The Phoenix Tree. Jon Cleary
no: he went home to Nagasaki a hero. Both Asahi and Mainichi ran stories on him and he went home to more than just a prodigal son’s welcome. From then on he had known he would never be happy to die in America, that eventually he would have to be laid to rest in the shadow of the hills outside Nagasaki where he had grown up. He had gone back again in 1927, telling his father he would come home to stay when he had made himself a rich man in America. He had become Westernized to that extent: the prodigal son is even more welcome if he brings home his own fatted calf. He had come to realize, though reluctantly, that he lived better in America than his parents did in Japan.
In 1929 he had returned to Japan once more, this time taking Tamezo with him. The 13-year-old boy had not minded going; after all, his best friend, Kenji Minato, was also going, with his father. The two boys had been left with their respective grandparents; at the end of two years Tamezo had been glad to return to America, but Kenji had stayed on, content to be thoroughly Japanese. Chojiro had been bitterly disappointed and almost uncomprehending when Tamezo, in his first fit of filial rebellion, told him how much he had hated Japan and everything about it. He had taken Tamezo with him again in the summer of 1937, when Hideki and Mieko Minato had gone home to live in Japan for good. But the visit had not been a success. Tamezo had been politely respectful towards his grandparents, but adamant towards his father that Japan was not for him.
Tamezo had visited the Minatos in their new home in Tokyo and come away shocked. ‘Ken’s become one hundred per cent Japanese,’ he told his father. ‘Ken – he wouldn’t let me call him that, like I used to. He insisted on Kenji—’
‘As he should,’ said Chojiro. ‘You should take him as an example.’
‘Dad, I don’t want that sort of example. For Pete’s sake, I just want to be an American – what’s wrong with that?’ As if to prove his point, Tamezo spoke in English. ‘That’s where we live, isn’t it?’
‘Only till the right time comes to leave,’ said Chojiro in Japanese.
Over the next few years Chojiro talked of going home to Japan to stay. But, though he was not demonstrative, he loved his children and he came to realize that, if he and Tsuchi retired to Japan, Tamezo and his sisters would refuse to accompany them. They had become Americans, despite all his sometimes harsh discipline that was meant to make them Japanese.
He had welcomed the bombing of Pearl Harbor as if it were a blow for freedom. ‘You will see now what Japan can teach the world. There are still too many barbarians masquerading as civilized people.’
‘Hitler, for instance?’ said Tamezo, now insisting on being called Tom.
‘Germany is like Japan, it is entitled to its own sphere of influence. Do you think the barbarians we have in Washington are any better?’
They had argued, stiffly polite, with Tom choking on his anger at his father’s attitude. Then the barbarians did start to emerge. Westbrook Pegler wrote in his column: ‘The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now – and to hell with habeas corpus.’ California’s Attorney-General, Earl Warren, demonstrated that Justice could be as blind in one eye as any politician cared to make her. The Western Defence commander, Lieutenant-General De-Witt, showed his stars as a racist; he took an overdose of patriotism, a bad thing for military men. There were no American-Japanese, as far as the bigots were concerned: they were Japs and nothing else, not even to be trusted as much as Germans. The Yellow Peril was peril indeed, and on 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt, one of Tom’s heroes, signed Executive Order 9066, interning all Japanese from the West Coast.
‘I told you so,’ said Chojiro and packed his bags for the internment camp at Santa Anita racetrack, content to have been proven Japanese by the barbarians. Though they did not know it, he and his family were quartered in a horsestall that had once housed Phar Lap, an Australian national hero that had come to California and, according to Australian legend, been poisoned by the Americans. No one was safe from the barbarians, not even horses.
He had ignored Tamezo’s vehement protests to the authorities at Santa Anita and then at Blood Mountain. It was shameful to have a son who so openly and loudly declared his allegiance to the American flag; so he went out of his way to shut America out of the family circle. In the camp he insisted that nothing but Japanese should be spoken amongst them. He had not taken part in any of the pro-Japanese demonstrations by the Issei and the Kibei, the Japan-educated Nisei, leaving that to the younger men; but he had sat in on the meetings that had planned the demonstrations. When a group of Kibei had attacked Tamezo, who had abused them for their treason to the land of their birth, he had turned his back and walked away, though it had hurt him more than he would ever confess, even to Tsuchi.
When in 1943 Tamezo had, after a number of applications, at last been accepted for army service, Chojiro had once more turned his back. This time he had moved out of the family hut and remained out of it till Tamezo had left for Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Once his son had gone he had joined all the demonstrations, as if he were fighting his own small private war. He had to wash away his shame in front of the other Issei.
‘Okada-san—’
He came back from his reverie of the past, turned away from the barbed wire to see Yosuke Mazaki standing a few yards from him. ‘I’m sorry, I was a long way away then – What is it?’
Mazaki was one of the Kibei, a young man whose fanaticism sometimes made even Chojiro uncomfortable. He was a hero who, fortunately, knew he would never be called upon to be heroic; such men are often more dangerous to their cause than to their enemies. Chojiro did not like him, but tolerated him.
‘Okada-san, I’ve had a message. Kenji Minato has been held by American Naval Intelligence for the past six months down in San Diego.’
Chojiro Okada worked his lips up and down over his teeth, the only indication he ever showed that he was perturbed. As a young man he had been like his son, profligate with his emotions and the expression of them; but the years in America had taught him the dangers and non-profit in such indulgence. He had tried to look calm, but it was always the calm of a thinly frozen lake.
‘What else did the message say?’ He had no part in the espionage network that ran through the camps and through other channels of which he had no knowledge at all. But it had been he whom Kenji Minato had come to first.
Mazaki did not look at him directly, as if turning his face away from the steel of the wind. ‘That he has now escaped.’
Chojiro Okada had been surprised when, two days after Pearl Harbor, Kenji Minato had phoned him. ‘I should like to meet with you, Okada-san. But please do not mention me to your family, not even to Tamezo.’
He had driven all the way out to Santa Monica in the two-year-old Buick which he had to sell only three months later for two hundred dollars, the best offer he could get before he and his family were carted off to Santa Anita racetrack. The irony was that on that day of the enforced sale in Gardena there had been several vultures with German names.
He and Kenji Minato had walked up and down under the palm trees on the promenade. People looked at them suspiciously or, in the case of one man, accusingly. He was an elderly man, wearing a faded American Legion cap, and he stood at the promenade railing staring out to sea, towards Japan, then looking back at Okada and Minato as if expecting them to start signalling the invasion fleet just beyond the horizon of his dimly-sighted eyes.
‘Why didn’t you come to visit us?’ Chojiro Okada had been circumspect in his greeting of the younger man, expressing no surprise. The war with Japan was only forty-eight hours old and already bricks had shattered the glasshouses in Gardena. Kenji Minato, wherever he had come from was not here just to pay his respects to his father’s old friend.
‘I had work to do. Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego. I very rarely came to Los Angeles.’
It was a moment or two before the significance of the three cities he had named besides Los Angeles sank in. ‘You were attached to the US Navy?’ Then he smiled at his own naivety; Minato mirrored his smile. Over by the railing the Legion veteran glared at them, then