September/October 2007

Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath

Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. America at that moment entered World War II. Formal declaration of war followed quickly.

Weeks later, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066. Under that order, the U.S. Army could designate areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The persons in question were those of Japanese ancestry, whether or not they were American citizens.

Much history stands behind the Japanese attack as well as behind enmity toward Japanese persons living in the Western United States. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor was a shock to the nation, attitudes of white Americans toward Japanese residents (and indeed most residents of Asian ancestry) had long been, if not actively hostile, then at least distrustful and controlling.

The attack on Pearl Harbor sharply magnified distrust and unreasoning fear of Japanese residents, especially on the West Coast, with the result of Executive Order No. 9066 and the ensuing removal of persons of Japanese ancestry to “relocation centers.” Early public discussions of the proposal frankly called them “concentration camps.”

Internment Memoirs

The story has been told before by individuals who lived through the war years, ripped from their homes and businesses, often robbed of their possessions or forced to sell them at a fraction of their value.

The best known memoir of the period is Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. In print for more than 30 years and often used as a curriculum resource, that is a valuable document, now positioned as a YA title. More recently (2005) appeared Mary Matsuda Gruenewald’s Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps. (Please see the “Resources” sidebar for details of those and some related books.)

A distinctive addition to this literature is Kiyo Sato’s Dandelion Through the Crack: The Sato Family Quest for the American Dream ( Nevada City, California: Willow Valley Press, August 2007; hardbound, xiv + 389 pp.; $29.95; ISBN 978-0-9762697-1-7.)

Kiyo Sato labored over the manuscript for Dandelion for some 25 years She sought to cope with the legacy of her family’s past and to document the experience of living through and ultimately triumphing over hardship and prejudice. The result is striking.

Dandelion of course centers on the internment, but it is about more than that, as it captures life among immigrant families and details the process of becoming American.

Literary Touches

Perhaps because the author wrote her manuscript in part as therapy, as a way of coping with the accumulated emotions of the years, the story gives the impression of an extended reverie in which memory is mined for nuggets that are then laid out for examination and contemplation.

Aside from a few flashbacks, the story is in present tense. Even the look back at the author’s father’s (Shinji Sato’s) trip to America and his life in his new country before she arrived is in present tense. Thus, Dandelion exposes the reader to the story as it unfolds. This is one of the touches that put Dandelion Through the Crack in a league of its own. In contrast, Farewell to Manzanar and Looking Like the Enemy, written in past tense, look back on each author’s history, establishing a certain distance from the events. The present-tense technique is especially powerful in the many scenes to which the author was eyewitness.

Each chapter begins with one of Shinji Sato’s haiku in transliterated Japanese followed by an English translation. These concise, enigmatic poems set a tone. This one, for example, precedes the first chapter:

HAI IDE TE
MISHIN NI HIKARESHI
KAWAZU KANA

It crawled out
Then crushed by a car
A frog

Is the oncoming car the evacuation order? Is the frog the painstaking building of immigrant life on a small farm? The reader must interpret.

A Sense of Dread

Chapter 1 opens with a look ahead to what is coming later in the book. It depicts a scene in Sacramento, California, on May 17, 1942, as the date for evacuation of the Japanese approaches. That scene sets a tone of anxiety and anticipation.

With a start, I notice a police car following me. As I glance in my rearview mirror, peering through the pile of old suitcases in the back seat, I quickly figure I must be at least three miles outside of my legal five-mile radius. My hands begin to sweat.

Will the cops take me to jail? What will they do with the suitcases? My brothers and sisters need them to pack up for the trip. If I don’t get home by curfew time, what will Mama and Tochan (which means “daddy” in Japanese) do? At 18, I am the oldest, and the only one who drives besides Tochan. My brother Seiji is close to my age, but he volunteered for the US Army after the Pearl Harbor attack and is stationed at Fort Leonard Wood.

What if the police think I’m a spy?

I lift my head and see the chilling reminders down the road—huge 18” x 24” public notices nailed onto the fence posts:

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL
PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY

Kiyo survives the risky encounter, turning onto a side road safely as the police car passes.

A Look Back

The story then turns the page back to 1911, in Onjuku, Japan, to show how Kiyo’s father, Shinji Sato, came to America to seek a better life. Shinji’s father, a man with a gambling addiction, accompanies Shinji, then 14, to California, to work and to recover his honor.

Shinji Sato remains in California after his father returns to Japan. He works, learns English, and gains a foothold on the land despite restrictive land laws. He returns to Japan briefly in 1922 to find a wife, and does so in a most unusual way for a Japanese man of that time. He chooses his own bride, met through a chance encounter, rather than accepting an arranged marriage. He and his new wife, Tomomi, come to Sacramento, where his brother has already settled and established a small farm. Kiyo is born in 1923, the first of nine children of Shinji and Tomomi Sato.

The story progresses, until:

I don’t know when I became aware of the world around me. I slip off my zori straw slippers and feel the soft spring grass under my feet. Sometimes I wander away from the strawberry field to the puddles in the neighboring property to pick tiny pink flowers. The strawberry crates are my playthings; they become a house, a table or a chair. I have one kewpie doll about as tall as my glass of milk. Mama puts the doll in her lunch crate along with a gallon of water every morning before we walk to the strawberry field. She also has a snack for me, like a box of cheese crackers, and on cold mornings, a bottle of hot chocolate all wrapped up in a dish towel.

The memories are not entirely linear, and probably they are more impressionistic than literal, but they nonetheless are remarkable, reaching back eight decades.

Living Life and Becoming American

Kiyo Sato recounts the birth of her brothers and sisters and depicts life on a Sacramento farm. The Depression comes, and times are hard. The family is poor, but does not know it, as everyone else is, too. But the Satos have the benefit of the fruits and vegetables they grow.

The children attend school, work on the farm and in the home, and clamor for Tochan’s stories and poems before bedtime. Themes of family, work, and learning—and at the same time of becoming American, of combining Japanese and American cultures—permeate the narrative.

Kiyo Sato’s telling of “The Depression and the Rearing of Nine Children” is long and lovingly detailed. The reader sees the family in its daily life over the years. Kiyo and the other children grow in knowledge and responsibility, bridging two cultures.

Although war is brewing elsewhere, it has not directly touched the United States, and it has not impinged on the life of this Sacramento farm family. Perhaps Kiyo’s parents are aware of developments overseas, but Kiyo is free to concern herself with the prospect of college and with such responsibilities as taking three-and-a-half-year-old brother Masashi to the store to buy new shoes. Life has improved for the family since Tochan had to craft shoes himself from materials at hand:

As we drive down Folsom Boulevard, Masashi says, “I don’t want Buster Brown shoes,” taking me by surprise that a three and a half year old would make such a request.

“Oh?” I question. “What kind of shoes do you want?” I ask.

“I want Florsheim shoes,” he states matter of factly.

Kozo's shoes flash through my mind. For his ninth child, Tochan does not have to repair his children’s shoes by slicing rubber tires for soles.

Reign of Terror

Disaster strikes. Kiyo’s friends and schoolmates turn cold and distant after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The Reign of Terror” arrives as notices to “persons of Japanese ancestry” appear on fence posts. The family must make fast preparations for evacuation. Yet some hope remains despite the growing dread:

Ten days! On the tenth day by twelve noon, the public notice warns, we must be out of here, with only what we can carry. What do I pack? How do I manage carryable baggage for each one of us? Why did our good President sign such a terrible order, this “Executive Order 9066?” Doesn’t he understand that we are loyal American citizens? Doesn’t he know what he is doing to all of us? Our Issei parents keep right on working to make every minute count. There is no time to waste, no time to complain.

Wherever we go, public notices on buildings, power poles and fence posts blast to the world that all of us with more than 1/16 Japanese blood are to get out of here in ten days.

Our President was wise enough to become president. Maybe he will realize his mistake and rescind Executive Order 9066. Then we can all go back to our normal lives, and maybe hate will subside.

No reprieve comes. The family manages as best it can to tidy its affairs and gather what it can take, storing in the attic or in a nearby church what it cannot take. Mother, father, and children must leave behind their beloved dogs, Molly and Dicky, strays they have adopted.

The story unfolds, scene by scene, image by image, step by step, wrenching in its sense of anxiety:

Where will we be sleeping tomorrow night? I lie in my bed in my clean pajamas, feeling stripped like a non-person, like a dandelion puff at the mercy of every waft of air. We go wherever we are sent. We do whatever we are told to do.

There is no choice if we want to survive.

The dandelion, the title image of the book, will reappear at the end. When it does, it brings a satisfying closure and meaning to the generations-long story

A harrowing train journey following a stay in the Pinedale “Assembly Center” ends as Kiyo faints on the truck to Poston, in Arizona, the last leg of a long journey. She awakens to find herself in 130-degree heat in a concentration camp:

There are supposed to be five thousand people in this camp. Camp I is already filled to capacity with ten thousand people. Three miles south of us, another camp is supposed to hold five thousand more people. Tochan tells us somebody named Camp I, Camp II and Camp III “Post'em,” “Toast'em,” and “Roast'em.”

The transition from a modest, hopeful, and hard-working life on a Sacramento farm to tarpaper barracks in the desert has been abrupt and shocking. We have seen the family through Kiyo’s eyes over the years during a process of becoming American and diligently seeking a small piece of the American dream. Then it is all taken away—home, possessions, and even friends, now turned hostile and distrusting.

Kiyo Sato’s story puts a human face and human feelings to the dragnet that swept up 120,000 or more persons of Japanese ancestry. Many of them, like 19-year-old Kiyo and her younger brothers and sisters, were American citizens, born and raised in the United States. The narrative clarifies and makes real through its depiction of this one typical family in a typical community, summarily dislocated and subjected to absolute control of the government.

How could the American government impose these harsh conditions and deprivations not only on resident aliens, but on American citizens? It did so by defining them out of citizenship: “The government reclassified my brothers and sisters and me,” Kiyo explains, “from ‘citizen’ to ‘non-alien,’ whatever that means.”

That memory, shared among the internees, has contributed to support given now by internees and their descendents to Muslims caught up in post 9/11 government suspicions. (An April 3, 2007, New York Times article reported on that development. Nina Bernstein, “Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims,” p. A19.)

Surviving the Ordeal

Through creativity, work, and application of agricultural knowledge and experience, the interned Japanese bring vegetable gardens to the desert. In other ways, too, they make life bearable, or at least less unbearable. The work is hard, and conditions volatile despite the modest inroads on the desert landscape:

One morning before the hot midday sun, I decide to head south. To my great surprise, in a grove of gnarled mesquite trees, I come upon a beautiful and austere Japanese garden. I walk up a curved bridge skillfully crafted from scrap lumber. A dry bed of rocks marks the river below. A small swing for a toddler hangs from a branch. Several benches and a picnic table beckon parents to rest. I sit down and ponder: who is this person who carried all this wood into this hot desert to create a place of beauty and fun for children?

Beneath the stoic attempts of parents to make life livable for the children, problems simmer. As a Councilman Advisor, Tochan meets frequently with other Issei, Nisei and camp authorities to prevent uprisings before they happen.

Some of the men, with approval of the authorities, take jobs on sugar beet farms in Idaho. In time, authorities release other internees to approved destinations. In the fall of 1942, Kiyo receives notice that she is to be released to attend college in Hillsdale, Michigan. Some others of college age are also being released, she learns, to attend various colleges.

One by one my Nisei companions who left Poston with me leave the train to head for their assigned schools—one school in Philadelphia, another in Nebraska, another a Baptist seminary somewhere. The Quakers, we are told, had something to do with our release.

No longer a prisoner of the government, Kiyo is nonetheless an alien in her new environment:

Unlike the students who take huge duffel bags of dirty clothes home on weekends, I spend considerable time in the dingy dormitory basement, washing and ironing my few changes of clothes.

“You sure can iron,” a student at the other ironing board remarks, impressed with my quickness. “I hear you people are real good at it.”

I look at her; I don't know what to say. Then it comes to me. She must see me as a descendant from a long line of “Chinese laundrymen.”

“I gotta get out of here,” I tell myself.

Released to a sugar-beet farm in Colorado, the family makes a temporary new home. Kiyo rejoins the others there in time.

Returning Home

In January of 1945, Kiyo, then 21 and a college graduate, is allowed to return to Sacramento. She learns, with sadness and dismay, what became of the family’s home and possessions, and of the dogs, Molly and Dicky.

The other members of the family—other than brother Seiji, in the Nisei 442 nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe—follow months later. They take stock of what has been lost and of what can be recovered. The prospect is daunting. Their home has been ruined and occupied by squatters. Their possessions, stored in the nearby church during their hurried preparations in 1942, are gone along with the church itself. But the family, used to hard work and to making something from nothing, rebuilds a life.

Kiyo Sato carries the story forward, developing dramatic climaxes relating to the farm and to the family. The challenges to their way of life are far from over with the end of the Internment. In a remarkable turn of events, Kiyo fights powerful developers who are seeking a county plan change that would destroy the farm.

With pride and dignity Shinji and Tomomi Sato become naturalized American citizens. Shinji adopts the American first name “John,” and Tomomi adopts the American first name “Mary” as part of that process. They have overcome and outlasted the discrimination that prevented them from seeking citizenship as they raised their family. They have fulfilled their quest for the American dream through their own accomplishments and those of their children and grandchildren.

The story concludes with Kiyo’s observation of a dandelion literally emerging through a crack in the sidewalk, inspiring in her and in the reader a new understanding of the fulfillment of this family’s quest for the American Dream.

In Conclusion

Shinji Sato’s poetic sense of life must have helped him cope with the demands of farming on poor land and the deprivations of the Internment. The finely crafted prose of Dandelion Through the Crack suggests that his first-born daughter, Kiyo, absorbed that poetic sense and drew on it as she wrote and refined her memoir.

I cannot open Dandelion at any point in its hundred-thousand words without again being entranced by its images and cadences and by the lives reflected in it.

The Internment, a central portion of the narrative, is intertwined with the author’s motivation to write it, but Dandelion Through the Crack is at its heart about family, about coping with hardship and discrimination yet ultimately thriving. Its message will draw readers far beyond those interested in the history of the Internment and the social issues of the time. This rich and detailed memoir, with the appeal of a novel as well as the value of history, will give readers much to think about as it puts new light on the human impacts of Executive Order 9066 and the fragility of civil rights in time of war.

Related Resources

An Interview with Kiyo Sato

My Role in Bringing Dandelion to Publication

Kenneth Umbach  was a policy analyst for the California Research Bureau, California State Library, from 1993 to 2003, and again in 2005-6. Most of his published CRB reports may be found at www.library.ca.gov/HTML/statseg2a.cfm. Printed copies of older reports that are not posted on the website can be requested from the Bureau. Ken welcomes comments and questions related to this column. His email address is Ken@umbachconsulting.com.