Death in Little Tokyo (9 page)

I drove back to Little Tokyo and went to the Kawashiri Boutique to talk to Mariko.

“I saw that police detective this afternoon. He caught me standing in front of a strip joint looking for that woman, and I’m sure I’m his number one suspect by now. I want to talk to your cousin Michael as soon as possible.”

“Oh, great. My boyfriend the criminal. Did you read the story in the
Times?”
Mariko asked.

“Yeah. It was really interesting. Especially the part about Matsuda originally being a U.S. citizen. The
Times
seemed to know about Matsuda awfully fast. I wonder what else they know? I’d love to get more information.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Mariko said. “Mrs. Kawashiri has a customer, a Mrs. Okada, who’s always talking about her grandson who’s a reporter for the
L.A. Times.
He wasn’t the person who wrote today’s story, but maybe he can give you more information.”

“How would I meet him?”

“By asking Mrs. Kawashiri, of course. You know how this works with Japanese, with all the reciprocal favors. All that
ongiri
stuff. Mrs. Okada owes Mrs. Kawashiri. For some reason Mrs. Kawashiri sees more in you than I do, and I’m sure she’d be glad to help you.”

Ongiri
is how Japanese keep things in social balance.
On
is a debt of gratitude.
Giri
is a sense of duty. You do me a favor or give me a gift, and I’m now obligated to eventually do you a favor or give a gift of equal value. In fact, if I do too big a favor or buy too big a gift in return, it’s a kind of a put-down. The exchange of gifts and favors don’t balance themselves out.

In most of Japanese or Japanese-American society you don’t write things down about who owes whom favors, but in some rural villages in Japan they actually write down all the help and favors one village member gives to another, and they keep these records for generations. A village member might be expected to help another build a barn because that person’s great grandfather got help from the barn-raiser’s great grandfather a century before, and that social debt has not been balanced out yet! It can get tedious keeping track of things, even without formal mercantile bookkeeping.

Mariko thought that Mrs. Okada owed Mrs. Kawashiri for past favors, and Mrs. Kawashiri would be willing to help me by calling in some of her chips with Mrs. Okada on my behalf. I, of course, would then be obligated to Mrs. Kawashiri.

“Okay, I’ll ask Mrs. Kawashiri if she can set something up,” I said. “Are you sure Michael will get back to me?”

“Michael’s very good about getting back to people. I’m sure as soon as he has a break he’ll call me.”

Frustrated, but not seeing much I could do about things on the lawyer front, I went into the shop and asked Mrs. Kawashiri if she could ask Mrs. Okada to set up a meeting with her grandson who worked at the
Times.
Mrs. Kawashiri showed genuine pleasure at the prospect of helping me, and said she’d set something up.

I went into the back room where Mariko was waiting and decided to try something else. “Where’s the hatbox with the mysterious package.”

“On the shelf behind you. Why?”

“Because I’m going to open it.”

Mariko reached behind me and took down a hatbox. “No you’re not,” she announced. “I’m going to open it!”

She took the package out of the box and set to work. Her small fingers busily worked at tearing away the string and tape that held the package together. I cautioned her, because I wanted to be able to put the package back together more-or-less like I found it. She moderated her enthusiasm, but within a few seconds the package was open and lying in her lap was a stack of pale yellow sheets.

“What are they?” I asked.

Mariko picked one up and looked at it. She frowned. “This one seems to be a warranty claim for a TV.”

11

O
ne hundred twenty-three thousand, seven hundred three dollars, and sixty-two cents. Did you double-check the total?”

Mariko shook her credit card calculator at me. “Are you saying my machine can’t add?”

“I’m saying you might have pressed the wrong key.”

“I double-checked it.”

“That’s an awful lot of money for warranty claims.”

“It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“Why all this fuss over a bunch of claim forms?”

Mrs. Kawashiri came into the back room and asked, “Ken-san, can you meet Mrs. Okada right after lunch today? She lives in Culver City and says her grandson can stop by at that time.”

“Sure. Can you get me the address?”

Mrs. Kawashiri handed me a piece of paper with Mrs. Okada’s address written on it. She looked at the claim forms and said, “What are those?”

I sighed. “That’s a good question.” I picked up one of the claim forms and looked at it. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “There is one thing unusual about them, though.”

“What’s that?” Mariko asked.

“Even though there’s a dealer number filled in on the form, the name and address of the business that did the repairs has been left blank.”

“Everything else seems to be filled in,” Mariko said, looking at one of the forms.

Mrs. Kawashiri picked a form up and looked at it. “Mine’s got a little sticker on it,” she said, pointing to a white label a quarter-inch high and about two inches long. “There’s a bar code or something on it. Do all of them have that?”

Mariko flipped through the pile of claims. “Yeah. They all seem to have a sticker. They’re all claims against Mihara Electric Company, too. Right?”

I shuffled through the forms. “That’s right, but they’re for different things: TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens. A lot of them are bulk claims for fixing five or six TVs or VCRs.”

The bell that announced a customer entering the boutique went off. Mariko rose to greet the customer, but Mrs. Kawashiri motioned her down and went back into the shop herself.

“What’s the biggest claim?” I asked Mariko.

“About thirteen thousand dollars, I guess. Most of them seem to be between four and ten thousand, but there are a couple in here for just a few hundred dollars. Those are the ones that just have one repair listed on the claim.”

“Do the bulk claims all list serial numbers?”

“Sure. Here’s one. See? Three TVs and here are the serial numbers, two VCRs and here are the serial numbers, four microwave ovens, a TV satellite dish, and a projection TV. Total parts and labor is seventy-eight hundred bucks.”

“Do you think this could be evidence of some kind of fraud?” Mariko said.

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe these things show that somebody was cheating Mihara Electric on its U.S. warranty claims, and Newly is trying to get back the evidence or something.”

“I don’t see how they could show that, because they don’t even have a company name. Although … I see they all have the same dealer number.”

“Maybe you can trace back from that who originally filled out the claim form, but I don’t see how they can be evidence of anything.” Mariko put down the claim form she had in her hand. “It’s beyond me.”

The phone rang, saving me from having to admit bafflement, too. It was Mariko’s lawyer cousin Michael. After briefly explaining the situation to him, we made an appointment to meet at three-thirty.

“Give me a couple of the claim forms to take with me, and wrap up the rest.” I said as I got off the phone.

“Excuse me, do I look like your personal assistant?”

“No, but you look like someone who will assist me if I bribe her with a large bowl of
udon
noodles for lunch.”

“With shrimp tempura on top?”

“Yes, with shrimp tempura on top.”

“Your packages, Mr. Tanaka, will be rewrapped in approximately two minutes.”

After lunch I dropped Mariko off and drove over to the Culver City address for Mrs. Okada given to me by Mrs. Kawashiri.

Naomi Okada was a small woman. I judged that she couldn’t be more than 4’9” tall, but osteoporosis had curved her spine till she seemed even tinier. She met me at the door of her modest Culver City home wearing a dark purple dress with thin black stripes. Her face was remarkably free of lines for her age, which I judged to be at least in the late sixties. Her gray hair was neatly pulled back into a bun, and her deep brown eyes had a bright sparkle of intelligence.

“Mrs. Okada?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Ken Tanaka. Mrs. Kawashiri said she talked to you about me.”

“Oh, Mr. Tanaka. Please come in. My grandson’s not here yet.”

She stood aside and let me enter the small, neat living room of her house. A comfortable looking flower print couch, a matching chair, and a maple coffee table made it look like a showroom at an Ethan Allen furniture store. On the coffee table was a book and an arrangement of irises. In one corner of the room was a lacquered wood glass doll case, with a Japanese doll in it. Japanese style, the case stood on the floor, instead of up on a table. The doll was dressed in a miniature print kimono. Its painted face looked up at me with solemn dignity.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said.

“Oh, it’s no bother. I’m happy to introduce you to my grandson, Evan.”

“Well, I know it’s a big inconvenience.”

“It’s no inconvenience. Please sit down.” She indicated the couch. “Would you like some green tea?”

“No, I don’t want to bother you or put you out.”

“It’s absolutely no bother. Why don’t you have some tea?”

“Well, if you’re sure it’s not a bother, I would like some. Thank you.”

“Good.”

The complicated dance of apology and refusal, offer and denial was carried out in traditional Japanese fashion, and I could see that Mrs. Okada was pleased that I knew my proper role in the elaborate social interplay. It showed I was “raised right.”

Mrs. Okada had the tea things ready in the kitchen, and she returned with them on a tray almost immediately. Of course I was expected to accept the tea, despite all the protestations, so she already had it prepared. If I had either accepted too readily or refused she would have been hurt and put out by my lack of manners. On the tray was a spectacular
satsuma
platter with characteristic gold and colored enamel designs. It held Japanese
arare
rice crackers, and it seemed a shame to use such a lovely piece for such plebeian purposes.

“This platter is beautiful,” I said, touching the edge of the dish.

“It’s a very poor thing,” Mrs. Okada said, even though obviously it wasn’t.

When all the social preliminaries had been dispensed with, we sat back in our seats. Mrs. Okada sort of perched on her chair with her legs barely touching the ground. Her curved spine forced her to look up to see me, but her face had an expression of expectation.

“My grandson should be here soon,” she said.

“Okay. Do you know what he covers for the
Times?”

“I’m not totally sure. My eyes are bad so I don’t read much anymore. I used to love to read, but now I have a hard time. My daughter sometimes reads stories to me that my grandson wrote. They all seem to do with Asian business.”

“You must be proud of him.”

She waved that thought away with her hand, but I could see she was pleased. Floundering to make polite small talk until her grandson appeared, I noticed that the book on her coffee table bore the picture of a dark mountain jutting out of a high desert landscape. The book was titled
Heart Mountain.
I pointed to the book.

“Is that book about the Heart Mountain Relocation camp?”

“Concentration camp,” she corrected. “Relocation camp is what they call it now to make themselves feel better. The book is about it. I was in that camp during the war.”

“Oh. It must have been pretty bad.”

“It was bad. The only nice part was you could see Heart Mountain. It was beautiful. Sometimes when I look at the cover of this book and I see the picture of Heart Mountain in Wyoming, it makes me think of Mount Fuji in Japan.”

“Were you born in Japan?”

“Heavens, no. I was born in Seattle. My father owned a hardware store before the war. I didn’t even visit Japan until the 1960s. I always wanted to see Japan, and I realize now I went at the perfect time, before the dollar became worthless!”

“What was Heart Mountain like?”

“It was just a collection of barracks at the foot of a mountain in Wyoming. The summers were unbearably hot, with all kinds of bugs biting at you. The winters were incredibly cold, with icy air coming out of Canada. I was a teenager then, but I still suffered from the cold during the winter. The old people really suffered. We used to joke that the average yearly temperature at Heart Mountain was great. It was the individual daily temperature that was lousy.” She poured the tea as she talked. “It seems like a lot of the camps were put in locations where there were extremes in temperature.

“The barracks at Heart Mountain were just little tar paper and rough board things, so they did nothing to stop the cold and they seemed to increase the heat. The lids from tin cans were in great demand because they could be used to patch knotholes. We were in room F of our barracks, which meant we had a little bigger room. Each barrack had six rooms, of three different sizes. The rooms got smaller in size as you approached the middle.”

“How big were the barracks?” I asked, interested.

“About sixty feet in total.”

“And your entire family lived in just one room in the barracks?”

“Yes. We had these rusty old army cots from the First World War and we strung blankets across on string to give some privacy. Something like a shelf to hold your possessions was actually a luxury. That’s because wood was so scarce. Every winter we would scrounge around for wood to burn to keep us warm. But even if you were lucky enough to find enough wood, the little potbelly stoves in the barracks would hardly take the frost out of the air on some cold mornings.

“The first men into the camps actually built most of it. My father was in that bunch, because they figured that if he owned a hardware store he must know all about construction. He told us the first group of men were convinced they were being taken into the wilderness to be shot. The guards on the train were real mean and they made the men sit in the same position for days. Sitting still for days doesn’t sound like much punishment, but after a while it can get to be agony if you’re not allowed to even stand up and stretch. They could only get up one at a time to go to the bathroom twice a day, on a regular schedule. If you didn’t have to go when it was your time, well, too bad. If you had to go at any other time, well, you just had to hold it.

“When they finally got to Heart Mountain, they found a bunch of tar paper and lumber dumped off by the side of the train tracks and they were forced to build the camp. My father said the materials they provided were junk, and a lot of the men didn’t know what they were doing. There was hardly a right angle in any barracks in that camp. He said he thought someone was selling the good lumber and such on the black market. I know the chefs at the camp were selling sugar and milk on the black market. It got so bad that the children didn’t have milk to drink and there was almost a riot over that.”

“I remember they gave us boiled squid and rice for weeks on end. I know squid is supposed to be a delicacy, but to this day I still can’t eat it.” She picked up her cup of tea, “You remarked on my
satsuma
platter. At the camp we had these cups and plates that were enormously thick and large. They all had ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ on the back, and I can remember wondering what kind of company would make porcelain so thick and clumsy. I eventually found out that ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ stood for ‘U.S. Quartermaster Corps.’ The plates were old army plates from World War One.” She laughed. It was a light, friendly laugh.

“From the time I was a little girl I loved porcelain. It came from my mother. When they gave us orders to go to camp we could only take what we could carry. Before we left I remember my mother packing her beloved porcelain away in a barrel for storage. A white man was going door-to-door in our neighborhood buying things from Japanese at just pennies on the dollar. When he got to our house he told my mother everything in storage would be confiscated anyway, and that he’d buy the plates for a penny apiece. I can remember my mother walking to the front door of the house with a handful of plates and throwing them on the sidewalk. They hit and shattered into a thousand pieces. She preferred breaking them over selling them to a profiteer. It turned out our things in storage weren’t confiscated, but some were stolen. This
satsuma
platter is one thing that survived.” She lightly touched the edge of the platter.

“It sounds like a terrible time.”

“We actually tried to have what we thought was a normal American life in camp. We had schools and clubs and even a boy scout troop. But it was a hollow kind of life. In the camps the whole family structure disintegrated. That’s what I think was sad. The men felt low and helpless. Kids were uprooted and put in a strange environment. The women put up with things they never had to put up with in civilian life.”