“The diplomats have to walk? Past all those people?” Emi asked her mother incredulously.
“Emiko, we are being interned! The Americans are not going to send Rolls-Royces for the men,” one of the Japanese wives said to Emi. She started to laugh until her eyes were watering, the tears moving straight down her face until they got trapped in her waxy red lipstick. “I’m sorry,” she said, waving her hand in front of her mouth. “I’m just very anxious. I don’t mean to bark at you.”
Her mother put her hand on Emi’s back reassuringly. “They’ll be fine,” she said, as they all tried to carry their luggage and themselves off the train.
As the women and children loaded into the cars, they could see a large group had indeed gathered to watch them, these far less sophisticated in appearance than the Washingtonians. They were in southern, rural America and that alone scared Emi. “Not again,” she grumbled to her mother as she waited to climb into a car with her. “The people in Washington already made it perfectly clear that it’s a miracle I can see out of the slits in my face. I don’t need to hear it twice.”
“Do not complain,” said her mother. “In fact, do not say another thing until we are locked in a room together inside the hotel. No sound at all.”
“The pretty ones are always obstinate,” said an older woman who was already in the backseat.
Emi looked at them both and frowned. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see another car idling with the back door open. The three oldest Shiga children were crammed inside. “I’ll ride with the Shigas,” Emi said turning around, squeezing herself into the backseat with them. Unlike Emi, the Shiga children had never lived in Japan before. Their mother was Canadian and they had spent most of their short lives following their father on postings or in Ottawa with their mother.
“You don’t fit, Emiko Kato,” said Mirai Shiga, the youngest, who had inherited her mother’s Canadian diction and curly hair.
Emi pulled her onto her lap, closed the door, and opened the window, resting Mirai’s arm on the ledge.
“Better now?” she asked the little girl.
“Better,” said Mirai, leaning back comfortably against Emi’s long frame.
The car was in a line, waiting for the others to start driving, and Mirai was starting to wiggle on Emi’s lap.
“You’re moving because you’re freezing,” her sister Anna said to her, pointing at the open window. “Close it before we all die.”
“No,” said Mirai stubbornly, letting her arm dangle out of it as the car finally roared off.
Emi and the Shiga children all looked straight ahead out of instinct as they drove close to the crowd of townspeople. Even though Mirai was just five years old, she was already trained to act with decorum when insults were being fired at you.
“Don’t worry,” said Emi as the car puttered slowly in line with the others. “They’re all staying quiet. Not like in Washington.”
But just as Emi finished her sentence, she felt something small and sharp hit her neck. She put her hand to it, wondering if something in the car had stabbed her, perhaps a piece of metal in the seat.
“Ow!” Mirai suddenly screamed, wrestling herself off Emi’s lap and falling on her older sister. Emi felt another sting and then another before she had the sense to roll the window up. Right next to her on the seat was a piece of gravel. Someone in the silent crowd was pelting them with it.
“What was that?” asked Anna, looking at her little sister.
“I don’t know,” said Emi, answering for her. “It’s the wild countryside out here. Just things flying through the air. Don’t worry. The window’s closed now.”
Mirai climbed back into Emi’s lap. A small red mark on her cheek started to show and she rubbed it against Emi’s coat. “I don’t like the countryside,” she said, putting her thumb in her mouth.
“Me neither,” said Emi, relaxing only when the crowd was far behind them.
“Are you scared to go to Japan?” Mirai asked Emi as the beautiful, sprawling brick hotel came into view. It had several buildings attached together, the largest a ten-story tower dotted with loggias, all brick with white accents, so thick and shiny that they looked frosted on. It looked far better than the prison Emi had imagined.
“No, not scared,” said Emi, hugging her. “It’s home to me. I just wish we were going back under different circumstances.”
“Are you Japanese? I thought you were an English like our auntie. You talk like an English,” said Mirai.
“And you speak like a Canadian. It’s the curse of the diplomat’s child,” said Emi, pointing to the hotel. “In Berlin I knew a Japanese woman who learned English in Australia and she sounded quite wild. So sounding British, or Canadian, isn’t so bad.”
“My Japanese is bad,” said Mirai.
“No it’s not,” said Emi, who had heard her speak Japanese when they’d been living in the embassy together. “And you’ll improve once we’re all over there.”
The Japanese diplomats and their families stayed at the Homestead for four months, eating well and living in peace. Though there was hardly any school for the children, and all their parents’ bank accounts were frozen, making money an eventual problem, they were allowed to move around the grounds with relative freedom. Emi and the other young people took advantage of their isolation and went on snowy hikes, explored the old halls, and went swimming in the enormous swimming pool as soon as it was warm enough. Emi was even allowed to play the hotel’s piano, something she did on a near-daily basis.
The first night she had played, Ambassador Nomura himself had sat to listen, swaying gently to the Debussy piece and then requesting some American jazz.
“You play incredibly well,” the ambassador had said when she was done. “No, that’s an understatement. You play like a professional musician.”
Emi thanked him politely before leaving him in the company of her father.
As Emi had hoped, her father had promised her that he, and even the ambassador, had not known that Japan was planning to attack Pearl Harbor before it happened. It came as an enormous shock to them, as Ambassador Nomura had been trying desperately to negotiate with the Americans, to keep the two countries from going to war with each other. “Sadly, diplomats do not have as much sway as we think,” said Norio to his relieved daughter.
After months of their Virginia hotel life, the diplomatic community was finally told that they had a sail date. They would leave for Japan on June 10, 1942. But before they did, they were all being moved to yet another luxury resort, where the German diplomatic community had been housed, the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
The hotel in West Virginia was much like the one in Virginia, sprawling, elegant, historic, and very isolated. High in the Allegheny Mountains, the resort, like the last one, originally beckoned visitors to its hot springs.