The Tango War Read online

  The problem the Special Division faced was grave. More prisoners were urgently needed to exchange for American prisoners under Japanese control. But the Quiet Passages operation would not go swiftly. Transport was in short supply because ships were in demand for the war effort. Staff labored over time-consuming interchanges with the Japanese, who wanted to be sure certain nationals were included on the prisoner exchange lists, just as Washington did. Overlapping duties with other government agencies and rivalries that went with them troubled the program. Even at its smoothest, the Quiet Passages were extremely complex, involving coordination of eighteen different agencies, from Customs to the Foreign Funds Control Office, and sometimes the Air Transport Command. Two exchanges involving thousands were successfully completed by 1943; for the rest of the war, the Special Problems Division struggled to arrange more. Meanwhile, side by side with some Japanese American detainees from the United States, the men, women, and children from Latin America had to make a life within the fenced perimeter of Crystal City.

  The sun shines practically every day of the year.

  —NARRATOR, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FILM, 1945, ON THE ALIEN ENEMY DETENTION FACILITY, CRYSTAL CITY, TEXAS

  Ironically, although a prison, Crystal City offered bright possibilities for the young, easing the trauma of being torn from home. Kazushige Naganuma enjoyed his job delivering blocks of ice. “If I had said it to my father at the time, he would have flattened me, but for me it was a paradise.” After the anti-Japanese riots of 1940 in Peru, the Naganumas kept their children home in an excess of caution, “cooped up with the cook and the nanny,” as Kazushige said. At Crystal City, things were different.

  The Naganuma boys attended a school taught in Japanese. At first, the language switch was difficult for children who spoke mostly Spanish, but they adjusted; many who were in the camp for being “Japanese” first learned the language at Crystal City. There was a school for German speakers, which Starr and Werner Gurcke’s eldest daughter Heidi attended, and English-curriculum grammar and high schools accredited by the State of Texas for Japanese American youth, its teachers inmates from Hawaii. There were sports teams and cheerleaders, Boy Scouts and mimeographed school newspapers.

  “Sugar cane and grapefruit grew wild, so I would grab a fruit from a tree in the grove or broke off a stick of sugarcane,” said Kazuharu Naganuma.

  During summers the temperature could hit 115 degrees, and parents had to wrap protective cloths around iron bedframes lest children burn themselves. But everyone could cool off together in a 250-foot-wide circular pool built by the prisoners on a swamp drained and cleared of snakes. A German internee surveyed the site and an Italian Honduran inmate, the civil engineer Elmo Gaetano Zannoni, designed the pool; camp administrators emphasized its use as an irrigation reservoir for fruit trees when requesting construction funds from the INS. Youngsters like the Naganuma brothers roamed as they wished, as long as they did not approach the dreaded fence. Elena Maoki remembered with warmth that the camp provided “everything for children,” even judo classes and sumo wrestling.

  Under the surface, however, the knowledge that they were prisoners never left inmates, even the young. “I was indifferent to the fence,” Libia Maoki said, but the guards were another matter. “The machine guns pointing at us scared me.” Libia’s older sister Blanca knew their lives were no longer their own. “Before, we were more or less on top of the world, but at this point we just had to bow to everyone, it seemed.” In Peru, their father’s business had flourished; they had household help and a driver. Now their extended family was in line to be exchanged for prisoners held by the Japanese—to go to Japan, where they had never lived.

  For young and old, life in Crystal City held elements of the surreal. Latin American youngsters and mixed Japanese Peruvian couples spoke Spanish among themselves, but the Japanese school, with its courses and events in Japanese history and customs, was aimed at preparing inmates for life in Japan. To call their looming journey “repatriation” was to use the word in an Orwellian way—many were slated to go to a country they had never known or had purposely left decades before to settle in the Americas. Some had brought mementos of their Catholic faith from their Latin American homes (Libia Maoki carried a small crucifix). But the presence of numerous Buddhist clergy set the religious tone for the “Japanese” inmates. Because they were more likely than Japanese Christians to maintain the language, perform traditional rituals, and stay connected with events in Japan, Buddhists were considered a risk to the United States. After Pearl Harbor, when the FBI listed groups deserving scrutiny with the designations “A,” “B,” or “C,” with “A”—with which Buddhists were labeled—highest risk, Buddhist clergy were rated “A1,” the label for the most urgent threat to national security.

  The camp at Crystal City held four thousand captives in 1944. Awareness that the Japanese were watching—the reciprocity principle—and the international mandates helped to ensure decent conditions. International Red Cross observers, charged with monitoring concentration camps in many countries during the war, visited often. And inmates generally encountered goodwill among camp administrators and civilian employees. If they wished, men and women could work up to eight hours a day at ten cents an hour. Each group—German, Latin American Japanese, American Japanese, and the few Italians—produced its own newspaper and elected its own “council” to represent it before camp authorities.

  At her house in Santa Cruz, California, Starr and Werner Gurcke’s daughter Heidi Gurcke Donald showed me “coins” of pressed paper used as scrip—they looked like casino tokens—to pay captives like her father, who worked in the mattress-making shop and the camp maintenance department. In a camp store, special food items and other products were available for the scrip. Besides pay for jobs, adults received $5.25 a month, children age six to thirteen $4.00, and even two- to five-year-olds received an allowance worth $1.25. A photo from Crystal City showed Starr and Werner, with tight smiles, holding the girls in their pinafores, their shiny blonde hair bobbed alike.

  There were not enough jobs to keep everyone busy, but parents did not burden their children with adult worries. “What it seemed everyone expressed was gaman,” Kazumu Naganuma said, using a Japanese term for dignified forbearance in the face of what is nearly unbearable. “Be patient, do the best with what you’ve got.”

  Nevertheless, many men especially became downhearted with what Germans called Gitterkrankheit, fence sickness. Some showed signs of depression. Their property had been confiscated, their assets were frozen if not gone completely, their sentences had no fixed end. Being captive inside the fence undermined a man’s status as the head of the family. Children wondered what adults had done wrong to land them in a desert prison, treated like criminals. A Department of Justice film meant to showcase the place as a model camp features an attendant in white pushing a man in a wheelchair as the narrator says, “Ills were often imaginary, traced to detention, the fence, the loss of freedom.”

  The camp hospital—doctors were inmates—treated “malaise” and multiple cases of “threatened abortions.” Some suicide-watch reports were recorded, including on two Japanese Peruvian mothers whose daughters, ages thirteen and eleven, drowned in a tragic accident in the pool.

  In 1993, when Kashiro Hayashi was ninety-eight, he told his son Thomas that he still remembered the sensation of constant oppression, relieved only when he carried the dead on burial detail. Inmates bore coffins to a cemetery outside the fence. “It’s not good to leave with a dead person and feel free,” Hayashi told his son. “But that feeling of freedom is something I could never forget.”

  And there were shadows of the greater conflict that fell over Crystal City. Many inmates like the Gurckes steered clear of Germans who were obviously pro-Nazi, like Fritz Kuhn, called “the most infamous Nazi in the world,” the former strutting leader of the German American Bund. At the Stringtown, Oklahoma, camp, the first arrivals—mostly hard-core Hitler sympathizers—elected a Nazi from Costa
Rica, Ingo Kalinowski, as their spokesman, and Kalinowski hoarded Red Cross packages from Germany for his friends. In some camps, fights broke out between the minority pro-Nazi populations—estimates range from 3 to 15 percent of German prisoners—and others.

  Jews—they numbered about eighty from Latin America in various camps—suffered “extreme mental anguish,” as William Heinemann, a German Jew arrested in Panama and sent to Stringtown, put it. The prisoner exchanges were not always voluntary; Jews feared they might be traded for American prisoners of war and sent to German death camps. To protect them from Nazi sympathizers, authorities eventually transferred Jews who felt threatened to a special camp in Algiers, Louisiana.

  * * *

  After the war, some captives remained at Crystal City for more than two years; the bureaucracy to free them worked more slowly than the program that had imprisoned them. Seabrook Farms, a company that produced frozen and canned vegetables, offered work to inmates in its New Jersey installations for twelve-hour shifts at fifty cents an hour (thirty-five cents for women) at a time when military prisoners of war on private contracts received eighty cents an hour and rations. The inmates from Crystal City were given one day off every two weeks, no sick leave, no paid holidays. “Even for that time, these working conditions were considered to be severe,” wrote Seiichi Higashide, who took a Seabrook job along with his wife and two hundred other inmates paroled to work in the plant. They replaced German prisoners of war. The job did not constitute bondage, but descriptions portray a life of unrelenting toil, unlikely to draw anyone but the desperate who sought escape from the place they lived as prisoners.

  Others were able to obtain sponsors that allowed them to live elsewhere in the United States on parole, as long as they reported regularly to local authorities. For some the requirement lasted into the late 1940s. A Shinto priest and community leader in San Francisco sponsored the Naganuma family. The brothers, speaking English with a Spanish accent and looking Japanese, said new friends doubted their story when they shared it. “They would say, ‘That could not have happened—how could they get away with it?’” said Kazumu Naganuma. “People don’t believe it happened, it’s not in the books.”

  From inside Crystal City, or later on “parole,” some began the difficult pursuit to obtain legal status in the United States, even as they felt they were not wanted. In a scenario that resonates with Kafkaesque absurdity, U.S. authorities officially regarded the captives as illegal aliens for having entered the United States without visas or documents.

  Some inmates took a different tack. Twenty-four Germans from Latin America launched a legal challenge to avoid being forcibly removed to the ruins of the Reich. The lawsuit in June 1945 argued that they were not subject to the removal measure as enemy aliens since the United States was no longer at war. They lost the case.

  In 1945, most Peruvian Japanese wanted to return to their homes, but Lima, having partially cleansed itself of an unwanted minority, refused to take them back. And with homes and livelihoods gone they had little to go back to. Long deprived of radios and newspapers from outside, they generally knew only that the war was over. Hundreds volunteered for, or passively accepted, deportation to Japan, where they hoped to find extended families.

  On December 11, the SS Matsonia carried twenty-four hundred passengers to Japan, including six hundred Japanese Peruvians from Crystal City. Only on arrival at the port of Yokosuka in Tokyo Bay did they truly understand that Japan had lost the war. Boatmen on sampans called out begging for fruit or cigarettes. On the dock, rows of women dressed in white robes bowed continuously while crying “Sumimasen”—“I’m so sorry”—in apology to the arriving passengers they saw as compatriots. That night in a temporary barracks, where dead bodies were stacked in one corner—there was no gas for vehicles to take them away—shaken families planned trips to towns where they thought they might be taken in. Carmen Higa Mochizuki, a young teenager from Peru who didn’t speak Japanese, watched her mother become virtually enslaved by resentful relatives on Okinawa. The island was a vast, wasted tract following the fighting earlier in the year, when almost half the population of three hundred thousand died.

  Libia Maoki’s family narrowly escaped the voyage to Japan when her father Victor was hospitalized with severe gout. However, the family’s adoptive daughter and her husband, their toddler and newborn baby—the baby was a Texan, like 250 others born in Crystal City—did sail. Weeks later the daughter wrote to say that she had to comb fields for wild grasses to boil for food. The infant died, she said, from hunger.

  * * *

  The kidnap program leaves a legacy of questions about the behavior of a democracy in war. When and for how long can an authority deprive people of liberty without trial, let alone without charges? What right does a government have to reach outside its borders to snatch putative enemies? What role do race and other kinds of prejudice play in determining who is perceived as the enemy? The FBI would never disclose the evidence behind a prisoner’s capture, so a captive could not face his accuser or offer a defense.

  Some of the deepest legacies of the program are carried in the minds and hearts of those who lived through them. This personal legacy will die with the program’s survivors, but while they are alive it often continues to simmer, or burn in their thoughts; each in his or her own way is affected every day by its consequences. Let one story stand for the rest.

  When Chuhei Shimomura sailed away from Callao in 1943, his wife Victoria searched for something comforting to say to her children through her tears. “Your father is leaving. He will come back to you,” she said. There was truth, and no truth at all, in her words.

  A month later Chuhei wrote from Panama; in 2016, his son Carlos showed me the letter at his house in Callao. The envelope was stamped “Detained Alien” and “Examined.” Inside, thin paper, elegant Spanish script. “How was my daughter’s birthday? I was holding her photo and crying all through the night.”

  Carlos and his sister Flor de Maria, both now in their late seventies, spent hours showing me family photos and letters like the one from Panama. Carlos, an engineer specializing in fisheries, stood more than he sat, sometimes going to a shelf to pull out a folder or reaching over to the computer keyboard to bring up an image. Flor de Maria, recently retired from teaching Spanish literature at the National University of San Marcos, the oldest (established 1551) in the continental Americas, was quicker to laugh or sigh than her brother; she was a warm presence. I had met with them in the café at the Peruvian Japanese Cultural Center in downtown Lima, where they insisted I come to Carlos’s house. His SUV possessed motion sensors all around that performed loudly in the chaotic Lima traffic. It was a relief to reach the home in a quiet neighborhood, to enter past a pond with a live turtle and climb narrow stairs to the orderly office.

  A photo of their mother Victoria as a lovely young woman reflected her Japanese and Peruvian parentage. On Chuhei’s birthday in 1937, Victoria presented him with a ring engraved on its face with his initials entwined, CS. The couple lived happily in Callao, where Chuhei’s small import business grew until it appeared on the blacklist in 1942.

  He resigned himself to capture—he had seen it happen to other Peruvian Japanese comerciantes whose businesses appeared on the list. On the day he expected the detectives, Chuhei Shimomura prepared a small suitcase and sat down to wait.

  “He did not hide,” Flor de Maria said, wonder still in her voice.

  “He was samurai,” said Carlos, referring to the onetime military aristocracy of Japan that was effectively gone by the 1870s, before his father was born. Carlos showed me his own business card, printed with a flowerlike symbol of samurai heritage.

  Brother and sister told their story tag-team style, each filling in details. “These things should not be kept hidden, they have to be understood,” said Flor, placing more letters before me. From Camp Kenedy, Chuhei wrote to his wife, “What will be the future for you and for my children?”

  Chuhei wanted to request famil
y unification, possible through the Spanish diplomatic mission, but Victoria’s mother had taken in the family and persuaded her that a concentration camp was no place for small children. U.S. authorities ordered Chuhei sent to Japan in exchange for an American prisoner. Victoria sent him a black-and-white studio photo. Before a wall painted to look like a refined drawing room, she sits gazing into the camera, lush black hair framing her face. She is wearing pearls and a dress coat, holding gloves and a purse on her lap, ankles crossed demurely above open-toed high heels. Carlos stands looking unsure, one hand holding his mother’s. Flor de Maria stares from under a cloth bonnet, a small bag on a shoulder strap draped grown-up style across her coat.

  “This is the last letter I shall write on this voyage,” wrote Chuhei on October 21, 1943, aboard the MS Gripsholm, a Swedish ocean liner chartered by the U.S. Special War Problems Division. The ship had entered the port of Goa, India, where the exchange would take place, and he expected to be boarded on a Japanese ship bound for Yokohama. “Take care of your health. Don’t take on heavy work. The war will not last long.”

  When time passed with no news, mother and children frequented the U.S. Embassy. “They treated us with indifference, as if to say, ‘How annoying, how tiresome these people are,’” said Flor de Maria. “Finally, someone said, ‘Señora, I’m sorry, your husband died in the war.’”

  As adolescents, Carlos and Flor de Maria tutored other students to help their mother. Victoria remarried, but the man she hoped might provide support treated her badly, and they parted. “I heard her crying at night,” said Flor.

  In 1976, when Carlos and Flor de Maria were in their late thirties and Victoria past middle age, a bombshell fell on their lives. In the course of Carlos Shimomura’s work at a government ministry, a businessman recognized his surname. He said he had known Carlos’s father in Peru before the war, and knew him now in Japan. Carlos dined with the businessman at a Lima restaurant, “and for the first time in my life, I ate Japanese food.” Soon a package arrived with a letter in his father’s unmistakable Spanish script.