The Japanese have a word for living with things that can't be changed, accepting what cannot be helped: shikataganai.
That is how my Japanese American father, Shigemitsu Nakashima, coped with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war that followed.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Shigemitsu Nakashima saw the smoke rising at Pearl Harbor from his Honolulu home. He overcame prejudice against Japanese Americans to serve in the Army Air Forces.
(Jeff Widener - The Washington Post)
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Or at least that is how he says he coped.
Dec. 7, 1941, dawned clear in Honolulu. It was a Sunday, and my father -- Shig, as everyone called him -- was a sophomore at the University of Hawaii, studying to be a teacher. He was having his usual breakfast of miso soup, fish and rice.
The next day, Monday, would be his 20th birthday. He had a lot on his mind. He was the only one in his family to go to college, and he wanted to make his parents proud by doing well. He also knew that international tensions were high. In the Hawaii Hochi, the English- and Japanese-language newspaper his father subscribed to, he had read about the Japanese invasion of China and about U.S. efforts to contain the Japanese.
There he sat at a table in the large, simple kitchen of his parents' house -- a shack, really -- nestled in the middle of a taro patch with a corrugated tin roof and five rooms for seven brothers. It was about 8 o'clock. He looked out the window and heard explosions in the distance. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. He saw black puffs of smoke.
He climbed out the window and up to the roof to get a better view. Pearl Harbor, about five miles away, was black with smoke. Single-engine planes flew low overhead. Looking up, he saw on the underside of the planes' wings a red circle, the symbol of the rising sun.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, commentators made inevitable references to Pearl Harbor. As the 60th anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack approached, I wondered whether my father saw any parallel with the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or in the war against al Qaeda.
No, no, he protested, in what became a series of evening phone calls -- Hawaii is six time zones behind the East Coast. "In this war here, you're fighting a very shadowy enemy," he said. "Whereas in 1941, you knew who the enemy was. It had a return address."
On that morning in 1941, Shig heard radio reports of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor. U.S. antiaircraft fire was aimed at Japanese planes, but missed, instead landing on the streets of Honolulu, injuring and killing civilians.
"I was fascinated," he said, "yet really scared."
That day, my father's family instantly became suspect -- people who looked like the enemy, spoke its language, shared its culture.
My grandfather Mokuta Nakashima had come to Hawaii in 1910 from Tamana-gun, a farming region on Kyushu, Japan's southernmost island. He took a "picture bride," a young woman named Sueka Hirano, who, having been introduced to Mokuta in a transpacific photo exchange, agreed to leave Tamana-gun to marry him. In Hawaii, Sueka bore seven sons, who helped in the truck garden, whose vegetables and flowers provided the family's income. The sons were nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans. Though Hawaii was an American territory, U.S. law barred Mokuta and Sueka from becoming citizens.
"The implications were very clear to me, what this meant to us as nisei, what we were in for," my father said. "We would be suspected because we looked like the enemy."
Despite these fears, he knew what he had to do. A member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, he reported the next day, his birthday, to the National Guard armory. He and other ROTC members, a good number of them Japanese Americans, became soldiers in the Territorial Guard and moved into the armory across from Iolani Palace, then the site of the territorial legislature.
One day, two months after the attack, Guard commanders confiscated the rifles of the nisei soldiers and discharged them. "We don't need you," they said.
"The motive was clear," my father recalled. "We could not be trusted."
I asked why this had happened. He replied with an account that is no doubt based in fact, but with a gloss that reveals how my father and his buddies felt like enemy aliens.
"When all these soldiers were shipped to Hawaii from the mainland, they'd arrive at the pier and they'd find these nisei, these Japanese-looking soldiers, guarding the pier, and they thought, 'Japan was already taking over.' There was a ruckus made about all the Japanese. . . . So it wasn't long before they kicked out all the nisei."
The bitterness is subtle, beneath the surface. My father was reared within the Japanese culture, with its emphasis on order and obedience, on simplicity and reverence for family. Early on, he learned the meaning of shikataganai.
Father is laid up for two years, forcing mother to take care of seven boys and tend the vegetable garden that feeds the family? Shikataganai. A younger brother has left home and won't answer letters or efforts to find him? Shikataganai.
Clearly, the situation in Hawaii for Japanese Americans was not as untenable as it was for Japanese Americans on the mainland, where the Roosevelt administration was sending them to internment camps. To my dad and his family in Hawaii, what was happening on the West Coast was horrible. And all they could do was say shikataganai.
He began to see his parents' homeland as the enemy. It was a tricky emotional feat, to continue to love one's parents but to resent the country they came from. "I thought the attack was a real sneaky thing to do. They put us on the spot," Dad said. "They had attacked our country, destroyed Pearl Harbor. If they invaded, we would have to fight them. I didn't feel any sympathy for them. They made our life very, very difficult."
Mokuta and Sueka, like many other Japanese in Hawaii, had registered each child's birth with the Japanese government through the consulate in Honolulu. That way, Shig and his brothers were automatically both Japanese and American citizens. But just before the war, there was much opposition to such dual citizenship. "That was used against us as a basis for doubting our loyalty," he said. "There was a lot of talk of expatriation."
One day, in the spring of 1941, in an act that he considered so mundane he does not remember the details, my father renounced his Japanese citizenship. "They made it very easy for us to do it," he recalled. "All you had to do was sign something."
For Shig and his brothers, Japanese citizenship meant little. "I didn't feel that I was losing anything valuable," he said. "It was not something I had asked for."
I never even knew my father had once been a Japanese citizen. Now I wondered how his parents must have felt. They had hoped to return to Japan one day and had sent their boys to Japanese school after regular classes, for two hours of instruction in language and culture, through high school.
"I guess they understood that under the circumstances, we had no option" but to renounce Japanese citizenship, my father said. "Whether they felt hurt or not, they never said anything against it. They accepted it. I guess you'd say 'shikataganai.' "
'Do Something About It'
After my father and 130 other nisei students were booted from the Territorial Guard, they returned to classes, but felt at loose ends. A community leader, YMCA Secretary Hung Wai Ching, told them, "You boys can just sit there and bemoan your fate, or you can do something about it."
So the students wrote a letter to Lt. Gen. Delos C. Emmons, the islands' military governor, who eventually allowed them to create a volunteer unit to help the war effort. Officially they were the Corps of Engineers Auxiliary, but went by the name Varsity Victory Volunteers. Attached to the 34th Engineers, the VVV lived for about a year with the troops in Schofield Barracks. They strung wire, built barracks and roads and were just like the engineer soldiers except they did not wear uniforms.
It was not just my father who served. Isaac, the number two son, had been drafted before the war. Like my father, he and his nisei buddies had their rifles taken away shortly after Pearl Harbor. For a while he worked as a janitor. Then in June 1942, the Army activated an all-nisei outfit, the 100th Infantry Battalion.
The 1,400 men of the 100th fought with distinction in Italy, suffering such heavy casualties that it was dubbed the Purple Heart battalion. In January 1943, the War Department directed the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which went on to become one of the Army's most decorated units. The Army had hoped to attract about 5,000 Hawaiian volunteers to the new unit. More than 10,000 turned out, including Richard, who is two years older than Shig and who fought with the 442nd in Italy and France. Three other brothers, Donald, Robert and Morris, were drafted and served at various times in Hawaii or stateside.
With the call-up for the 442nd, the VVV disbanded, and my father volunteered with the rest. But an X-ray turned up a lung scar. Though he can recall no chest injury, he was classified 4-F, unfit to serve. The last thing he wanted was to return to school -- there was no action there. He could not get a decent job in defense work, for nisei were not welcome. He was just about to tell himself, one more time, shikataganai, when he heard a nisei unit was being formed to do intelligence work. Though he was sure he would be rejected, he volunteered again. He took another physical. This time, strangely, the scar didn't show up. He was in.
So much for shikataganai.
He got on a troop ship to San Francisco, then went to Minnesota, where he took military intelligence training at Camp Savage for six months. After completing basic at Camp Blanding, Fla., he did several months of Army Air Forces intelligence instruction in Orlando in 1944.
By December of that year he was in the Philippines. There, he monitored Radio Tokyo and translated captured maps and unit organizational charts. On Luzon, Clark Air Field had already been taken by the Americans. His job was to strip parts from abandoned Japanese planes, and translate and send to Washington information such as serial numbers, date and place of manufacture. That would help analysts assess whether the Japanese were producing enough to replace destroyed planes.
My father's unit also scouted the long, elaborate caves on Luzon in which many Japanese soldiers lived and died. The stench was horrid. But in the scouts went, retrieving diaries and maps. The military documents contained little of use beyond unit designation. But the diaries bore a personal dimension that Shig was not expecting.
"When you search the dead body, and you feel into the pocket, and you pull out the diary, and you read the diary, it hits you that these are all human beings, just like you. Their concerns are not about the Americans, how they hate the Americans. Their concerns are about things at home. Their children. Their thoughts about their loved ones. . . . These are the things that stick with you."
A Bad Taste
My father never had an enemy soldier point a gun his way. The one time he can remember a rifle being pulled on him, it was in the hands of an American GI. He was a young man, barely 20, guarding the entrance to a cave. But Shig could tell he was nervous. Mustering his best English, my father tried to persuade the soldier that he was one of them.
The soldier would not back down: Raise your hands. Don't go for your pocket.
Finally, Shig was able to get a superior to persuade the soldier to allow him to pull out his ID, and the GI, chastened, lowered his rifle and let my father pass. To make up for the slight, he offered my father a case of Japanese whiskey he had found in a cave. My dad took it, mostly to please the kid. He took one swig and spat it out.
"It was awful," he said. "It tasted like kerosene."
My father flew over Hiroshima after the United States dropped the atomic bomb. In Nagasaki, he went into the city after the second A-bomb had been dropped. There he saw the devastation firsthand. Ground Zero, the industrial zone, was flattened. Steel beams leaned this way and that. His duty was to act as an interpreter for any survivors who were found.
"Strangely, at that point, it didn't affect me in the way that you might imagine it would," Dad says. "It was almost like a clinical experience. I was looking at them in terms of this is what happened. I didn't put myself into their position. I was doing a 'technical' job. . . . I guess in the war, many times, you have to be in that position to be able to do your job. You can't get so involved with the feeling of the people you're dealing with that you can't do your job."
He did not have the feeling that this was happening to "his" people. "I knew that this was where my folks were from. [But] I didn't have any experience that led me to feel that these were my people, that you have an affinity, a kinship. You're an American. They're Japanese."
I was struck by his ability to detach. It seemed to me a corollary to shikataganai, another way to avoid uncomfortable emotions. He calls this part of the Japanese psyche. So I was gratified that, as our conversations continued, he opened up a little more with each one.
There was one scene that he witnessed in Nagasaki that was so shocking, he can see it clearly today. In the midst of the smoke and twisted steel, he saw a little concrete bridge spanning a ditch. Miraculously, it was still intact. On that bridge, he could see, like an X-ray image, the imprint of a small hand.
"There was a child and in one instant that child was gone and all that was left was the child's hand," he said. "That I will never forget."
Some say that the dropping of the bomb was the moment when our scientific ability outstripped our capacity to understand the moral dimensions of what we were doing. Yet my father came away from the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced that the United States was correct.
"Otherwise," he said, "more people would have died."
If there is one parallel my dad sees between Sept. 11 and Dec. 7, it lies not in war, but in the reaction at home. He identifies with Arab Americans, who he says are facing the same scrutiny and suspicion he felt. He remembers passing through Washington on furlough, and stopping at a lunch counter for a bite to eat. He was a soldier, wearing an Army uniform. And he was completely ignored.
"They never served me. They never even looked at me. So I just walked out. I felt terrible.
"This discrimination against the Japanese became part of my heritage, part of my background, something that I had to live with. But it was nothing special to me. There were hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans in the same boat. You don't like it. But you can't do anything about it. . . . Shikataganai."
For my father, Pearl Harbor was more than an attack on his home. It was bound up with feelings of resentment toward the land of his parents' birth, of bitterness at the treatment he and other Japanese Americans experienced, of pride in what Japanese Americans did, of identification with America. He came out of it knowing, in a way he could not have before, that he was an American.
But he learned that being an American was more than waving a flag or carrying a gun. It meant working through competing loyalties, surviving indignities. It meant making the most of a bad situation, refusing to sit back and accept things as they were. Just as the VVV did, and the 442nd, and my dad, when he served his country at war with his parents' homeland.
It meant saying goodbye to shikataganai.
