Allegiance (30 page)

“I'll allow it,” says Goodman.

Seawell is so surprised he forgets to sit down. After a few seconds he recalls himself. “This isn't good,” he whispers to me.

“And how did your father end up in California?” McGowan asks.

Kuwabara tells his story. His father was a translator, accompanying the overseers. One day an overseer beat a sick worker with a bullwhip. Kuwabara's father took the whip and knocked the overseer unconscious. After that he had to leave, of course. The workers hid him in sugar cane and put him on a freighter to San Francisco. There he sharecropped and saved until he could afford a wife. “A picture bride,” Kuwabara says, sent from Japan. There were three children, Masaaki and two younger daughters.

“What was your childhood like?” McGowan asks.

Kuwabara shrugs. “It was ordinary. My father had saved enough to buy a
farm by the time I was two. He held it in my name, since he could not own land.”

The Alien Land Law
, I think, flashing back to Harry Nakamura in the barracks at Tule Lake. Certificates for the land.
Your program
, he said,
the government's program.
A program that does not exist. On the stand, Kuwabara is still talking. The children went to the local schools. His parents sent one of the girls to Japan for education, but she did not like it and returned to the United States. Some people shunned them, but most were accepting. They traded vegetables for meat from neighbors who hunted; they hid Easter eggs together.

“And did this change after Pearl Harbor?” McGowan asks.

“Not at first,” Kuwabara says. He was seventeen at the time of the attack, a senior in high school. Like everyone, he was astonished and angry. At school they talked all day about the damn Japs. For the first time, Kuwabara smiles. “No one seemed to think I was one of them.”

Then the FBI started taking the men away. They searched his house. The older sister had drawn pictures of the Panama Canal in school, and agents seized them as evidence of a plot to destroy the canal. Kuwabara smiles again, a different smile. “The drawings of an eleven-year-old girl,” he says. The FBI took his father to a Justice Department camp in North Dakota. They took a busload of men from the neighborhood, everyone who had any role in the community. The man behind the wheel was the driver of Kuwabara's school bus. He could not meet their eyes. He dropped his cap to the ground as if by accident and picked it up slowly to give the wives time to say good-bye.

For weeks after, Kuwabara says, there was still no talk of evacuation. But at the end of January, things changed. When the President issued his order, they knew it was coming. Kuwabara's mother considered leaving on their own, but they heard that families were being turned back at the state line. Without his father, they did not know what to do. In March the freeze order came down, and leaving was no longer an option. They stayed, waiting for evacuation. They tended the farm. “The seasons will not wait,” his mother said. “Plow, plant, weed; that is the process of life.”

McGowan waits a moment before his next question. “You did not think of resisting?”

Kuwabara looks around the courtroom. Through windows on the right-hand wall, squares of sunlight fall on selected chairs in the gallery. They shift, slow spotlights traversing the audience. “
Shikata ga nai
,” he says. “It is a saying. It cannot be helped; it must be borne. We could not resist the Army. A neighbor killed himself rather than go. He had fought in the Great War and thought he was dishonored. But the Citizens League told us it was a way to show patriotism. For some I think it was a relief. No one would ask us to be anything other than what we were. And we did not know what the camps would be like.”

The order that applied to Kuwabara's family was issued on April 27. The Army posted notices on telephone poles.
Bring only what you can carry. Report to the Tanforan Assembly Center.
“We had eight days to dispose of everything else.” There is more expression in his face now, and an edge coming into his voice. “My parents had a tea set from their wedding. We did not use it; we were saving it for a better house. It was fine china, worth over three hundred dollars. A man came by the house and said he'd pay seventeen. ‘You won't get a better offer,' he said. My mother smashed the plates in front of him.”

Tanforan was a racetrack. The people were lodged in whitewashed stalls that still smelled of horse urine. It was so hot that the legs of Kuwabara's cot sank into the asphalt floor. He woke up with the bed frame on the ground. The guards said they should be honored because Seabiscuit had lived there.

There are scattered laughs from the audience. “Please,” says Judge Goodman. A man in a plaid shirt catches my eye and spreads his hands, palms up. Ostentatiously innocent. I raise my eyebrows and shrug. After all, it was funny. I think.

After four months in Tanforan, Kuwabara tells us, they were sent to Topaz, in Utah. They had been told that the assembly center was temporary, that the camp would be different. But the barracks were tarpaper. The walls were green pine boards that pulled apart as they dried. Dust came through the gaps and covered the furniture, the clothes, the food in the mess halls. Storms shrank the visibility inside to three feet. When they came at night, he woke up coated white with dust.

The toilets were communal, he says, all unscreened. Women brought cardboard boxes with them for privacy or tried to go when no one else was there.
Midnight became a crowded hour. Kuwabara's youngest sister began to complain. She thought she was in Japan again because none of her white friends were there. She kept asking to go back to America. His mother pointed to the flags in the guard towers. “This is America,” she said. His sister did not believe her.

“Perhaps she was right,” says McGowan.

Seawell stands up. “That's not a question.”

“Mr. McGowan,” says Judge Goodman, “please do not comment on the witness's testimony.”

“I apologize, Your Honor,” says McGowan.

“Bush league,” Seawell whispers to me. I grunt. The aside seems pointless, at any rate. McGowan has sensibly opted for a bench trial, so there is no jury to impress, only Judge Goodman. And me; I am finding myself drawn into Kuwabara's story. His life is nothing like mine, of course. But he hid Easter eggs like I did; he went to school to learn what was right. He was called for a physical, a doctor to smile and call him son. But not to say his war was over.

Kuwabara's father joined them in Topaz in July, after six months in a Justice Department detention camp. He had aged past the point of recognition. Soon after that, the administrators came looking for men to harvest crops. They offered work furloughs, and Kuwabara got on a train to pick sugar beets.

“How was your experience harvesting?”

Kuwabara scowls. “Worse than the camp.” The detainees were guarded like cattle on the trains. They went to a farm in Utah. The townspeople wouldn't let them into movie theaters or serve them in cafes. All around were signs saying
No Japs
. When no other place would take them, they slept in the jail. “I was happy to go back.”

“So you went back to Topaz,” McGowan says. “How did you come to Tule Lake?”

“It was the questionnaire.” Kuwabara shakes his head. In February the Army came through with the loyalty questionnaire.
Will you serve
, one question asked.
Will you pledge allegiance to the United States and forswear loyalty to the emperor of Japan?
“I answered both questions no, and so did the rest of my family.”

“Why did you do that?”

“For my family.”

McGowan raises an eyebrow and tilts his head. People were confused, Kuwabara says. They were suspicious. The form was called an application for leave clearance, but they did not want to leave. They were not allowed to return to California, and where else could they go? He had told his family what it was like on the outside.

Then, too, some people thought the second question was a trick, that a yes answer admitted loyalty to the emperor. How else could it be forsworn? And what of the parents, who were not American citizens, who were not allowed to be? To pledge allegiance to the United States and forswear Japan for them was treason. What would happen if they did that and were sent to Japan?

Jesus
, I think. Of course. Nine thousand said no instead of two hundred, Biddle told me. Now I know why the questionnaire didn't work. I remember John Hall protesting that he spent a lot of time writing it.

“So they could not answer yes to that question,” Kuwabara says. He did not want to be separated from them. And he did not want to be drafted. The Army was forming Nisei suicide squads, he heard, so the white boys would not have to die. But why should he die in their place? Why should his parents lose their only son?

After they answered no, the family was classed as disloyal. They were sent to Tule Lake on a train. The people from Tule Lake who had answered yes were on trains in the other direction. Kuwabara saw them when they passed. The faces that looked like him, like the enemy. He heard them shout.

“What did they say?” McGowan asks.

Kuwabara's face is expressionless again. “They said, ‘Go back to Tokyo, you goddamn Japs.' ”

In Tule Lake he received the draft notice. He refused it. “Same reason I said no on the questionnaire,” he explains. “My family.” His father had come to the United States with only a bedroll, had worked all his life for his children's future. Kuwabara's life is not just his to do what he wanted, he says; it is his father's too. “I will not let the government take it from him.” He pauses. “We Japanese go to war expecting not to come back. The white boys all think someone else will die. We do not. If I am to do that, if my father is to lose his only son, it must be for a cause I respect. When I believed in this country, I
could have gone. I could have said, ‘This country gave us much, and in return we gave all.' But we could not tell it that way now. It would be that my father worked for everything and it was all taken from him. And last they took his son and the future of his name. There is no honor in that. My family will not end that way.”

“I see,” says McGowan. He turns his eyes down for a moment, then looks back up. “Is there anything more you would like to say?”

Masaaki Kuwabara looks at me and Seawell, at the crowd in the gallery. “I forgive you,” he says.

The audience erupts in hisses. Goodman pounds his gavel. “I will clear this courtroom.” The crowd settles slowly. “I'm going to take a recess now,” says Goodman. “We'll resume tomorrow.”

• • • • 

Eureka has several hotels, but pride of place belongs to the Eureka Inn, a Tudor Revival building occupying a full city block. Emmett Seawell, Judge Goodman, and all the court personnel are lodged there, courtesy of the Humboldt County Bar Association. Andrew Rosen and I are too, which would not have been the case if DOJ were footing the bill. But Seawell has managed to get us included in the judicial party, and I am not about to complain. In the restaurant we discuss strategy over a chicken dinner. Outside of special occasions, steaks are still rare.

“McGowan's turning this into a circus,” Seawell complains. “And the judge is letting him.”

“Yes,” I say. “I don't think Goodman is on our side.”

“You don't say.” Seawell looks at me as though I have professed a belief in the law of gravity.

“I wouldn't give up hope, though. What can he do? They broke the law and they admit it. So he lets them tell their stories. It doesn't matter in the end, does it?”

“Yeah,” says Sewell. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six,” I say.

“I've got a couple more years under my belt. In my experience, having the law on your side isn't always enough.”

“What's he going to do?” I ask. “Strike down the Selective Service Act?”

“You're the expert,” says Seawell. He drains his beer. “See you tomorrow.”

I turn my glass meditatively in my hand, watching the amber liquid. It is true that Goodman seems favorably inclined toward the defense, and true that the law by itself isn't always enough. Still, I have a hard time seeing what Goodman can do other than allow the resisters a forum to air their grievances.

When I look up I find myself staring into the eyes of Judge Goodman's law clerk, seated on the other side of the room. I raise my glass in her direction, and she turns away. Then she gets up and walks over.

“Enjoying your stay?”

I rise to my feet. “This is what I think of as the California climate,” I say. “Nice low sixties.”

“You didn't find that elsewhere?”

“Sacramento was pretty hot.”

“How was Tule Lake?”

“Better,” I say. “So you know where I came from.”

“Of course I know. You're the Special Assistant to the Attorney General,” she says. I can hear the capitalization in her voice, and other things.

“One of many,” I say. “I don't think you're supposed to be talking to me. Not without the other side present. It could give me an unfair advantage.”

“I don't think Blaine McGowan is going to complain.”

“Probably not. Where'd you get him?”

“He's one of the judge's law school classmates.”

“Is it true he's never lost a case?”

“As far as I know.”

“Well then, I probably need all the advantage I can get. Would you like to sit down?”

She shakes her head. “I can stand.”

“How about telling me your name then?”

“Eleanor.”

“How can I help you, Eleanor?”

“Does your mother know what you do?”

I am taken aback. “What do you mean?”

“Or your girlfriend? I'm sure you have a girlfriend, with that suit. Is she proud of you?”