24
The Yamadas * 1860—1935
Kenichi Yamada of California was born Yamada Kenichi in 1860 in Osaka, Japan.
It was a peculiar time to be born in Japan, for at that time the nation had developed an idiosyncratic self-consciousness about itself as a sleepy backwater. Samurai families had ruled for centuries, but now the country wished to shake itself awake and compete with the West—or at least an influential portion of it did—and as the nation attempted to modernize, there were many challenges to the class system that ranked samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants in descending order.
Kenichi’s parents were one example of the new disruption between castes, as his mother descended from the Matsudaira, an old samurai clan, while his father’s family owned the local rice mercantile in Osaka. The match had been arranged and approved by both families, of course, but represented a bargain that was familiar the whole world over: class in exchange for money.
Still, his parents seemed happy in their union together, and Kenichi’s father taught Kenichi to stand tall, to take pride in the prosperity of the rice mercantile, and to be proud of his native city, Osaka, which was also known as “the nation’s kitchen.” His father’s point of view was not considered typical among his countrymen. Sometimes they heard the cries of peddlers hailing from over their garden walls.
“Listen to that,” Kenichi’s father would say. “Your grandfather hollered those same cries and roamed the streets as a peddler when I was just a boy. Can you imagine?”
Kenichi tried to picture his paternal grandfather—by then a frail, elderly man—shouting in the streets, buying and selling rice.
“Many people disdain peddlers, but your grandfather worked very hard as a peddler . . . That is how we earned the mercantile we have now,” his father said. “If the city is a heart, peddlers are the blood that make it pump. Never look down on anyone who works hard.”
Hard work had always been a Japanese value, but paying the same respect to a peddler as to a shogun was not. Yet Kenichi was an unorthodox child raised in an unorthodox household; he easily took his father’s point of view on the subject for his own. As fate would have it, it was an outlook that would eventually serve him well in America.
One day, when Kenichi was ten years old, he made a discovery that steered him even further toward a nontraditional path. He was snooping around his mother’s possessions when he came upon a delicately carved wooden box. He found it buried deep within a chest, keeping company with his mother’s tea ceremony things. It was a Japanese puzzle box, and once he got it open, he saw that it contained a series of letters folded up in thick, rough, foreign-looking envelopes, all of them stamped with strange-looking postmarks. He read them without hesitation, as young children are wont to do with the private letters of adults, and determined that they were from an uncle he’d never met: his mother’s brother, Haruto.
He brought the box to his mother, and when she finished scolding him for nosing about in her possessions, she sat down and told him the story of his uncle. Kenichi had never met his uncle Haruto for reasons too tangled and complex for his young mind to understand—in part due to his mother’s marriage, but also in part due to Haruto’s involvement in the Boshin War and the unusual travels that ultimately resulted. That was the next detail that grabbed Kenichi’s attention: The letters were sent from a land an ocean away. His uncle had traveled all the way across the Pacific to America, to a place called California.
A year or so earlier, Haruto had joined a group of samurai-class families financed by Matsudaira Katamori as they set sail for San Francisco. The group landed in San Francisco on May 20, 1869. They did not linger in San Francisco very long. The group pushed onward, traveling east, through the Sacramento Valley and up into the foothills that stood at the other side, until finally they reached a place called Gold Hill, where they settled for a time. They had brought with them fifty thousand kuwa trees and six million tea seeds from Japan. Once they secured two hundred acres of land, they officially established what came to be known as the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony. It was the first Japanese colony of its kind in the so-called New World.
Kenichi was less interested in the historical details than he was in imagining his uncle roaming around an exotic, faraway country. He was riveted by his uncle’s account of the journey, sailing into the San Francisco Bay and putting into port at the strange, hilly American city full of tall clapboard houses, saloons, theaters, opium dens—all of these structures populated by Western pioneers, Chinese laborers, and European gentlemen alike. In his letters, Haruto gave detailed descriptions of ship captains, merchants, painted women, and prospectors.
Haruto enthusiastically described his new life in his letters to his sister: He spent the days practicing his English, doing business at the trading posts with the old forty-niners, planting kuwa trees, coaxing silkworms into production with the mulberry leaves, and planning for the first-ever tea harvest. He wrote about the golden hills and black oaks, the orange iron tinge to the soil. He wrote about the dry, baking heat of the summer days and the icy rapids of the American River, which hosted agitated, lumbering bears hungry for salmon, and flowed with melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. Kenichi’s mother let him read the letters again and again, and Kenichi began to memorize the contents, kanji for kanji, until this place called California began to run in his veins.
“Where is Uncle Haruto now?” Kenichi asked his mother four years later. It had been some time since any new correspondence had arrived, and Kenichi still thought of his uncle from time to time, dreaming of his uncle’s adventures.
Her face clouded.
“This was the last letter I received,” she said, pointing to a letter postmarked with the year 1871. Neither of them could know: The Wakamatsu colony had been short-lived, and its members had dispersed, some of them returning to Japan, even.
It didn’t matter: Kenichi had set his sights on following in his uncle’s footsteps. He’d set about learning everything he could about this new land, California. He’d even undertaken to learn English. His mother was vaguely alarmed, and Kenichi learned to hide the secret dreams he was nurturing.
By 1878, Kenichi was a grown man, ready to embark on his own adventure. He had worked all of his adolescent years at his father’s mercantile exchange, buying and selling rice, saving his weekly pay, and making his plans in secret.
In 1879, he set sail for the California coast from Osaka Bay. The journey was long and terrible. Kenichi had never known the ocean could stretch on like that—endless mile after endless mile. There was something utterly vacant and lonely about that much sea; it was like being in a desert made of water. Perhaps it was for this reason that, once he arrived in San Francisco, Kenichi did not stay. San Francisco was a city surrounded by water, and after his tumultuous voyage across the Pacific, Kenichi craved dry land. He’d also fallen under the spell of his uncle’s letters, which had only made him more certain he might like to try his hand at farming. To his peers who had grown up with him in Osaka, the very idea of Kenichi farming would have been laughable. He was a city boy; he may have bought and sold rice but he certainly had never farmed it. However, he could not be dissuaded. He pictured the rolling hills his uncle had described and found himself joining a wagon train out of San Francisco and into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, disembarking at a town not far from the site of the now-disbanded Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony.
Once off the wagon train, Kenichi felt certain he had found the place he was meant to stay, if only he could find some way to purchase a stake. He was in luck: When he inquired around town, he learned there was a young prospector eager to get a prime parcel of land off his hands. Of course, nobody told him about the poker games and bad blood between Silas Northrup and Ennis Thorn. When he happened upon Silas in the town tavern, he thought it merely a sign of his own good fortune that the young man was so desperate to sell him some land. Silas took him right away to see the land in question, and Kenichi surveyed the sloping hills and put his hands in the dirt to check the soil. He didn’t have much experience, of course, but he’d studied books about agriculture back in Japan, and the books had told him what to look for. The soil was fertile, and the terrain appeared to have good drainage; it was just right for an orchard.
“Who owns the land in that direction?” Kenichi asked, pointing. He wanted to know who his future neighbors might be.
“The Thorns,” Silas answered. “Man and his wife. Older folk. They got a son, too. It’s all apples over there, mostly.”
“Apples?”
“Sure. They got a little pasture for the cattle, and an apple orchard on the property,” Silas answered. He did not add anything more, or continue on to say, And this here land I’m selling you was a parcel belonging to Old Man Thorn that I took off him when he was too drunk to notice I had an ace hid up my sleeve . . . Instead, he remained silent, staring at the hillside as Kenichi nodded in approval.
“An apple orchard,” Kenichi repeated.
Silas’s lips moved in a slight grimace and he nodded. Just then, his eyes were drawn by a plume of dust rising in the air, far off in the distance. That would be Ennis Thorn’s wagon, he thought, headed in the direction of the Thorn farmhouse. Silas didn’t think it would be wise to linger much longer. There weren’t any drainpipes to shimmy up out there in the open fields.
“Let’s go back to town and talk it over down at the tavern,” Silas said, heading back in the direction of his horse.
“All right,” Kenichi agreed, already trying to think of the number he was willing to offer.
A few dusty miles later the two men found themselves seated at the bar counter. As Kenichi hoped to stay and make this region his new home, he wanted to establish himself as a good and moral citizen. He made Silas a very fair price, and Silas accepted. They toasted the exchange over two glasses of rye.
Kenichi could not believe he’d become a landowner so quickly. Now there was only the matter of making his plans for the property. Building a little campsite, hiring a few hands of help, and deciding what to grow. Perhaps I ought to introduce myself to the neighbors, Kenichi thought. He was still new to America and unsure what the appropriate decorum might be. Little did Kenichi know, in this particular situation, he’d be hard-pressed to discover any decorum that might impress Ennis Thorn. When Kenichi began to camp on his newly acquired land, there were only three Thorns living on the property adjacent, and none of them welcomed the sight of Kenichi’s campfire in the evenings. The Thorns maintained an aloof distance from their new Japanese neighbor, establishing the relationship that would last for decades to come.
The years passed quickly. Kenichi Yamada matured from a young man into a middle-aged man. He had always assumed he would marry young. But when the first few years of his twenties passed and he had not gotten around to marrying, it did not seem so strange that another decade should pass, and then another. He was busy with plenty of hard work. The land he had bought was fruitful. Down at the growers’ exchange and packing sheds that abutted the railroad tracks in town, he regularly sold almonds, plums, and satsumas—all for very favorable prices. He built the farmhouse and then—seeing it through a potential bride’s eyes—expanded it, constantly improving it, bit by bit.
In the fall of 1916, Kenichi was finally ready for a bride, but at fifty-six he was afraid he’d waited too long, and that none would want him. The delay in marrying wasn’t entirely intentional; it was largely due to the fact that Kenichi had been busy building up the orchards and ranch—he hadn’t wanted to send back to Japan for a potential wife before everything was at its best, before everything was prosperous and ready. He was a dignified, proud man. He had insisted on making his own way in the world. His own parents had long since passed away, and Kenichi was cut off from any regular communication with Japan. Now he only had his land, his orchards, and his farmhouse to offer—and he wanted them to be perfect. The thought of asking a wife to move halfway around the world for anything less struck him as distasteful.
But now . . . could a fifty-six-year-old man successfully embark on marriage and a family so late in life?
Kenichi hoped the answer was yes. There were certainly examples, back in the old country, of samurai who’d served in battle so long that they didn’t get around to taking a wife or fathering children until their fearsome samurai moustaches were already tinged with silver. But Kenichi was no samurai and no longer lived in the land where such legendary men ruled the history books.
Kenichi’s inquiry was answered by a family named Miyamoto. Kenichi could write to their daughter, they said, and if what he wrote pleased her, he could send for her passage across the Pacific. The young woman in question, Shizue, was twenty-two years of age and had never been married. She was pretty enough but possessed “a certain defect,” her family warned. Around the time Shizue turned sixteen, she had begun to suffer from terrible seizures that came and went without obvious provocation or warning. Kenichi understood what this meant: Shizue was an epileptic.
Her condition had taken a toll on Shizue’s personality over the years. She had been a confident, friendly child. But suffering multiple embarrassing epileptic fits as a teenager had changed her. She had grown so that she was perpetually nervous and unable to conceal her condition. At tea ceremony, her hand shook so as to spill the tea. She could not answer simple questions without speaking in a flustered stammer. Shizue was awkward in a world that did not embrace awkwardness in any form. As things stood at that time, many matchmakers considered epilepsy a disfigurement, and her increasingly shy, nervous disposition only emphasized the fact of her affliction. The Miyamoto family was at pains to find Shizue a proper marital match. Perhaps, they thought, our daughter is better suited to another continent. Perhaps, living among foreigners, she will not seem so strange or have to endure the daily embarrassments of being . . . the way she is.
And so they gave their twenty-two-year-old daughter permission to exchange letters with Kenichi. He had, after all, guaranteed that he did not mind Shizue’s condition, his property and fortune were sound, and he had further promised that whomever he took for a wife would have a life of comfort and security. It was not traditional for a man and woman to correspond before arranging a marriage, but clearly he was not a traditional man.
For his part, Kenichi insisted on exchanging letters because he wanted to know something about the mind of his future bride. He dreaded the thought of a young woman sailing halfway across the world because her parents forced her to, arriving on the orchards and hating her new life. Such an arrangement would pain his tired heart, after all his hard work and struggle to make a good life for himself in the New World.
I am much older than you, he wrote. I do not know if you imagined marrying a man of my age.
According to the traditions of courting, young women were obligated to point out their flaws, but it was uncommon for a man to do so. To point out his old age . . . perhaps she was supposed to be repulsed. However, Shizue was impressed by his sincerity.
I do not expect to fall in love with you, she wrote back, returning the favor of his honesty in kind. If we married, I would only expect to make a shared life together that is prosperous and honorable.
Kenichi was curiously comforted by these words. The sentiment was fair and true. He sent a large sum to her parents—more than enough for her passage to America, meeting the unspoken expectation. Shizue packed a small chest and prepared to make her departure. Her mind was made up. Even so, she was still as nervous as a sparrow. She wondered if this older man would truly want her for his wife in spite of her flighty nature. There was only one way to find out.
Then, while at sea, a curious thing happened. The ship sailed through a storm, and Shizue was tossed about like a ragdoll. She was sick often, throwing up into a tin pail, and utterly horrified as the ship listed so steeply from side to side, it felt as though it would certainly capsize. But something strange came over her during the worst of it: Some sort of ironclad will took over her nervous body and steadied her. She was determined to make it to America, she realized. She was surprised to realize she was not apologetic for the unladylike intensity of her determination. A cool, collected calmness came over her. The nervous tremors in her hands ceased. Her breathing became even. When she spoke, her stammer was gone.
Shizue endured three weeks at sea. When she disembarked in California, the spring of 1917 was in full bloom and she was surprised to realize her new sense of calm was still with her. Somehow she understood it would forever be with her now. The ocean had tested her, distilled her, and washed away all the apologetic tics that had previously betrayed her.
Instead of sending a wagon or a train ticket, Kenichi met Shizue himself in San Francisco, so that he might personally escort her to the piece of property up in the California foothills that was to be her new home. Their rapport was instantly just as it had been in their letters: honest and simple; they harbored between the two of them a tacit understanding. It was a quiet journey, but peaceful. Kenichi brought Shizue back to the Yamada property, watching her face and carefully reevaluating his home as it must look through her eyes. Shizue stepped down from the buggy and gazed at the little white clapboard farmhouse cantilevered into the side of a foothill.
When a small smile of approval played on her lips, Kenichi just about felt his heart split at the seams like an overripe pomegranate.
They were married and settled into their life together. Shizue was surprised to sense love in Kenichi’s heart—the kind of breathlessly optimistic, wholehearted love one might expect from a much younger man. He was also jolly, playful—a touch irreverent, even. Shizue was even further surprised when she woke up one morning and, listening to Kenichi humming cheerfully over his daily cup of strong American coffee, realized she had done the one thing she had dutifully informed him she wouldn’t do: She had fallen in love with him, too.
And curiously, in America, Shizue finally became the good Japanese she never was back home. She was calm and graceful in all things—in the meticulous decoration and organization of the house, in the careful way she spoke and dressed, in the way she kept the old traditions, even arranging for a small teahouse and ancestral shrine to be added onto their existing home. Nonetheless, Shizue also embraced the new, and perhaps it might be said that her greatest grace was in blending the East with the West in harmonious balance. She knew adopting Western culture—at least to some degree—was important to her husband, who had struck out from Japan to make his home in California for a reason.
In those first weeks, as their mutual respect grew into genuine affection and then love, they began—shyly at first—to consummate their marriage. Shizue wondered if children would come; she waited anxiously every month with a mixture of excitement and fear to find out what her fate as a mother might be. Slowly, as each month passed and Shizue experienced the normal bleeding, the excitement and fear turned to puzzlement and then, bit by bit, a sort of silent, empty worry. Though her seizures had lessened, she was convinced her epilepsy was at the root of the problem. She visited the local doctor, but he could not tell her much, except that bearing children was a challenge for some women. Ironically, prior to this intersection in her life, Shizue had not thought about children—or the lack of them—very much. Now it was all she thought of.
She cried—never in front of her husband, never anywhere he could see—and, stony-faced once more, accepted her future as a barren woman. It was her fault, she was sure. She was being punished for her spectacular, inborn deficiency, and now her husband was being punished, too.
Weeks, months, and eventually years passed. Kenichi was anxiously awaiting a family, too, although he understood his wife’s sensitivity enough to carefully conceal this desire. Kenichi’s prime reason for eagerly wanting a family was to experience the miracle and blessing of a child, to pass along love and the fruits of his hard work to another living being. But Kenichi had a handful of more complicated reasons as well: He was not a U.S. citizen, and neither he nor his wife was permitted to become a citizen under various anti-Oriental exclusion laws. This had never affected the Yamadas directly in the past, but as the state of California began passing more and more legislation aimed at ensuring aliens were not allowed to own property, Kenichi understood that everything he had worked so hard for was in jeopardy.
Other Chinese and Japanese families in the area were navigating their way around the potential legal pitfalls by transferring their holdings into the names of their children, who, having been born on American soil, instantly possessed the citizenship that had been barred to their parents. Kenichi knew their lives—his and his wife’s—would be best secured if they could manage to have a child. But he also understood how wounded she was upon discovering their difficulty in conceiving.
A dedicated husband, he pretended to delight in Shizue alone, in the good company she provided.
There are many theories about the circumstances that best beget a child, and in the case of Kenichi and Shizue Yamada, it is certainly compelling that only when Kenichi had proved his love was unwavering, only when Shizue felt the pressure of the duty of motherhood fall from her shoulders, that they were finally blessed with a child. After almost three years of trying, Shizue’s body ceased to bleed. She assumed it was a mistake, of course; her body was merely playing tricks on her. But the doctor who attended her—the same doctor who had condescendingly patted her hand and comforted her by telling her it was simply not possible for some women—confirmed the pregnancy.
Young Haruto was born in the autumn of 1920. The birth was not an easy transaction. First, the thing Shizue feared most—a seizure—sent her into early labor. Compounding this was the fact that the baby’s neck was caught in the umbilical cord and it was only by some strange combination of coordinated actions on the part of all involved—Shizue, midwife, and baby—that he was not strangled. The second he breathed the air, unleashing the full power of his squalling lungs on a small, attentive audience, he was a miraculous joy to behold. They were so overcome at the moment of his birth—a moment Kenichi insisted on being present for—they forgot to count toes or demand to know the sex. A boy, they were later told, a very healthy baby boy. And then came the name: Haruto, after Kenichi’s mysterious uncle. But as he would also be an American child, it would be “Harry” for school, “Harry” for his American friends. Although they could not know, this was indeed a fitting name for a baby who had, from a certain point of view, performed his first escape act and who would one day idolize the great Harry Houdini.
Kenichi was surprised to discover how much purpose he found in being a parent, especially given how long he had postponed this phase of his life. By the time of Haruto’s birth, Kenichi had turned sixty and understood this made him an old father. Nevertheless, he was determined his son shouldn’t suffer for it, and to his own gratification and surprise, a wave of fresh energy and enthusiasm sprang from some unknown well within him.
When Haruto grew into a toddler, Kenichi spent countless hours wandering the orchards with the boy perched atop his shoulders. As Haruto grew, they made a game together, joining in on the pruning and picking. The Yamada land was a wondrous playground for a small child; Haruto grew into an adventurous, outdoorsy boy. Some years later, when Haruto was going on nine years old, Kenichi and Shizue were blessed with a second child: a little girl. They named her Mai—a name that would be easily converted to “Mae” by her American schoolmates. In spite of the age gap—or perhaps because of it—Haruto was exceptionally kind to his little sister, caring for her with a gentle, protective touch. As she grew bigger, Mai also roamed the property, helping and playing in the orchards. On an early school report, Mai was asked to name one of her favorite things, and the teacher would help her write out the words. She wrote, “The smell of satsuma blossoms in Papa’s orchard.” Kenichi took one look and knew in his heart that everything he had done, all of his work, had been so his daughter might write down that one sentence. It was worth it to him.
But Kenichi understood that, while their home made for a perfect haven for his two young children, the world beyond their property lines wouldn’t always be so accommodating. He understood, too, that Haruto and Mai were not like him; they were nisei—second-generation Japanese in America—and would only call California home. The sounds of their American names, Harry and Mae, would eventually ring more familiar in their ears than Haruto and Mai. The Japanese words Kenichi and Shizue coaxed from their children’s mouths were bound to quickly rust and decay. It was unlikely either child would ever set foot in Japan. Kenichi also knew that one day his children’s assumptions—primarily the assumption that their identities as Americans was a given—might be shattered by others who might throw stones.
Of course, he could never have predicted the sharpness of the stones that would be thrown during war, or how thorough the shattering. Kenichi was more like his children than he knew. The land belonged to him, but he believed he belonged to it, too. They had adopted each other; this was how America constantly reshaped herself. A good citizen, a polite neighbor . . . Kenichi believed he was safe, and home.