“Yes, I do. You teach California history; you ought to know something about them.”
“Of course I know something about them.” Now he sounded indignant, as if I had impugned his credentials as a teacher. “I know quite a bit about them, as a matter of fact.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. I once wrote a paper on the wartime evacuation of Japanese-Americans. A fascinating study, from the historical point of view.”
“Sure. Unless you happened to be in one of the camps.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Tragic. Very tragic. Families uprooted, stripped of their possessions, shunted off to live in dreary tar-paper barracks behind barbed-wire fences.” He shook his head. “Tragic,” he said again, and he seemed to mean it.
I started to say something, but Mixer wasn’t finished yet. He seemed to be warming to the subject. “Politics, war-induced hysteria, racism-those were the three principle reasons behind the decision to relocate. The idea that all the Nisei and Issei in California were potential spies and saboteurs is ridiculous. Did the government decide to imprison American citizens of German or Italian descent? Of course not; they were white. Nor was there any mass evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry in the Hawaiian Islands, even though more of them lived there than here on the West Coast: 157,000 as compared to 120,000. What the Hawaiians did was to round up known dissidents and ship them to the mainland camps-a total of less than a thousand, or a mere one percent of the adult Japanese population. Were you aware of that?”
“No,” I said, “I wasn’t.”
“A gross miscarriage of justice,” Mixer said, and nodded his head emphatically.
“How many camps were there altogether?”
“Ten. Two in California, two in Arizona, two in Arkansas, and one each in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.”
“The one I’m interested in was a California camp-Tule Lake.”
“The California camps were the worst,” Mixer said. “Tule Lake and Manzanar-woeful places. Barracks partitioned into one-room apartments twenty by twenty-five feet, each one occupied by eight to ten people. No furniture; just Army cots and bed ticking. Inadequate sanitation facilities, inadequate hospital facilities; insuffient food in most camps. And the allowances the people were given… my God! Eight dollars a month for unskilled labor, twelve dollars for skilled labor, sixteen to nineteen dollars for professional work. And even then, the people didn’t start receiving their money until the War Relocation Board took control of the camps in the summer of 1942, three months after the first evacuation orders came out of Washington.”
Pretty grim stuff. I remembered feeling sympathy for the Japanese-Americans when it was happening; my family and a Nisei family had been friendly in the Noe Valley district where I grew up. But I’d forgotten about their plight as time passed, ignored the suffering and the injustice. Too many others had forgotten and ignored too, without any feeling of shame or culpability. It was only in recent years that some effort at reparation had been made-too little, too late, to too few of the survivors.
I said, “Tell me about Tule Lake. What kind of camp was it?”
“The worst of them,” Mixer said. “Isolated, with its own irrigated farm land so that it was self-supporting; but there were sixteen thousand people jammed into it, an uneasy mix of Pacific Coast farm workers and their families and recalcitrants from other camps and from Hawaii. It was also the official ‘Segregation Center,’ where the small percentage of Issei who requested repatriation to Japan and Nisei who renounced their American citizenship were sent.”
“It sounds pretty woeful, all right.”
“Yes. Boredom, fear, distrust, suspicion, greed-those were the everyday elements of life at Tule Lake.”
“Was there much crime, then?”
“My God, yes. Graft, theft, rape, assault, two murders. Not to mention countless disturbances. Members of the Hokoku Seinen Dan — young men who advocated renunciation and repatriation-used to blow bugles early in the morning and hold marches and generally terrorize the peaceful residents.”
I remember old Charley Takeuchi telling me that Kazuo Hama had blown bugles before dawn. I asked Mixer, “Was it only the Hokoku members who blew horns?”
“No. Other young men did it too.”
So Kazuo Hama may or may not have been a dissident during his stay at Tule Lake; ditto Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka. But even if they had been dissidents, I couldn’t see any connection between that and their being killed forty years later; or between that and their jewelry being sent to Haruko Gage.
“Those two camp murders you mentioned,” I said. “Were they both solved?”
“One was. The other, no.”
“Who was the victim of the unsolved one?”
“The general manager of the camp cooperative, a man named… I believe it was Noma, Takeo Noma. He was stabbed to death. The theory at the time, which seems probable, is that he was killed because he was an inu.”
“What’s an inu? ”
“Literally, the word means dog. In the camps it meant an informer, a cheat, a traitor. Noma was hated by nearly everyone at Tule Lake; they considered his death a blessing.”
“There were no leads to who killed him?”
“Several leads. And several men were put into the stockade-the probable killers, in fact. But none was ever indicted; the evidence was too circumstantial.”
“I don’t suppose you remember the names of those men?”
“Not offhand. Do you want me to look them up?”
“If you can do it here and now.”
He nodded, got out of his chair and went to one of the wall shelves and began rummaging through the books there. He picked one out and thumbed through it; put it back and found another and thumbed through that until he located the list of names. He read them off to me, close to a dozen of them.
No Hama. No Tamura. No Masaoka. No Wakasa. And no Fujita.
Zip.
Mixer put the book away, adjusted his mauve jacket and his yellow shirt cuffs in a way that suggested a fox preening itself, and made a small production out of consulting his watch. “Is there anything else you want to know?” he said. “I have an eleven o’clock class.”
“That should do it.”
“Should I expect you to bother me again?”
“Why? Don’t you like my company?”
“Frankly, no.” The persecuted look came back into his eyes. “I’m a peaceful man. I hate violence.”
“I don’t remember getting violent with you.”
“You would have if I hadn’t told you what you wanted to know.”
“Well, you know how it is with us private eyes,” I said. “We like to talk tough and beat up on people once in a while. Just so we don’t get rusty.”
He looked at me as if he were afraid I might jump him after all. “I’m a peaceful man,” he said again.
“Sure you are. A lover, not a fighter.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that.”
“Yes you do.” I moved over to the door and unlocked it and opened it up. “Tell Darlene her father’s looking forward to those home movies you took the other day.”
“What?” he said. “ What?”
I went out and shut the door softly behind me.
There were public telephone booths on the main floor of Batmale Hall, and I used one of them to look up the number of the Slim-Taper Shirt Company and then to dial it. Somebody at Slim-Taper went and got Eberhardt for me, but the three of us might have saved the effort it took. Jack Logan had been up to his ears in a drug-related triple homicide in Visitacion Valley, Eberhardt said, and not inclined to spend any time at all checking out either jewelry or deaths in Princeton and Petaluma. Besides, the Tamura killing was McFate’s case-we should go talk to McFate.
Yeah.
I told Eberhardt I would see him later and rang off. It was all up to me now, like it or not.
