Robert Conroy - Rising Sun

“I was born here,” one of them said. He was no older than fourteen. “And so was my mother. So why the hell are we being sent away?” It didn’t go unnoticed that the boy spoke perfect, unaccented English.

Major Cullen was from the 32nd Division and in charge of the ragtag group. He turned and snarled at the boy. “Because you’re Japs, that’s why, and the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”

When the kid looked like he was going to say something more, Dane told him not to lest he get his skull cracked. He said it in Japanese, which surprised the boy and stunned Cullen.

“You speak Jap?” asked Cullen.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“No matter, they all speak English.”

Dane shook his head. “I find it very hard to think that any of these people are saboteurs. Did you find any weapons, any radios?”

Cullen shrugged, “A couple of hunting rifles, but no shortwave radios. You’re probably right, Dane, none of this group is any threat whatsoever. However, until we sort them out they stay locked up, and I don’t care what the bleeding hearts say. You know what they’re doing to our people in the Philippines and Hawaii, don’t you?”

Dane knew all too well. American prisoners of war were being brutalized, while many American civilians in the Philippines had been jammed into a concentration-camp-like place called Santo Tomas in Manila, where they were being poorly fed and probably abused. Americans in Hawaii were slowly starving while the Japanese Navy blockaded the islands and prohibited food from going in. He couldn’t help but think of Amanda and whether she’d made it out or was dying in Hawaii. She had been fairly thin in the first place. How would she survive? He had a nightmare vision of someday returning to Hawaii and finding a skull with a twisted front tooth and realizing it was her.

Or had she survived at all? Or, damn it to hell, was her body rotting at the bottom of the Pacific as a result of the attack on the doomed convoy? For a second the cluster of Japanese civilians didn’t look all that harmless. He shook his head and put things back in perspective.

Cullen softened. “Look, I’m not a total goddamn monster. I know these old ladies and little kids are no more a threat to the country than are one of Orson Welles’s little green men from Mars,” he said, alluding to Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast that had terrorized so many people a few years earlier. “But I do have my orders and I’m going to obey them.”

“I understand,” Dane said, and he did. Japanese were not the only ones being interned. Some Germans and Italians had also been rounded up, although selectively and in much smaller numbers. FDR had signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing just such actions, and Dane could do nothing to prevent the roundup unless he wanted to risk court-martial.

And what did he really want to do? Prior to Pearl Harbor, numbers of Japanese-Americans had been proud of the advances Japan had made in less than a hundred years, emerging from a medieval period to become a technological and military power of the first rank, and that included their military advances in China. Japanese-language newspapers had praised their homeland with bold headlines and pro-Imperial articles. So too had millions of German-Americans and Italian-Americans when Hitler and Mussolini led their respective homelands to victory after victory. Did that make them all suspect as traitors? War with the United States had quieted them and made many choose between their new country and their old homeland. The overwhelming majority had chosen the United States. But had it changed their hearts? And what about the minority who felt more strongly for their origins than for their new homes?

And what would happen to this pitiful handful of people staring at him if they were released back into the population? Many Japanese ran small farms or owned little shops. A number of their businesses had been burned and looted by angry white Californians in an orgy of violence that had gotten worse after the disaster at Midway. Censored reports said that more than a hundred Japanese men had been lynched, and an unknown number of women raped by angry whites in California. For the most part, the police had done an admirable job of enforcing the law, but they couldn’t be everywhere; thus, there was some logic to the thought that interning the Japanese was for their own protection.

Some of General DeWitt’s staff had read Dane’s report on Japanese fanaticism and, to his dismay, it was being used as another excuse to round up the unreasonable Japs as opposed to more reasonable Germans and Italians.

“What are you thinking, Commander?” asked Cullen.

“That I should go back to base, write a little report about how I spent my day, and then go get a drink.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Cullen.

Perhaps a drink would help him to not wonder what might be happening to Amanda. Maybe he would phone his nephew and take him up on the invitation to see how the other half lived just a few miles up the coast.

Their first day sailing out of Oahu, they’d sighted a number of small craft like theirs, but nobody made any attempt at contact. Were these others trying to flee, or were they fishermen busy at work, or perhaps they were smugglers? Neither Amanda nor the others cared—they just kept their distance, and the other vessels did as well. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone, was the clear message.

A few hours later, just before nightfall and what they hoped would be the safety of darkness, they saw a Japanese cruiser on the horizon. They quickly dropped their sail in hopes that they wouldn’t be spotted. They were, and the cruiser headed their way, even firing a shell that landed a few hundred yards away when they wouldn’t follow the order to heave to. Mack handed them each a gun and the message was clear—use it on yourself. Don’t become toys for the Japanese Navy to play with, torment, and then throw overboard to the sharks. They took the guns and looked at each other, was this the way their lives were going to end?

To their astonishment and relief, the enemy ship suddenly turned and raced away. “I guess they found something more important than us,” Mack said as he collected the weapons. The cruiser fired a second shell, apparently just for spite, and it raised a giant splash a ways away from them. There was no third shell and Amanda imagined the Japanese officers on the bridge of the ship laughing at the silly sailboat whose occupants they’d just terrified.

Late in the second day, they were practically alone in the vast sea. The other small boats had scattered and were out of sight, although a few were doubtless attempting the same trip to California. The food riots and the menace of the Japanese Navy were too much, as it had been for them.

The weather remained warm and good, with largely clear skies. The seas were calm and the catamaran clipped along, eating up miles and easily climbing over the gentle swells. If it wasn’t so deadly serious and their journey just beginning, it would be pleasant.

“Don’t get used to this happy little vacation,” Mack warned. “The ocean can turn into a monster in a heartbeat.”

Amanda agreed. It was noted that this was the first time that the catamaran with the girls sailing it had ever been out of sight of land. It was a profound and disconcerting feeling and one that was not at all pleasant.

Seasickness was not that much of a problem, although Grace had spent a little time sending her meals into the briny deep before managing to shake it off. They were just too busy sailing the catamaran to indulge in the luxury of being sick. Even though the weather was calm, at least two of them were alert at all times.

When there was time, Amanda couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d actually killed Mickey, the man she’d shot. If so, what did she truly think about it? He and the other one had been trying to rape her friends and steal the boat, leaving them stranded in Hawaii. Desperate times called for desperate measures, didn’t they? And what she had done was self-defense, wasn’t it?