Takao Fukuda had lived in the United States from the age of twenty without feeling any desire to integrate. Like many issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants, he had no wish to dissolve in the American melting pot in the way that other races from all four corners of the world did. Proud of his culture and his language, he kept them intact and tried in vain to transmit them to his descendants, who were seduced by the grandeur of America. He admired many aspects of this immense land where the horizon blended with the sky but could not help feeling superior, although he never allowed this to show outside his home as this would have been an unforgivable lack of courtesy toward the country that had received him. As the years went by, he inevitably fell into the trap of nostalgia; the reasons why he left Japan became blurred, and he ended up idealizing those same stuffy traditions that had led him to emigrate in the first place. He was shocked by the Americans’ self-confidence and materialism, which he saw not as character building and pragmatic, but as vulgarity; he suffered to see his children adopt the individualistic values and brash behavior of the local population. His four children may have been born in California, but they were Japanese on both sides of their family, and so there was no justification for their lack of interest in their ancestors or lack of respect for their elders. They were unaware of the position destiny had allotted each of them; they had become infected by the foolish ambition of the Americans, to whom nothing seemed impossible. Takao knew that his children were betraying him even over small things: they drank beer until their heads were spinning, they chewed gum like cattle and danced to the frenetic rhythms that were fashionable, with greased hair and two-tone shoes. He was sure Charles and James sought out dark corners where they could fondle girls of dubious virtue, but at least he trusted that Megumi didn’t do such things. His daughter copied the ridiculous fashions of American girls and in secret read the magazines full of love stories and gossip about movie idols that he had prohibited, but she was a good student and on the surface at least was respectful. The only one Takao could still control was Ichimei, but soon his youngest too would slip through his fingers and become a stranger like his brothers. That was the price to pay for living in America.
In 1912, Takao Fukuda had left his family and emigrated for metaphysical reasons, but this fact had gradually lost its importance in his memories of Japan, and he often wondered why he had taken such a drastic step. Japan had opened up to foreign influences, and many young men had been leaving to seek opportunities elsewhere, but for a member of the Fukuda family to leave their native country was regarded as an unpardonable betrayal. They came from a military line and for centuries had shed their blood for the emperor. Being the only male of the four children who survived the diseases and accidents of infancy, Takao was destined to be the guardian of the family’s honor, responsible for his parents and sisters. It was he who would later lead the ancestor worship at the domestic altar and every religious festival. However, at fifteen he discovered Oomoto, the way of the gods, a new religion derived from Shintoism that was taking off in Japan at the time, and felt that at last he had discovered a map that could guide his steps through life. According to its spiritual leaders, nearly all of whom were women, there may be many gods, but they are all essentially the same, and it did not matter by what name or ritual they were worshipped. Throughout history, gods, religions, prophets, and messengers have all come from the same source: the Universe’s Supreme God, the One Spirit, which impregnates all that exists. With the help of human beings, God tries to purify and rebuild the harmony of the universe, and when this task is complete, God, mankind, and nature will coexist in friendship on earth and in the spiritual realm. Takao threw himself into this new faith. Oomoto preached peace, which could be reached only through personal virtue, and Takao therefore realized that he could not follow a military career as those of his lineage were meant to. The only way out he could see was to get as far away as possible, because to stay in Japan and renounce warfare would be seen as unforgivable cowardice and the worst affront he could inflict on his family. When he tried to explain this to his father, he only managed to break his heart, but he expressed his reasons with such fervor that the old man finally accepted he would have to lose his son. Young people who left never returned. Dishonor can only be washed away by blood. His father told him that death at his own hand would be preferable, but this alternative went against the principles of Oomoto.
Takao reached the coast of California with two changes of clothes, a hand-tinted portrait of his mother and father, and the samurai sword that had been in his family for seven generations. His father handed it to him when they bade farewell, because he could not give it to any of his daughters. Even if his son were never to use it, the sword belonged to him by right. This katana was the Fukudas’ sole treasure. It was made of the finest steel folded and refolded sixteen times by ancient craftsmen; its hilt was of wrought silver and bronze, and its wooden scabbard was decorated with red lacquer and gold leaf. Takao traveled with it wrapped in sacks for protection, but its long, curved shape was unmistakable. The men who shared the ship’s hold with him during the tedious crossing treated him with due deference, as the weapon proved he was from a distinguished family.
After disembarking, he immediately received help from the tiny Oomoto community in San Francisco, and a few days later he found a job as a gardener for a compatriot. Far from the reproving gaze of his father, who thought a soldier should never dirty his hands with soil, only with blood, Takao devoted himself to learning this new skill, and it was not long before he established a reputation among the issei who made a living from agriculture. He worked tirelessly and lived frugally and virtuously as his religion required, so that in less than ten years he had saved the necessary eight hundred dollars to bring a wife over from Japan. The marriage broker offered him three candidates and he selected the first, because he liked her name, Heideko. Takao went down to await her arrival at the dock in his one and only suit, bought thirdhand and worn shiny at the elbows and on the backside, but well made; his shoes were polished and he wore a Panama hat he had bought in Chinatown. The fiancée he had sent for turned out to be a peasant girl ten years younger than him. She was stockily built, with a placid expression but a resolute temperament, and she was always ready to speak her mind. As he could tell from the very first moment, she was much less submissive than the marriage broker had suggested. Once he had recovered from the initial shock, Takao decided that this strength of character was a definite advantage.
Heideko arrived in California with few illusions. On board ship, where she had shared the narrow space allotted her with a dozen other girls in a similar situation, she had heard terrible stories of innocent virgins like her who had faced the dangers of the ocean in order to marry well-off young men in America, only to discover that waiting on the quayside to receive them were impecunious old men, or in the worst cases, pimps who sold them into prostitution or as slaves in clandestine workshops. This did not happen to her, as Takao Fukuda had sent her a recent photograph and did not lie to her about his situation, telling her he could only offer a life of effort and hard work, but one that was honorable and less backbreaking than that of her village in Japan. They had four children: first Charles, Megumi, and James, and then years later, in 1932, when Heideko thought she was no longer fertile, Ichimei arrived. He was premature and so puny that they thought he would not survive, and so did not give him a name for the first few months. His mother built up his strength as best she could with herbal infusions, acupuncture sessions, and cold water, until by some miracle it began to seem as though he would pull through. It was then that they gave him a Japanese name, unlike his brothers, who had been given English first names that were easy to pronounce in America. They called him Ichimei, meaning “life,” “light,” “brilliance,” or “star,” according to the kanji, or ideogram, used to represent it. From the age of three, he could swim like an eel, at first in local pools and then in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay. His father molded his character through hard physical work, a love of plants, and martial arts.
At the time Ichimei was born, the Fukuda family was struggling to deal with the worst years of the Great Depression. They rented a plot of land on the edge of San Francisco, where they grew vegetables and fruit trees to supply local markets. Takao supplemented his income by working for the Belascos, the first family to employ him when he set up independently from the Japanese colleague who introduced him to gardening. His reputation was such that Isaac Belasco invited him to create the garden for a property he had recently acquired at Sea Cliff, where he wanted to build a house that would stay in the family for at least a century, as he joked to his architect, little thinking that his joke might come true. His law firm was not short of funds, as he now represented the California Western Railroad and Navigation Company; Isaac was one of the few businessmen who did not suffer during the crisis. He kept his money in gold and invested it in fishing boats, a sawmill, mechanics’ workshops, a laundry, and other such businesses. In doing so his intention was to employ some of the desperate folk who lined up outside the charity soup kitchens, so that he could help alleviate their misery, but this altruistic goal brought him unexpected benefits. While the house was being built according to his wife’s extravagant whims, Isaac shared with Takao his dream of reproducing the plant life of other latitudes on a steep hillside exposed to fog and wind. As they began the process of turning this crazy dream into reality, Isaac Belasco and Takao Fukuda established a respectful relationship. Together they read the catalogs, selected and ordered the trees and plants from other continents, which arrived wrapped in damp sacks with the original soil still sticking to their roots; together they pored over the instruction manual and assembled the glass greenhouse shipped piece by piece from London like a jigsaw puzzle; and together they kept this eclectic Garden of Eden alive.
Isaac’s lack of interest in social life and the majority of his family affairs, which he delegated entirely to Lillian, was compensated for by an unbridled passion for botany. He neither smoked nor drank, and did not succumb to any known vices or irresistible temptations; he was wholly unable to appreciate either fine music or fine cuisine, and if Lillian had allowed it, he would have dined on the same coarse bread and poor man’s soup eaten by the unemployed, standing up in the kitchen. A man like him was immune to corruption and vanity. Instead, he showed great intellectual curiosity, a passion for defending his clients with artful legal subterfuges, and a secret weakness for helping the needy. But none of these pleasures could compare to that of gardening. A third of his library was dedicated to botany. His ceremonious friendship with Takao, based on a mutual admiration and respect for nature, became fundamental to his peace of mind, an essential balm for his frustrations with the law. In his garden, Isaac became the humble apprentice of his Japanese master, who revealed secrets of the vegetable kingdom to him that his botanical treatises so often failed to clarify. Lillian adored her husband and looked after him with a young lover’s care, but she never desired him so much as when she caught sight of him from her balcony, working side by side with the gardener. In his overalls, boots, and straw hat, sweating under the glare of the sun or soaked by fine rain, Isaac was rejuvenated, and in Lillian’s eyes once more became the passionate lover who had seduced her at the age of nineteen, or the newlywed who possessed her on the stairs, before they could get as far as their bed.
Two years after Alma came to live at Sea Cliff, Isaac Belasco and Takao Fukuda formed a partnership to set up a nursery for flowers and decorative plants. Their dream was to make it the best in California. The first step was to purchase some parcels of land in Isaac’s name, as a way of getting around the 1913 law that prohibited issei from becoming American citizens, owning land, or buying property. For Fukuda this was a unique opportunity; for Belasco it was a wise investment similar to others he had made at the height of the Depression. He had never been interested in the vagaries of the stock exchange, always preferring to invest in creating jobs. The two men became partners on the understanding that when Charles, Takao’s eldest son, came of age, the Fukudas could buy out Isaac’s share at the then prevailing prices, the nursery would be put into Charles’s name, and their partnership would be dissolved. Because he was born in the United States, Charles was an American citizen. All this was a gentleman’s agreement, sealed with a simple handshake.
The Belascos’ garden remained deaf to the defamatory propaganda campaign against the Japanese, who were accused of unfair competition against American farmers and fishermen, threatening white women’s virtue with their insatiable lust, and corrupting American society by their Oriental, anti-Christian ways. Alma only found out about these slurs two years after she had arrived in San Francisco, when from one day to the next the Fukuda family became the “yellow peril.” By that time she and Ichimei were inseparable friends.
Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 severely damaged twenty-one ships of the US fleet, leaving a tally of twenty-three hundred dead and more than a thousand wounded, and in less than twenty-four hours completely changed the Americans’ isolationist mentality. President Roosevelt declared war on Japan, and a few days later Hitler and Mussolini, Japan’s allies, declared war on the United States. The entire country was mobilized to fight the war that had been soaking Europe in blood for the past eighteen months. The reaction of widespread terror provoked by Japan’s attack was whipped up by a hysterical media campaign that warned of an imminent invasion on the Pacific Coast by the “yellows.” Hatred toward East Asians, which had already existed for a century, was exacerbated. Japanese who had lived in the country for years, as well as their children and grandchildren, suddenly became suspected of spying and collaborating with the enemy. The roundups and arrests began soon afterward. It was enough for a boat to have a shortwave radio—the only way for fishermen to communicate with the land—for the owner to be taken in. The dynamite used by small farmers to remove trunks and rocks from their crop fields was seen as proof of terrorism. Shotguns, and even kitchen knives and other tools, were impounded; so too were binoculars, cameras, small religious statues, ceremonial kimonos, and documents in another tongue. Two months later, Roosevelt signed the order to evacuate for reasons of military security all persons of Japanese origin from the Pacific coast states—California, Oregon, and Washington, where the “yellow” troops might carry out the feared invasion. Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah were also declared military zones. The US Army was given three weeks to build the necessary shelters.
In March of 1942, San Francisco awoke plastered with warnings that announced the evacuation of the Japanese population. Takao and Heideko did not understand them, but their son Charles explained. First of all, the Japanese could not go outside a radius of five miles from their homes without a special permit and had to obey a nighttime curfew from eight p.m. to six a.m. The authorities began to raid houses and confiscate possessions; they arrested influential men who might incite treason, community leaders, company directors, teachers, pastors, and took them away to undisclosed destinations; their terrified wives and children were left behind. The Japanese had to quickly sell off whatever they owned at knockdown prices, and to close their businesses. They soon discovered that their bank accounts had been frozen; they were ruined. The plant nursery Takao Fukuda and Isaac Belasco had planned together never saw the light of day.
By August, more than a hundred and twenty thousand men, women, and children would be evacuated, old people snatched from hospitals, babies from orphanages, and mental patients from asylums. They would be interned in ten concentration camps in isolated areas of the interior, while cities would be left with phantom neighborhoods full of empty homes and desolate streets, where abandoned pets and the confused spirits of the ancestors who had arrived in America with the immigrants wandered aimlessly. The evacuation order was aimed at protecting not only the Pacific coast but also the Japanese themselves, as they could become the victims of misunderstanding by the rest of the population; it was a temporary solution and would be carried out in a humane fashion. This was the official line, but meanwhile the hate speech spread. “A snake is always a snake, wherever it lays its eggs. A Japanese-American born of Japanese parents, brought up in a Japanese tradition, living in an atmosphere transplanted from Japan, inevitably and with only rare exceptions grows up as Japanese and not American. They are all enemies.” It was enough to have a great-grandfather born in Japan to be seen as a snake.
As soon as Isaac Belasco learned of the imminent evacuation, he went to see Takao to offer help and reassure him that his absence would be a short one because the evacuation was unconstitutional, violating the principles of American democracy. His Japanese partner replied with a deep bow. He was profoundly moved by this man’s friendship, because in recent weeks his family had suffered insults, snubs, and even aggression from other whites. Shikata ga nai, what can we do, Takao told him. That was his people’s slogan in times of adversity. When Isaac insisted, Takao asked a special favor of him: to allow him to bury the Fukuda sword in the garden at Sea Cliff. He had managed to hide it from the agents who raided his house, but it wasn’t safe. The sword represented the courage of his forebears and the blood shed for the emperor; it could not run the risk of being dishonored.
That same night the entire Fukuda family, dressed in the white kimonos of the Oomoto religion, went to Sea Cliff, where Isaac and his son, Nathaniel, received them in dark suits and wearing the yarmulkes they used on the rare occasions they attended a synagogue. Ichimei brought his cat in a basket covered in a cloth and handed him to Alma to look after for a while.
“What’s his name?” she asked him.
“Neko. It’s Japanese for ‘cat.’ ”
Accompanied by her daughters, Lillian served Heideko and Megumi tea in one of the first-floor living rooms, while Alma, who did not understand what was going on but was aware of the solemnity of the occasion, slipped through the shadows beneath the trees and followed the men, clutching the basket. They filed downhill through the terraces, lighting their way with oil lamps, until they reached the spot overlooking the sea where they had dug a small trench. In the lead was Takao, carrying the katana wrapped in white silk; after him came his eldest son, Charles, with the metal box they had had made to protect the sword; James and Ichimei followed him; and Isaac and Nathaniel Belasco brought up the rear. Not bothering to hide his tears, Takao prayed for several minutes, then placed the sword in the box his eldest son held out and fell to his knees, forehead pressed against the ground, while Charles and James lowered the katana into the hole and Ichimei scattered handfuls of soil onto it. Then they filled the hole in and flattened the earth with spades. “Tomorrow I will plant white chrysanthemums here to mark the spot,” said Isaac, his voice hoarse with emotion, as he helped Takao to his feet.
Alma did not dare run over to Ichimei, because she guessed there must be an overriding reason why women were excluded from the ceremony. She waited until they had returned to the house to catch Ichimei and drag him off to a corner out of sight. The boy explained he would not be returning the following Saturday or any other day for the time being, possibly for several weeks or months, and that they would not be able to talk on the telephone either. “Why? Why?” shouted Alma, shaking him, but Ichimei could not explain. He himself had no idea why they had to leave or where they were going.