling to our neighbors when the evacuation plan was announced. It was not wholly satisfactory. That
is why there is now this government compensation program. Your program.”

“There is no such program,” I say. We look at each other. “Can you get me one of those certificates?”

It is his turn to hesitate. “I think so. I will try.”

Two days later, word comes through Marvin Opler. Harry wants to meet with me again. He has something to show me. But for this meeting, I am the one who does not turn up.

“WHAT'S THE RUSH,
sir?” Andrew Rosen stuffs clothes into a duffel bag. “I was getting on well with one of the nurses.”

“Duty calls, soldier.” In the jeep I explain the gist of a lengthy phone conversation with Edward Ennis.

Eureka, California, calls itself the Queen City of the Ultimate West. In reality, it's a small to midsized fishing and logging town with a growing tourist industry. And once a year, in the summer, it gets an especially distinguished visitor. A federal judge for the Northern District of California makes the daylong drive up from San Francisco and hears cases in the Humboldt County courthouse. The local bar association welcomes him appropriately, with a clambake and plenty to drink. The cases are an afterthought, trivial and one-sided. “Guys selling alcohol to the Indians,” Ennis told me. “That sort of thing. It's an excuse for a party.”

This year, the visiting judge was Louis Goodman, and the cases they had for him were those of twenty-seven draft resisters from Tule Lake. Dinners and dances were planned. Upon Goodman's arrival, he appointed two local lawyers, Arthur Hill and Chester Monette, to represent the defendants. That evening, the parties began. Seventy-five guests filled Eureka's finest restaurant. They ate steaks with mushrooms, shoestring potatoes, and whole kernel corn. There was crab cocktail for a starter and green apple pie for dessert.

“I don't need the menu, thanks.”

“Just setting the scene,” Ennis said.

Then came the whiskey and the speeches.

Arthur Hill spoke, and Assistant US Attorney Emmett Seawell, up from Sacramento for the occasion. Prosecution and defense agreed that only in America could such people as the resisters receive a fair trial with all the protections of the Constitution. It is a wonderful thing.

Finally it was Judge Goodman's turn. “He gets up there,” Ennis told me, “and says something vague about the need to be calm and just despite the war, to adhere to the principles of our forefathers. There's some confusion, as you can imagine.”

The following day Hill and Monette began the process of pleading their clients guilty. Judge Goodman questioned the defendants briefly about the conditions at Tule Lake and accepted their guilty pleas. He was seen late that night in a bar, talking animatedly to his clerk. The next morning there was a new member of the defense team, a man named Blaine McGowan. Emmett Seawell did not know who he was; nor, apparently, did Hill or Monette. “Just walks into court with a string tie and a pair of alligator boots,” Ennis said. “Goodman appoints him, too, and he greets his clients in front of everyone. ‘Let me tell you, I got no love for Japs. But I haven't lost a case yet, and I don't intend to lose this one.' ”

With Hill and Monette watching in amazement, McGowan made an oral motion to withdraw the guilty pleas. “Granted,” said Judge Goodman.

“I move to dismiss the indictment,” McGowan said.

“On what grounds?” Goodman asked.

“Duress,” said McGowan. “Confinement without due process of law in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

“Opposition, Mr. Seawell?” asked the judge. Seawell said nothing out loud. His internal monologue was extensive, but nonlegal in nature, and mostly obscene. Arthur Hill rose slowly to his feet. “Mr. Hill?”

“We would like to withdraw as defense counsel, your honor,” said Hill. “Our clients have disregarded our advice and we do not feel we can offer effective representation under these conditions.”

“Agreed,” said Judge Goodman. “And now, Mr. Seawell?”

Emmett Seawell did what any Assistant US Attorney would do under the
circumstances. He requested a postponement and called for help. At Main Justice, he got Edward Ennis. “He was in quite a lather,” Ennis told me. “Went on and on about how the judge was trying to railroad him. I told him not to worry; we had an expert in the area who could be there in half a day.”

“Me?”

“That's right.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Help him,” said Ennis. “What do you think's going to happen if word gets out that the Japs are free to refuse the draft? How would that play in California?”

“What do we argue?”

“You're an expert on the evacuation, right? Say they weren't confined; the Relocation Authority would happily have released them for military service. Say that when your country calls, you go. Sixty-three resisters from Heart Mountain got sentenced to three years a couple weeks ago.”

“So here we are,” I tell Andrew Rosen. “Riding to the rescue.” It is a distraction from my investigation, but there is nothing I can do about it. I remember the Sears upholstery of the administrative apartments. “We're the cavalry.”

“Jeez,” says Rosen, chewing his gum. “I guess we are.” He shakes his head; muscles jump in his shoulders and upper arms as his hands move on the steering wheel.

“What do you think?”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“I'm not your superior officer, Andrew. I'm not in the army at all.”

“You're the cavalry, though, sir. I'm just the horse.”

“Thanks,” I say, unsure whether I am being mocked.

“Well, here's what I think, then. I got in this uniform through the draft. I didn't like it. I had a job. I had a girl. I didn't like being told to put them aside and pick up a rifle. But I did it. Your boss is right; when your country calls, you go. But let me tell you. If old Uncle Sam had taken away that job, taken away that girl because he didn't like my looks, put me in a camp and then said, ‘Well, son, pick up that rifle, I guess you're good enough to die'—I'd spit in his face is what I'd do. A man that would go along with that kind of treatment, he's not a man at all.”

“That's what you think?”

“Yes, sir, it is. But like I said, I'm just the horse.”

“All right, then,” I say.

• • • • 

A few hours past Mount Shasta the first seabirds fly into view, high in the darkening sky, and an hour later there is the shining expanse of the Pacific under the setting sun. It is the first time I have seen sunset on the ocean, and another reminder of how far I have come from Philadelphia. Eureka hugs the coast of Humboldt Bay. I see a tangle of buildings, a calm lagoon, a clock tower with a statue above.

“Thank God you're here,” says Emmett Seawell when I introduce myself. He is a fireplug of a man, short and sturdily built, with the face of a bulldog. “Judge Goodman will know Washington is paying attention.” He seems less enthusiastic when I offer him Ennis's arguments. “It's not a question of whether the Relocation Authority would have let them go,” he says. “It's whether they were unconstitutionally detained in the first place. That's what Blaine McGowan is arguing. He's attacking the whole plan of detention.”

I consider this for a moment. “You're right,” I say. “That's not going to work.”

“So what do we say?”

“We can't let this case be about the detention. We can't defend that unless we have the facts to show it was reasonable to suspect disloyalty. And we don't have those facts right now.” Finding them is my job, of course, but I think it best not to mention that. When I get back to Washington I will have to take a closer look at the brief the Pacific states filed.

“And so?” Seawell interrupts my reverie.

“So we're going to have to avoid the issue.”

“How do we do that?”

“I'll think of something,” I say. “I'm the expert.”

• • • • 

“Caswell Harrison,” I say. My voice sounds thin. I get to my feet, button my jacket, and step out from behind the prosecution's table. “Special Assistant
to the Attorney General. With the court's permission, I will offer the Justice Department's opposition to the motion to dismiss the indictment.”

“Please proceed,” says Judge Goodman. He does not look the ogre Seawell described. If anything, his face conveys a quizzical air. Pale eyes, pale eyebrows, slightly protuberant ears. The clerk with whom he schemed in the bar is a pretty, dark-haired girl.

“These men were called for military service,” I say. “That call had to be obeyed. Whether they were unconstitutionally confined has nothing to do with it.”

“It doesn't?”

“No. The Supreme Court will tell us whether their confinement was lawful. They cannot decide on their own that the government has treated them so badly that they're now entitled to ignore the Selective Service Act.” I have learned something from the Supreme Court, I realize; I have learned how to avoid hard questions. “We cannot let every man's conscience be the measure of the law. That would be anarchy.”

Goodman leans back in his chair. “Or, two wrongs don't make a right?” he asks. “Well, however you put it, you have a point, Mr. Harrison. The motion to dismiss is denied. I'll start hearing testimony this afternoon.”

“That was beautiful,” says Emmett Seawell, clapping me on the back.

“Thanks,” I say. “Well, we'll see how it goes.”

“Don't worry,” says Seawell. “The rest is a breeze.”

• • • • 

When court resumes in the afternoon, word has gotten around that interesting doings are afoot. The gallery of the Humboldt County courthouse is filled with the citizens of Eureka. Only one of the resisters is present, a man named Masaaki Kuwabara; the others remain in the county jail. Kuwabara has donned a suit for the occasion and slicked his hair back in a pompadour above his wide and placid face. He looks young to me, too, as he takes the stand.

“Did you receive a notice that you had been inducted into the United States Army?” Seawell asks him.

“Yes.” Kuwabara's answer is flat.

“What did it instruct you to do?”

“To go for a doctor's exam.”

“And did you report for the preinduction physical?”

“No.”

“Are you willing to serve in the Army?”

“No.”

“Thank you,” says Seawell. “Your witness.”

Blaine McGowan is older, probably nearing fifty, but he dresses with the flash of a younger man. Under the pants of his suit I can see the alligator boots I heard about. He smiles at Kuwabara but gets no response. “I'd like you to tell the court the story of how you came to be confined at Tule Lake,” McGowan says. “From the beginning. Your father was born in Japan, is that right?”

“Yes,” Kuwabara says. “He came to Hawaii on a one-year indenture contract. He was an interpreter on a sugar plantation.”

“I object,” says Emmett Seawell, rising to his feet. “The family history has no relevance here.”

“Our argument is that the defendants were under such psychological strain that they could not make a voluntary decision to submit for induction or not,” McGowan answers. “To understand their psychological condition, the court must hear the full story.”