I hurried out of the washroom. The lineup was getting bigger each morning, but that was only to be expected as the population of the park grew each day — the pool was getting deeper. I heard that they were now putting families in the old pig stalls. I’d heard they were smaller and smelled even worse than the cattle stalls. I couldn’t imagine that.
I looked at my watch. It was almost eight o’clock. If I didn’t hurry there wouldn’t be much left to eat for breakfast. I’d agreed to meet Sam at eight-thirty, so if I hurried I could eat and get there on time. He was usually late, but I was still going to try and be on time.
As I turned into the stall I wasn’t surprised to see both my sisters all dressed up. My family had washed and gone for breakfast before I’d even risen. My grandmother was carefully combing Yuri’s hair while my mother helped put a clip in Midori’s.
“There, you are both ready for your first day of school,” my mother said.
I shook my head in disbelief. “I still can’t believe that they went ahead and set up a school.”
“School is important,” my mother said.
I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d heard talk from the first day we arrived in Hastings Park that people were worried about their children “losing their year” at school. How crazy was that? People were forced out of their houses, had to sleep in cattle stalls, had virtually no idea where we’d all be heading, and they were worried about their children not getting a proper education. How Japanese.
“Blackboards have been found, paper, pencils. Even chairs and desks have been found and placed in a building.”
“What about teachers?” I asked.
“Some of the women in the camp are teachers at the Japanese schools. They have volunteered to school children,” my mother explained.
I’d heard about the Japanese schools. In Vancouver there were dozens of them. Places where kids of Japanese descent used to go on Saturdays to learn Japanese and about Japan.
“And some of the high school students are to assist them,” my mother added.
“But we’re only going to be here a few weeks,” I noted.
“A few weeks that won’t be wasted. At least, for the younger children,” my mother said.
I tried not to smile, because of course I knew what she meant — the school had been set up only for those in the seventh form or lower. Just another reason to be grateful for being in eighth grade. Going to school was about the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
“Could you bring your sisters to school?” my mother asked.
“We don’t need him to —” Midori stopped in midsentence when she saw the look in my mother’s eyes.
“What building are they using?” I asked.
“I can show you,” Midori said. “It’s not far from the front gate. They call the building the Forum.”
I knew which one she meant. It was big, and strange shaped. Unfortunately, it was in the completely opposite direction of where I was going — the mess hall.
“Come on, let’s go now,” I said. My stomach was already grumbling and I wanted to drop them off as soon as possible.
Both girls picked up a small bundle of books that they had been working on since we left Prince Rupert.
They said goodbye to my mother and grandmother and we headed down the aisle and toward the big barn door. At almost every stall we passed, there were also children being readied for school. Hair was being combed, faces were being given a last scrub with a washcloth, as children, books in hand, stood waiting in good clothing, standing with their friends or playmates. They were chatting together, laughing, playing, smiling, all excited. Their mothers also clustered together at the entrances to their stalls and talked to their neighbors. I caught little snippets of conversation as I passed. They were talking about the school, and the weather and clothing, and … all the sorts of things mothers talked about in our village as the children started off for school.
I stopped and Midori and Yuri kept walking, unaware that I had stopped. I looked all around at the scene being played out before me. If I looked at just the people, and not the place, we could have been in our village. Everybody seemed so cheerful, happy, excited. The children were skipping and playing. The mothers smiling and talking. Even the men being gone didn’t seem out of place — they could just be out early working the fishing boats. If only it all wasn’t being played out in a barn, cattle stalls covered with bedspreads. I closed my eyes and just listened. Soft voices, high-pitched laughter, the scuffling of feet — “Tadashi!”
My eyes popped open. Midori was standing thirty feet in front of me, hands on her hips, Yuri at her side, looking very annoyed. That was just like our usual walks to school as well. I started walking again.
“What were you doing?” Midori demanded.
“Waiting for Jed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing … just joking. Come on.”
That’s what I would have been doing if we were heading to school from our village. As the girls hurried off, I would have stopped at the entrance to Jed’s village and waited for him — he was always late, just like Sam. I guess they did have some things in common.
We moved along with the mothers and their children. We were just another part of an unofficial parade heading to the school. Yuri took my hand as we walked. Actually, I walked and she skipped along beside me. She and Midori held an animated discussion, hoping that they’d like their classmates and wondering if the teacher was going to be strict. I didn’t say anything, but I knew she would be. After all, she was going to be Japanese. Not that I’d ever had a Japanese teacher — all the teachers in our school were white — but I just knew.
Soon the trickle of people f lowing from our building joined into a bigger stream moving along the main path. As we passed each new building another trickle of children joined in. The stream was becoming a river. There were hundreds of kids going to school.
I hadn’t thought about just how many children were in this camp. When we’d first arrived at the park, I was told there were over fifteen hundred people. That number had been dwarfed over the past week as more and more people arrived daily. I’d heard that there were now closer to three thousand. I didn’t really know. I just knew the lineups were much longer at the mess, and even once you got your food it was hard to find a place to sit.
Along with the extra people came extra things. A small store was now housed just inside the main gate.
It sold cold pop and candy and gum. Sam now only needed to get his newspapers from the outside, as these still weren’t for sale to Japanese. A small infirmary, a place where people who were sick could go, had been set up in one of the buildings. Two of the interned Japanese were doctors and some of the women were experienced as either nurses or midwives, and they’d been assisting those needing help.
We stopped right outside the building that was now the school. It was large. Hopefully, large enough to hold all these kids. Outside the building were a number of tables. Behind each table sat two or three women. Over their heads were large hand-drawn signs in both English and Japanese to show students where to register for the different forms.
“Midori, you go over —”
“I know,” she snapped. “I can read.”
She walked off and took her place in a line with other kids her age. I walked Yuri over a couple of tables to take a place in the proper line.
All the kids seemed so excited and happy. For a split second I felt like maybe I was missing out on things. I usually did like school — at least, my old school.
“Hey, Tadashi!”
I turned around and saw Sam, his little sister Keiko — he called her Kay — in tow. They weaved through the crowd, waving, a big smile on Sam’s face. As always, he was chewing gum a mile a minute. I waved back. They came over to us and we exchanged greetings.
Yuri let go of my hand and took Kay’s hand instead, pulling her into line beside her. They were the same age, and would be in the same grade. They’d gotten to know each other through me and Sam, and had played together a few times before. Like Sam, Kay spoke almost no Japanese.
We shuffled forward with the crowd, Sam and I making small talk, and the girls giggling and playing. Finally we reached the front and provided the necessary information — name, age, grade, school — for them to be put in the proper class. The girls, still holding hands, waved to us and were led away by one of the teachers, disappearing into the building.
“I can’t believe how happy my sister was about going to school,” I said as we walked away.
“Mine too. Kay was just upset that it was only half a day long.”
“But I heard that they might make it a full day later … even add the higher grades.”
“I heard that too, but I figure we’ll be long gone before they get around to that,” Sam said. “I can think of a lot of better ways to spend my time than in some classroom.”
“Yeah. So what do you want to do today?” I asked.
“We could play baseball.”
“I guess we could.” We’d played baseball every day for the past two weeks. I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of playing ball, but somehow … “Any other ideas?”
He smiled. “I had something else in mind.”
“What did you —” I stopped in mid-sentence as I saw Toshio, a foul look on his face, standing right in front of me. Beside him were two other boys — more like men — his age.
Toshio stopped directly in front of me, blocking the path.
“You still here … you not white,” Toshio said, spitting out the word, a smirk on his face.
“White?” Sam asked, turning to me.
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Yellow on the outside … white on the inside. You too!” Toshio said, aiming his words at Sam.
“Me?” Sam questioned and then burst into a big smile. “Did you hear that? I’m white!”
Toshio looked confused by Sam’s response.
“Take a hike, Toshio,” I said.
“Hike?” he asked.
“Go away,” I said in Japanese.
“You not tell me what to do. You not boss of Toshio. Toshio stay right here.”
He spread his legs apart and put his hands on his hips, freezing like a statue.
I shrugged. “Suits me. Then we’ll go.”
I stepped off the path to go around him but was violently spun around by a hand on my shoulder, and found myself staring into Toshio’s face.
Before I could even react, Sam stepped in between us and brushed Toshio’s hand off my shoulder.
“Shooo!” Sam said, motioning with his hands like he was trying to scatter some birds.
Toshio looked taken aback. He turned to his two friends and spoke to them in Japanese — he told them that he thought Sam was a monkey. They both laughed. Thank goodness Sam didn’t understand any Japanese or he might have been — “The only monkey around here is you … and probably your mother!” Sam yelled.
How did he know what Toshio had said?
“Do you understand me, you stupid monkey-faced boy? Your mother’s as ugly as a monkey. Understand?” Sam demanded.
There was no question that Toshio understood. Even if the words hadn’t made sense, the tone was undeniable. Toshio moved in toward Sam. They were going to fight. I’d seen Toshio in action and knew how dangerous he could be. I went to move in to do something and one of Toshio’s two new buddies — he looked like he was about twenty and bigger than me — stepped in front of me.
“Leave them alone,” he said threateningly.
The second guy stepped forward too and nodded his head in agreement. Unless I was prepared to fight the two of them, Sam was on his own.
Toshio and Sam circled each other, sizing one another up. Sam was holding his arms high, hands folded into fists, like a prize fighter. Toshio was gliding, falling into judo poses … Judo! Sam didn’t know!
“Sam, be careful, he knows judo!” I called out.
“Good for him,” Sam yelled back. “Soon he’s going to know a beating.”
“Stop!” yelled out a voice in Japanese, and an older man rushed forward.
He was about my grandmother’s age. He had been sitting behind one of the tables where the children were being registered for school.
“Stop, right now!” he yelled again, repeating himself in English.
Toshio took a half-step back and lowered his guard as the old man stepped between him and Sam. Sam kept his hands up. The old man turned his head toward Sam and started to question him in Japanese.
“I don’t understand Japanese!” Sam snapped back defiantly.
The old man looked slightly confused by Sam’s statement, but nodded his head. “You can lower your defenses, there will be no fight.”
Sam lowered his arms, but his fingers remained curled into fists and his facial expression remained angry.
The old man had surprised me. His English was perfect, with not even a trace of accent. Most of the old people, people his age, only spoke halting English, heavily tainted by Japanese accents.
He then turned to Toshio. “There will be no fight.”
Toshio nodded. His eyes were on the ground.
“We didn’t start it,” Sam said. “These big tough men,” he said, motioning first to Toshio and then to the other two flanking me, “came over here to pick a fight with us. Really tough, aren’t you three? Couldn’t you find any girls to fight? Big brave —”
“Silence!” the old man said, cutting Sam off.
I was surprised, and grateful, that Sam listened.
The old man looked at Toshio, then at Sam, then at me and finally at the two men who stood on either side of me. His expression hardened and I could see his eyes flare in anger. I think he’d seen what Sam had pointed out. In rapid-fire Japanese he asked the three why they were here, what business they had and if they had started the fight. They practically tripped over each other answering, apologizing and groveling.
He shook his head. “We have been herded into this park like animals. Many are sleeping in places where animals sleep. Fed like animals. Fenced in and restricted in our movements like animals. And when you fight … you are acting like animals.” He paused. “We are not animals. We are people. We have dignity. Dignity is not where you live, but how you live. Understand?”
“Hai,” Toshio said, nodding his head, and his friends echoed out agreement. All three had their eyes firmly rooted on the ground. I nodded my head in agreement as well.
“And you?” he asked Sam. “Do you have anything more to say?”
“No … no, sir.”
Sam calling him “sir” surprised me. That wasn’t like him.
“Good. It is now finished,” the old man said. “Now I have business in the school and then in the city. I suggest you all get on with your business. And remember, acting like animals justifies being placed here. But when we act with dignity we shame those people who have put us here. Dignity. Like Japanese.”
The old man walked into the school.
The crowd that had started to gather at the first signs of trouble had long since dispersed. People had begun to leave as soon as the old man arrived. It wasn’t respectful for them to stay and witness what was happening, although I wasn’t sure my curiosity would have let me leave if I had been standing on the sidelines watching.
I watched as the old man walked away. There were now very few children remaining to be registered. In typical, efficient Japanese style, the seemingly impossible task was nearly complete. Turning back around I was happy to see that Toshio and the other two were walking away and were already at a safe distance.
“I didn’t recognize him at first,” Sam said.
“Who?”
“The old man. Do you know who he is?” Sam asked.
I shook my head. “I was thinking maybe the principal of the school.”
Sam laughed. “He’s a lot more than that. That was Mr.
Wakabayashi.”
I shrugged. The name didn’t mean anything to me.
“I heard he owns half of the Japanese businesses in Vancouver.”
I shrugged. “Are there a lot of them?”
Sam shook his head, and his expression showed disbelief. “There’s a stretch of stores and buildings along Powell Street from Main all the way to Campbell. Most of the businesses are Japanese, and he owns half of them. Even my father calls him ‘sir.’ Funny, I was surprised to see him here.”
“Why?” I asked.
“First off, I figured he lived right in Vancouver, and they aren’t making the Japanese in Vancouver leave their homes yet.”
“Good thing. They couldn’t fit everybody into this park,” I said. “But maybe he doesn’t live in Vancouver.”
“Maybe, but even if he doesn’t, I just figured that somebody as rich and powerful as him wouldn’t have to come here.” He paused. “I guess the color of his skin is more important than the color of his money. You eaten yet?” Sam asked.
I shook my head.
“Me neither. Let’s get some grub.”
“Sure, let’s …” I let the sentence trail off as I realized that Toshio and his friends were walking ahead of us on the path to the mess hall.
“Don’t worry about them,” Sam said, reading my mind. “I could tell that they recognized Mr. Wakabayashi too. There won’t be a problem. Besides, if he does decide to start something, I’ll take care of it.”
“I’m glad you’re so confident.”
“I would have cleaned his clock. Let’s go.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” I said as we started to walk, trailing behind them at what I hoped was a safe distance.
“You’ve never seen Toshio fight.”
“You’ve never seen me fight either,” Sam said.
“You talk a good fight, I’ll give you that much.”
“I can do more than talk. You get good at what you do often,” Sam said.
“What do you mean?”
“I was about the only Japanese kid in my whole neighborhood. Besides me and my sister, there were only two other Japanese kids in my school and they were both girls.”
“Yeah?”
“So you don’t think I had practice fighting?”
“Why would …” I had an uneasy feeling that I knew why.
“Jap, gook, fish-breath … heck, I even got called a chink. Stupid idiot didn’t even know enough to throw the right insults at me — he thought I was Chinese. When I started school I learned to fight. Older kids, bigger kids, more than one of them … I didn’t care. I fought them all.”
“Every day?”
“Every day in the beginning. Then every week, then every so often. The last few years I only seemed to have to fight when some new kid came to the school. I’d lay a beating on him and then everything would be okay.”
“That would be hard … not having any friends.”
“What are you talking about? I had lots of friends. Lots. It’s just that none of them were Japanese!” He shook his head. “Funny … out there I used to get in fights because I was Japanese and here, when I’m surrounded by Japanese, some guy wants to pick a fight with me because I’m not Japanese enough — or I guess because you aren’t Japanese enough.”
“He’s just stupid.”
“I figured that part out, but why does he think you think you’re white?”
“Because of my friends. I hang out with Japanese too, but lots of my friends, like my best friend, aren’t Japanese.”
“Big deal; all my friends are white.”
“Jed’s only part white. His mother is Tsimshian.”
“Tsimshian?”
“Native Indian.” Then in a flash I remembered something that had struck me as strange. “You said you didn’t speak any Japanese, so how did you know what Toshio was saying?”
“I don’t speak any Japanese, but I do understand some of it. Besides, even if I didn’t understand the words, I would have known he wasn’t asking if we wanted an ice cream.”
“But you knew exactly what he called you.”
“Called me?” Sam asked.
“You know, calling you a monkey,” I explained.
“I thought he was talking about you. Maybe I still should give him a smack in the head. Idiot!” he screamed at Toshio, up ahead of us on the path.
“Don’t start anything!” I said, trying to quiet him down, relieved that Toshio hadn’t turned around. He and his friends were some distance away and maybe he didn’t hear him, or didn’t understand the taunt.
“I’d like to show him who’s a monkey! Monkey boy!” he yelled.
There was no response from up ahead. I had to do something to distract him.
“How can you understand Japanese but not speak it?” I asked.
“I used to know how to speak it. Up until the time I went to the first form, that was all I spoke,” Sam explained.
“And what happened?”
“What happened was that kids made fun of me. And once I understood enough English to understand what they were saying, then I started fighting.”
“But what’s that got to do with not speaking Japanese?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just didn’t make sense to speak a language that nobody understood, so I just stopped speaking it.”
“What about at home, with your parents or your family?”
“They didn’t say anything about it. They just spoke to me in English from then on.”
“And what about your grandparents or other relatives?” I knew that a lot of the older people had almost no English.
“All my grandparents have been dead since before I can remember, and we don’t hardly have any relatives. Both my parents are only children … well, I guess my father did have a brother, but he died when they were kids. The only relatives we have are some cousins my mother has, and they live way up in Kamloops, so we hardly ever see them anyway.”
I thought of all my relatives, some of whom lived in our village. And then there were the people I’d known all my life, people who had actually come from the same village in Japan as my grandparents, who weren’t family, but were more than just neighbors. Sam didn’t have any of that. He had friends, but friends weren’t enough. Friends!
That reminded me that I’d been putting off writing that letter to Jed like I’d promised. I’d started to write him a half-dozen times. But each time, I got no more than a few lines in and the letter ended up in the trash. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to tell him; I didn’t know how to say it. How could I describe what was happening to us? Regardless of how hard it was, I’d have to do more than just try.