“No one thinks I’m beautiful here,” Emi said plainly, flipping over onto her back and kicking off her stiff school shoes. “In Europe we were interesting. The Japanese family. People wanted to get to know me, would seek me out at school. Here, everyone speaks to me with caution. First they’re skeptical, amazed that I can speak English. Then their eyes follow me around the restaurant, or wherever I am, like I’m some exotic bird they’ve never seen before. I can tell they don’t know what to make of me and their conclusion is mostly the same. They don’t want to speak to me, but if I stay quiet and try to blend into the wallpaper, they won’t talk about me.”
“You’re exaggerating as usual,” said Keiko, but Emi could tell by her voice that she was experiencing similar reactions from the Americans. They had previously talked about the stares they had received, the comments, though Keiko was hesitant to ever speak ill of anyone, even strangers. But she had been willing to talk about her shock at the treatment of Negroes in America. “They hate them,” she’d said to Emi one night when they’d returned from a family dinner in a hotel and seen a young Negro man berated by a white woman outside the restaurant, slapped across the face in the middle of the sidewalk. “They forced them into this country and yet despise them for still being here. They like their dogs better. Even the ugly dogs.”
Emi had agreed, as shocked as her mother was at the racial divides in America. “A bit like us and the Koreans,” Emi pointed out.
“Oh no, Emi, I don’t think so,” Keiko had replied, refusing to admit that the Japanese had their own brand of bigotry. “Besides, it’s not like that in the diplomatic community. We are open-minded, curious people. Educated. Especially the wives,” she said smiling.
“But I’m not in the diplomatic community,” Emi reminded her. “I’m at a small school in Maryland with people who have known each other since they were babies. Maybe it would be different if we lived in California, where there are many more Japanese. Erika Adachi said it was much better there. They used to live in Los Angeles—she and her American mother—while Takeo was at the consulate.”
“You are almost done with school, Emiko, for good. And we are not going to California,” said Keiko. She folded one of Emi’s dresses and sat on her bed, too. “I admit, sometimes I do wish your amah Megumi was still with us. More for my sake than yours. Her English was poor but she was so tough. Stubborn, too. I think she’d do much better with the stares and the questions than I do.”
Megumi had sailed back to northern Japan before the family left for Washington in 1939. In America, the diplomatic corps did not employ amahs as they did in other countries, and Emi had said goodbye to hers tearfully, knowing that at seventeen, she was too old for one anyway, but not wanting to let her companion go.
“She must have given you your toughness,” said Keiko. “Because despite your hesitation to go out and get to know the city, your annoyance with strangers’ behavior toward you, you’re the strongest person I know. Please try to remain that way.”
“Okay, Mama,” said Emi putting away her latest letter from Leo, making sure the exotic stamps weren’t peeling off the envelope. She folded it and placed it at the corner of the bed, running her hands over the return address. “I promise I’ll leave the house more.”
Emi did start to venture out with more frequency after the winter of 1940 melted away, writing to Leo about the things she liked about Washington—the low marble buildings, the streets inspired by European grids, the humidity that reminded her of Tokyo weather. Sometimes they wrote to each other of war, of their fears about what was happening in Vienna, but they’d agreed to focus mostly on the good in their lives.
There was far more good for Emi than Leo in 1940, especially after she turned eighteen and graduated from high school that spring, but when Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in September, Emi couldn’t help but write to Leo expressing her shame. He dismissed it as bad judgment on the part of the Japanese, and they tried to turn their correspondence back to their positive tone, but so much more was to come.
Pearl Harbor.
The attack on Hawaii in December 1941 changed the lives of every American with Japanese ancestry. But first, it was the Japanese diplomats who were zeroed in on for dismissal.
Emi was too distraught to write to Leo about what was happening to them, but he still wrote to her, knowing to send his letter to her father at the Japanese Embassy instead of to their home. In the last letter Emi received from Leo, he wrote, “You have nothing to do with them. To me, you are still the good that exists in the world.”
But the American people, especially President Roosevelt, did not agree. After Pearl Harbor, the diplomats’ families were shut inside their apartments, while the men were at the embassy trying to understand their new position, living and working in an enemy nation.
“They’ll treat us well,” Keiko assured Emi the first night they spent alone. Emi, stunned and nearly silent since the news of the attack broke, was sharing her mother’s bed, and trying to understand why Japan had made such a foolish choice. She knew quite a bit about Japan’s history with America, as her father talked about little else since moving to Washington. She knew the Americans did not approve of Japan’s recent occupation of southern Indochina, putting massive pressure on the Japanese to pull out. Japan had refused and the United States had frozen its oil exports. But Japan had not relented, moving deeper into Southeast Asia, occupying Saigon. Even with what she knew about the different power struggles, what she was most desperate to know was if her father had been aware in advance that the Japanese military was going to attack Pearl Harbor. Did he know before the bombs hit how much their lives—and the world—were about to change?
She could tell that her mother was thinking the same thing. “Try to get some sleep,” she said, holding Emi close to her, curled up like they used to years ago, before Emi was a head taller. “No one will hurt us. They have to treat us well. They want to get their American diplomats out of Japan—alive—as badly as they want to send us back.”
“What does a bomb do to you?” Emi asked, trying not to shake in her mother’s arms. “How do you die? Do you explode? Are you burned alive? Is it instant? Or does your body melt from the heat, your organs slowly giving out one by one?”
“I don’t know,” said Keiko, stroking Emi’s hand. “It can’t be good, however it is. Let’s just pray for the souls of the dead and hope that the Japanese are right. That there is an important reason behind the bombs and gunfire.”