The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (24 page)

On the morning of November 14, 1944, Shinko noticed that the face of her fourth son, Yoshiro, was swollen. Yoshiro was eight years old and only the day before had participated in a sumo match at the Japanese School. That morning, he was sluggish and complained of
pain. His parents took Yoshiro to the camp hospital, where a female Japanese doctor examined him.

After a variety of tests were run, the doctor told the Fukudas that Yoshiro suffered from kidney disease and that his condition was grave. He was immediately admitted to the hospital and placed in the pediatrics section in a bed that was too small for him. He cried out for his parents.

Yoshiro’s illness forced Fukuda and his wife—separately and as a couple—to come to new understandings of their faith. On the walk home from the hospital, Fukuda told his wife that he felt guilty for causing Yoshiro’s internment. He realized for the first time how much he loved his children and how often he had neglected them. Though it was still hot in November, Shinko had been told that Yoshiro would not be allowed to drink much water in the hospital, as it might aggravate the swelling. That night, she refused to drink water as well.

Official visiting hours at the hospital were limited to 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. daily, and no more than two visitors at a time were permitted. The next day when the Fukudas went to visit Yoshiro, he complained that he had not slept and did not want to be alone. O’Rourke intervened, and the Fukudas were allowed to visit Yoshiro twice a day.

Weeks passed. The Fukudas debated how to get Yoshiro better medical care. His doctor was married to a Japanese surgeon, who also worked at the camp hospital and helped to take care of Yoshiro. The surgeon was a friend of Fukuda’s; they had both attended the Imperial University of Tokyo. Fukuda did not want to offend his physician friend and his wife, but he knew that neither of them was an expert on kidney disease. Fukuda knew the importance of saving face in Japanese culture and did not want to show disrespect to his friend the surgeon, but he considered requesting that Yoshiro be taken outside the camp, to San Antonio, to be treated by a kidney specialist. Shinko urged against it; she didn’t want to be separated from her son. Besides, O’Rourke had been kind to them, and she did not want to run the risk of offending him.

Fukuda put his heart even more strongly into his faith. In the Konko religion, the word for god is
kami
, which is generally defined as a divine parent. Fukuda built a special altar in his barrack, and three times a day he prayed on his knees for Tenchi Kane No Kami, the principal deity of Konko, to cure his son. As a minister, he’d performed “mediation,” a mystical healing ceremony, on people with all kinds of maladies and diseases. Now, he realized, he had never fully understood how helpless parents felt when their children were seriously ill.

Within a few days, Yoshiro was moved out of the pediatrics ward and into a room in the tuberculosis ward, which was crowded with patients. Yoshiro complained that he was frightened of catching tuberculosis and did not want to stay in the ward. Fukuda requested that Yoshiro be transferred to the adult ward, and his request was granted. Slowly, Yoshiro’s condition began to improve.

Near the end of December, around Christmastime, Yoshiro was discharged and returned to the family bungalow. Mitch and Nob gave him sips of orange juice. Every night, Fukuda bowed humbly before the altar that he’d made. Of all the children, Yoshiro looked the most like his father and was smart and excelled in judo. Even at the age of eight, he understood his father’s expectations of him, and often, as he lay on his Army cot, he said, “I want to be a minister like my father.” As the year drew to a close, the Fukuda family huddled in their crowded bungalow, each with their own sorrow. Yoshino’s illness remained grave.

In any other high school in America, it would have been a simple event. Yet
in May 1944, when a group of graduating juniors and seniors at the Federal High School in Crystal City approached O’Rourke about the possibility of having a prom, the request triggered an international incident.

Ken Dyo, a Japanese American senior with straight As, made the request, and O’Rourke immediately said yes. It was the end of the first full school year in camp and the first opportunity to have a prom—a time-honored American custom. O’Rourke generally seized every opportunity to give the American-born students in Crystal City as much of a normal life as was possible in an internment camp. Most of them were good kids. All were innocent. It was their fathers, and in a few cases their mothers, who were prisoners of war.

O’Rourke was particularly fond of Ken Dyo and his younger brother, Sei. Ken’s father, Tsutomu, spoke Spanish and served as a cooperative liaison between O’Rourke and members of the Spanish consul’s office, which served as the neutral power on behalf of interned Japanese. Back home in Santa Barbara, California, before their internment, the Dyo brothers were Boy Scouts and had participated in victory drives to help the American war effort. Now, Sei was the only boy in Crystal City at work on his Eagle Scout rank, the most prestigious award in scouting. He accumulated his badges in secret under the supervision of Tate, the principal of the
American high school. Otherwise, the pro-Japanese leaders in camp would have made life difficult for Sei as well as for O’Rourke. The Japanese had their own scouting program in camp, led by former Japanese military officers, who conducted marching drills and emphasized loyalty to Japan.

That summer, as Axis powers suffered catastrophic defeats and it became clear that Germany and Japan were not a match for Allied forces, the American-born children in Crystal City lived isolated, emotionally tangled lives. Every internee, whether pro-American or loyal to Germany or Japan, fought his or her own private war. O’Rourke knew that the future lives of all the children, particularly the students in the Federal High School, the majority of whom were Japanese American, would be affected by decisions that he made as officer in charge. On the issue of the prom, he decided to side with the students, not their parents.

By social custom, Ken Dyo was expected to ask formal permission of his Japanese elders, the issei leaders, to hold the prom. However, he also knew they would oppose it. Instead, he went directly to Ryuchi Fujii, the elected Japanese spokesman in camp, and asked him to publicly endorse the prom. Fujii, a Buddhist priest, turned him down. Like the other elders, Fujii viewed the prom as an insult to Japanese parents, an effort by O’Rourke to Americanize their children and he advised Dyo to withdraw his request to O’Rourke.

The battle over the dance was joined. Fujii called a meeting of all the members of the Japanese council, and they voted 322–20 against the prom. In a letter to O’Rourke, Fujii listed the reasons why leaders opposed the dance: “All Japanese leaders have disapproved of having any dance party in this camp because it may have a bad influence on all children.” He cited the war itself, saying it was “offensive” to hold a dance “at this time when other people are suffering in a life and death struggle.”

O’Rourke’s answer was swift: the prom would go on. He told Fujii that he would not allow the Japanese council to call off an event at the Federal High School, which was operated by the US government
and attended by mostly American citizens. Many of the issei men opposed to the prom did not even have children enrolled in the school; their children went to the Japanese School. For O’Rourke, the line was clear. He would not allow the issei leaders to impose their cultural standards on American-born teenagers.

Fujii refused to give up the fight and sent a formal letter of complaint to Harrison and copied the Spanish consul: “According to time-honored Japanese customs, social dance has been condemned morally and religiously and is prohibited by law. A dancing girl is despised as much as any prostitute. Any girl of a well-to-do family never attends a social dance.” If the dance was held, Fujii warned, teachers at the Japanese School would resign in protest.

In every bungalow and Victory Hut in the Japanese section of camp, the issue of the dance was debated. In many of the other Japanese relocation camps, such as Manzanar and Tule Lake, where anti-American feelings ran high, strikes and demonstrations had broken out over such issues as the mandatory loyalty oaths and harsh treatment by guards. In Crystal City, what seemed like a minor event—a junior-senior prom—turned children against parents, students against teachers, and the Japanese leaders against O’Rourke.

At school, the prom was all anyone talked about, but Sumi did not bring up the subject at home. Since their arrival in Crystal City, Tokiji had become more temperamental—a symptom of fence sickness. Once, Sumi visited a girlfriend in a different bungalow and was supposed to be back by 8:00 p.m., but arrived home an hour late. Her father slammed the door in her face and screamed at her. “There was no way I would ever have asked him if I could go to the prom,” recalled Sumi. “If my father saw me talking to a guy, he would have been furious. I knew he would never let me go to a dance.”

Sumi’s friend Yae Kanogawa, whom she’d met on the train from Ellis Island to Crystal City, loved to dance and wanted to go to the prom, and was encouraged to go by her father, Sho, who worked as a cook in Crystal City. Sho received a circular, signed by Japanese leaders in camp, warning against allowing students to attend the prom.
Yae was a student at the Japanese School, and her teacher pressured her father to keep his daughter home. “Only prostitutes dance in Japan,” said the teacher.

However, Sho was a
michiro
, a trained Japanese dancer, and he saw no harm in the prom. Indeed, he encouraged Yae to go to the dance with her brother Shoji. “He told me I had to go,” recalled Yae. “He thought everyone should learn to dance.” Meanwhile, Japanese block managers went door-to-door among the Japanese bungalows, asking that parents not allow their children to attend the dance. Ultimatums flew back and forth.

Nevertheless, on May 26, 1944, a Friday night, thirty brave Japanese American and fourteen German American teenagers gathered in Harrison Hall for the dance. The hall was festooned with balloons, and the walls were lined with tables laden with punch bowls and platters of cookies. O’Rourke, Tate, and several teachers in the American School attended as chaperones. They kept their eyes on the windows and the doors.

It was summer, and school was almost over for the year. The pool had been open for a month, and days slipped away under the burning desert sun. That night, the guards were especially attentive at their tower posts, and after dusk, the air grew cooler. Soon, the music of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Judy Garland, and Harry James floated through the breeze.

Inside the hall, many of the boys stood with their hands shoved in their pockets. In time, the smooth-chinned young men summoned the courage to approach the girls, equally shy in their cotton dresses. Some couples awkwardly stepped on each other’s toes, while others glided easily to the music. Yae took to the dance floor early and urged her friends to join the fun. The sound of their feet—
thump, thump, thump
—echoed from the wooden floors in the first dance that many of them had attended since the war began. To Yae, the dance felt like the most natural, necessary thing in the world.

Halfway through the party, O’Rourke announced an intermission. The music stopped, and the teenagers were served
refreshments. While they drank punch and ate cookies, several of the teachers from the Japanese School crashed the hall and ordered all the Japanese children to leave the prom.

Yae’s teacher confronted her and said that, because of her attendance at the dance, he was forced by his principal to quit his job at the Japanese School. He said her lack of morals indicated his failure as a teacher and called her a “harlot, a dancing harlot.” Like many of the Japanese Americans in camp, Yae felt scapegoated by her government for forcing her to evacuate her home and navigate existence behind barbed wire simply because of her Japanese heritage. Now she felt blamed by her Japanese teacher and forced to bear his burdens, as well.

After the teachers’ outburst, no one at the prom felt like dancing. Yae and her friends sulked home. The leaders had succeeded in breaking up the prom.

The following day, Yae sent a letter to a friend outside the camp. Before it was mailed, a censor read it and sent a copy to O’Rourke. In her letter, she used American vernacular and wrote, “Gee, the atmosphere around here between teacher and student, issei and nisei, is really sharp and annoying.” She commented on how the Japanese leaders had forbidden students to go to the event: “Isn’t that positively outrageous? And it was against the H.S. [high school], which was real earnest about giving the students a decent time, ’specially at graduation, and that’s some memory one cherishes. I went too, but after intermission, the fireworks began. The Japanese School sent spies to see which students from the tip school went—one of them saw me, and now I’m in a position where I have to quit school. Honestly! It’s inhuman. When you get in a place like this, you honestly wonder if these Japzip in here are really human! I pity the Caucasians who have to work with them.”

Yae was more Americanized than the Japanese leaders in camp could have understood. She blamed the Japanese leaders—the “Japzip,” as she referred to them—for the bitter atmosphere, not O’Rourke and the teachers in the American School.

She was not alone. Another student, Sachi Sasaki, was not allowed to go to the dance. In a letter forwarded to O’Rourke by censors, Sachi wrote that she loved to dance and said, “Of course my pop thought it was better if I didn’t go, so I had to stay home and suck my finger. I was so mad that I bawled for the first time in ages. I’m telling you, I never saw so many narrow-minded, ignorant Japs in my life. Pardon my language. The American teachers are our true friends.”

Maruko Okazaki, another student, wrote of the prom controversy to a friend outside the camp: “The atmosphere here hasn’t been any too good. Last night, they had the Prom (I didn’t go) and bang! Trouble after trouble has come up already. It’s too disgusting. We know there’s a war on—they keep reminding us that we shouldn’t go out and enjoy ourselves when soldiers are fighting with all they’ve got, and we realize that, too—but it’s just a dance a year. I don’t think that’s hurt anyone.”