To the Stars Read online

  “Outside?” “Here?” There was confusion. “Why are we stopping in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Outside. Outside for exercise,” the MPs barked.

  The younger people began explaining the situation in Japanese to the bewildered old folks. A few young men staggered up from their seats and sluggishly began the hurly-burly of leaving the train. Tired, rumpled people who had been sitting in the same place for two days and a night started to gather themselves up. My mother hurriedly arranged on her head her new Sears Roebuck straw hat and handed my father his Panama hat. All three of us kids had white cotton caps placed on our heads.

  The high railcar steps seemed like a series of small cliffs to me. My father held my hand, and I was dangled down. Henry was hanging from my father’s other hand. It felt great to be outside.

  As soon as I was put down, I grabbed a handful of warm sand and flung it at my brother. He yowled and started toward me. I grabbed another handful and started to run away. Just then, I felt a firm hand grab my arm. It was the quiet man who sat across the aisle from us. He stopped Henry with a gentle point of the finger. “You have lively boys, Takei-san,” he said smilingly as he handed me over to my father.

  “Thank you.” My father was strangely subdued as he took our hands. My father looked down at us, and for a moment I expected a frown of disapproval. But instead I saw sadness in his eyes. They seemed to linger on us. He repeated softly to himself, “Lively boys.” Then he gazed off into the desert void. As if asking the empty horizon, he murmured, “What am I taking them to?”

  After the railcar was cleared of those who wanted to stretch their legs, the MPs planted themselves again at parade rest at the foot of the car steps. The one closest to me was idly singing the tune, “Shoo fly, don’t bother me. Shoo fly, don’t bother me.” Most of us who got off the train milled about near the car, but a few young men wandered farther out into the hot sand. Others were bending down inspecting the underside of the train. One young man ducked between the cars and urinated on the train wheels. There was a steamy sizzle when the liquid splashed onto the hot steel. I thought my father saw him, too, but he pretended not to notice. Henry and I looked at each other and giggled.

  “All right, everybody, back on board. Everybody back.” The MPs roamed about, shouting. “Exercise break’s over. Back on the train.” The tumult and congestion getting back on was worse than getting off. Some old folks had to be carried back up the steep steps. Our “shoo fly” MP planted himself beside the steps, offering a hand to anyone who needed it. We were standing right beside him waiting our turn up. His rifle was slung smartly on his shoulder. I reached up and touched it. The gunmetal was hot from the heat of the desert sun. I yelped, more out of surprise than pain. The MP smiled down at me. “Ya won’t do that again, will ya.” He bent down, picked me up, and set me down on the upper step. “There ya go, kiddo.” My father struggled up, dangling Henry by the hand. My mother was already up in the car with my sister, Nancy Reiko, in her arms.

  Our brief exercise break in the middle of the desert was over. Our family’s long journey across America with hundreds of other Japanese Americans to a barbed-wire-enclosed camp in Arkansas had another night and day yet to go. And, for an inquisitive and energetic four-year-old boy, a great adventure was just beginning.

  Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually true and faithful, sometimes elusive but, at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can be as much a misrendering of the truth as the fondly remembered taste of candy at a funeral. That sweetness for a child, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the surrounding circumstances of my childhood.

  I remember my father’s melancholy and my mother’s obsessive concern for our basic well-being. But they are dusty, peripheral remembrances. My bright, sharp memories are of a joyful time of games, play, and discoveries.

  I remember my mother bought each of us kids our own individual water canteens at Sears for our trip. We thought that was great. She had actually bought them because she was worried about the quality of the water supply on the trip. But no matter how great my mother’s anxiety, my own more vivid memory is of the fun of taking those wonderful little sips of lukewarm water that we were periodically treated to from our very own canteens.

  For my father, Takekuma Norman Takei, that long, hot trip through the southwestern desert was more than the end of all that he had built of his life. It was a journey into uncertainty with a wife, three small children, and nothing else. As the desolation of the desert flew by his window, a myriad thoughts must have rushed through his mind. Memories of his coming to America from Japan at age thirteen with his older brother and his widower father, so full of hopes and dreams. Of growing up in the vibrant Japantown community of San Francisco. As the arid landscape swept past him, his thoughts must have drifted back to memories of the cool San Francisco Bay Area that he traveled as a member of the Japantown Seals baseball team. Memories tumble on top of memories. How stinging it must have been to think of the buoyant plans he had made for the future when he graduated from Hills Business College of San Francisco. Of his move down south for the opportunities in the booming, young city of Los Angeles. Of starting up a lucrative cleaning business in the Wilshire corridor. There, he met Fumiko Emily Nakamura of Sacramento, and in 1935 they were married by the city clerk on the twenty-seventh floor of Los Angeles’s stunning new City Hall. Then he would remember the pain at the loss of their firstborn child at only three months.

  But they knew joy again at the birth of a healthy boy on April 20, 1937. This baby, so precious after the loss of their firstborn, became the center of their lives, the most important being in their world. He needed a fitting name. To them, this baby was as great as a prime minister, even a king. As an Anglophile, an admirer of things English, my father therefore had a choice between Neville and George. He and Fumiko Emily—whom he had decided to call “Mama” from then on, and she would call him “Daddy”—settled on the royal choice. The baby was named George, for King George VI of England. They chose Hosato, Japanese for “Village of the Bountiful Harvest,” for his Japanese middle name. A year later, another boy was born—a healthy, chubby baby—as fat as King Henry VIII. He was named Henry, of course. Two years later, another baby arrived—this time a girl. She was named Nancy Reiko—Nancy for a remarkably beautiful woman they knew and Reiko, Japanese for “gracious child.”

  Then a terrible war had broken out, and my father’s whole world was blown away. All people of Japanese ancestry in America were to be immediately removed to internment camps, leaving everything behind. So much was irretrievably lost. The business—abandoned. The rented house on Garnet Street—hurriedly vacated. The car, sold for the best offer, five dollars—better to get something than leave it behind. But the new refrigerator got no offer. It nearly killed Mama to have to abandon it to the vultures. Everything other than what we were allowed to carry—all abandoned. All memories now. All as fleeting as the sand blowing past the window. All gone.

  My father’s memories of that train ride are so different from mine. How I wish I could have shared some of his anguish. How it grieves me now that I could not do anything to have somehow lessened his pain. But time and a generation separated us on that desert voyage—our shared and yet so different journeys to the camp called Rohwer.

  My mother’s background is the transpacific reverse of my father’s. He was born in Yamanashi, Japan, in the shadows of Mount Fuji. She was born in the United States on my grandfather Nakamura’s farm near Sacramento, California, in a town called Florin. My father came to America as a young teenager and was educated here. My mother was sent to Japan and educated there. They traded countries and experiences in their youth, but fate brought them together in the city of the angels, Los Angeles.

  My grandfather Nakamura grew hops, strawberries, and grapes by sharecropping the land of a man named Cra
nsarge, and he was quite successful. My grandfather was one of the first to own a Model T Ford in Florin. When my mother was five years old, he bought a grand piano for her, and she began her lessons. He could afford not to have his children educated in the inferior and segregated rural school of the Sacramento delta of the time. All seven of his children were educated in Japan. When my mother, the third child and first daughter, was seven, she was packed off to be schooled as a proper Japanese lady. So although American-born, my mother was and is quite traditionally Japanese. But she was always traditional in her own unique way.

  As the train rattled on, Mama was constantly preoccupied. The baby had to be fed. Henry got carsick, and his mess had to be cleaned up. George needed to go to the bathroom, and there was the constant long line at the end of the car to contend with. Yes, we all faced an unknown future, but the reality before us had to be dealt with. She was not going to surrender to the angst of our condition. She was determined to make her own certainly out of our collective uncertainty. As certain as the rice balls she had wrapped in seaweed and packed in her hand luggage to supplement the cold train box lunches. She was not going to yield to the monotony that others accepted as inevitable. She had stuffed into her limited luggage space special treats for the children; a few lollipops, packages of animal crackers, and Cracker Jack boxes that contained little surprise toys. She packed story books for Daddy to read to us. Boredom was a foe she was determined to fight.

  She was not going to allow anything, not even the United States Government, to affect the well-being of her family. She had packed a potent arsenal in the hand baggage she hauled on board that traincar. That memory of my mother’s huge, shapeless, wonderful bag, I can now share with her. I have glowing recollections of her bag so full of goodies that made the journey an unforgettable train ride. But even that shared memory was from two very different journeys—one an adventure of discovery, the other an anxiety-ridden voyage into a fearful unknown.

  It was the third day, and we were finally out of the desert. We could see trees now and an occasional billboard. As we approached a small, rural east Texas town, the MPs ordered us to pull down the window shades, as we’d done at every little ramshackle station we’d passed through. The townspeople were not to know that Japanese Americans were being transported on the train. We rumbled in slowly. Gradually the train came to a hissing, coughing stop. We were ordered to keep quiet and still in the dim light that filtered in through the olive drab shade. I could hear sounds of things being loaded and unloaded outside. I could hear loud shouts flying back and forth between the men on the work crew. I could hear clanging sounds, rolling sounds, heavy scraping sounds. I could hear people laughing. It was the sounds of life just outside, tantalizing me beyond the tightly drawn canvas barrier. It was unbearably alluring. I lifted the bottom of the shade the tiniest little bit and peeked out. Right in front of me—in full, bright sunlight that made me squint—I saw something I had never seen before. There on a long, splintery wood bench sat a row of old black men. I had seen black people before in Los Angeles, but I had never seen people so deeply and purely black in color. These weathered old men, looking like they had been charred by the scorching Texas sun, sat there in their baggy, shapeless clothes all lined up as if they had been there waiting forever. In their eyes I saw wearied, stoic patience. It was fascinating. I thought I recognized something. There in the eyes of these pure black old men, people who looked so different from us, I saw the same distant, drained look that I saw in the eyes of the old folks who sat in our train car.

  Henry noticed me peeking out through the bright sliver of sunlight and tried to force his face next to mine. Suddenly, my narrow little view of the outside world blacked out. Mama had noticed us, too, and quickly slammed the shade closed before the MPs could catch us.

  A low rumble, the squeal of tired steel on worn-out tracks, a huff of strenuous exertion from the engine car up front, and we were moving again. Slowly, laboriously, we began our final stretch to Rohwer, Arkansas.

  2

  Rohwer Remembrances

  “ROHWER!” THE MPS’ BELLOW HAD revived energy. “Everybody get ready to leave. This is Rohwer!” Their lusty voices sounded as if they were shouting “roar.” They sounded like a pack of guard lions. We could hear them roaring out in all the other cars, like bouncing echoes fading with distance. “Roar!” “Roar!”

  The train sidled up right beside the barbed wire fence. The camp had been built along the west side of the tracks of the Missouri Pacific Railway. On the other side, to the east of the tracks and running parallel to them, was a gravel-covered dirt country road incongruously, but officially, named Arkansas State Highway No. 1.

  Camp Rohwer—or Rohwer Relocation Center, as it was called in the formal governmental euphemism—was the easternmost of the ten internment camps hurriedly thrown up by the War Relocation Authority created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9102. An earlier order by the President, Executive Order 9066, authorized the internment itself. Milton Eisenhower, brother of the future President, was the National Director of the War Relocation Authority.

  Rohwer was located in the southeastern corner of Arkansas, about seven miles west of the Mississippi River and roughly forty miles north of the Louisiana border. One of the internees, Eiichi Kamiya, later gave a vivid description of the camp as “far enough south to catch Gulf Coast hurricanes, far enough north to catch midwestern tornadoes, close enough to the river to be inundated by Mississippi Valley floods, and lush enough to be the haven for every creepy, crawly creature and pesky insect in the world.” For me, it was to be a great, paradisiacal adventureland.

  “Rohwer!” the MPs continued bellowing. We rolled slowly alongside the barbed wire fence—so slowly that it seemed the train was forcibly impressing upon us each detail of the place to which it had brought us. In the bright sunlight, we could see each and every barb glinting and flashing like sharp, deadly gems strung out along the new wire fence. We passed tall guard towers with armed soldiers staring down at us. Beyond the fence, a distance away, we could see internees who had arrived earlier lined up and waving forlornly. Beyond them were rows upon rows of black tar-paper-covered Army barracks aligned in military parade precision. Mama recognized a friend among the people out to greet us, and she managed a wan smile and a wave. Daddy just stared out the window in intense silence. With a final lurch, the train came to a stop. Our grueling three days and two nights were finally over.

  I jumped up from our hard wooden seat. I couldn’t wait to run out of the car. But Daddy grabbed me, made me sit down, and said we had to wait our turn. In as orderly a fashion as a trainload of exhausted, unwashed and nervously apprehensive people could muster, we gathered our luggage from the overhead shelves and under the seats and filed out in silence. Only the commands being shouted by the guards could be heard over the scuffling and the thumping of the mass exodus.

  We waited beside our train car in the blistering Arkansas sun for quite a while before we finally heard someone shouting, “Takei family of five.” A guard with a clipboard was calling out our name. “Takekuma Takei and family.”

  “Right here,” Daddy shouted back. The guard strode over and began to tag all of us with a card that read 6-2-F. We were told to continue to wear the ID number card that had been attached to our clothes at the beginning of the journey. Daddy seemed to stiffen as he was being tagged.

  “What is this?” he said. It was more a demand than a question.

  “That’s where the driver’s gonna take you,” the guard with the clipboard answered, “6-2-F.” It was the address of the single room that was to be our new home. Block 6, barrack 2, unit F.

  All of the Block 6 people were loaded onto an open truck with their luggage, and after another quick check by the guards at the gate, we were driven through the camp entrance and past the waving group of early arrivals. Mama waved and nodded politely to the face she recognized. “It’s Imai-san,” she whispered. Daddy didn’t say anything. “Mrs. Ima
i. From North Hollywood,” she emphasized. Daddy remained impassive.

  The camp had a huge, sprawling layout. We drove past block after similar block of black tar-paper barracks all the way to the southern edge of the camp. Every block was set up exactly alike. There were twelve barracks to a block, with six units of rooms to a barrack. Each block had six barracks lined up on each side with the toilet-shower-wash building and the mess hall in the center. A dirt road and a drainage ditch surrounded each block. A block was planned to house about 250 people. Rohwer had 33 blocks in all and, at its peak, a population of almost 8,500.

  The driver unloaded us by the Block 6 mess hall and drove off to pick up more new arrivals. Our block was at the southern border of the camp right beside the barbed wire fence. We could see a guard tower, and it could see us. Daddy went off to locate 6-2-F, leaving Mama and us kids with the luggage.

  While Mama, carrying our sister in her arms, chatted with the other ladies, Henry and I sat on the luggage waiting. Beyond the fence we could see a forest of tall trees with thick, shrubby underbrush. It was dense with dark shadows. From the distant depths of the woods, we occasionally heard eerie “caw-cawing” sounds. The forest looked and sounded like a scary place beyond the barbed wire fence.

  “You know what that funny sound is?” a voice asked. I looked around. A big boy about eight years old sat on a nearby pile of baggage waiting for his father to come back.

  “No. What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a dinosaur out there,” he whispered to us confidingly. Henry and I looked at each other. We had never heard of this thing.

  “A dino-what?” I asked.

  “A dinosaur, dummy,” he replied. “Don’t you know about dinosaurs?” We both shook our heads. “They’re great big monsters that lived millions of years ago and then they died.”

  “They died?” That’s strange, I thought. “Then how come we can hear them out there?”