See why this novel is invited to Japan!

I grew up in classrooms filled with kids and teachers from all over the world. My high school, Canadian Academy, located in Kobe on top of a hill, had a view of the harbor which looked beautiful. My school also had a grassy area where we ate lunch in the warmer months. I recall looking around at my senior friends and noting the countries they represented. Malfrid from Norway, Sophie from France, Jules from Canada (the French region of Quebec), Sangeeta from India and Japan, Nada from Lebanon, Katie from California, USA. We are like a United Nations, I thought.

I know I almost failed algebra. And hated biology. But I never recalled learning anything in history about internment camps for Japanese-Americans during War World II.

I wish I had listened. One of my classmates' mom was in a camp during her youth. But that didn't register in my mind until long after I held my high school diploma.

It would be years later when I felt the need to write about this period of history. It would be when living in another country, at another setting. In North Carolina, I heard my friend Artie Kamiya talk about his mother who had been forced to spend years in a camp in Colorado after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. Shortly after Pearl Harbor was bombed, those of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the U.S. were sent to various camps. Many forced to these camps were American citizens. Most had never even been to Japan.

This shows just has strong fear and prejudice go and how they eat at people's hearts and minds. Americans, born in the United States, had to leave their homes, board trains with one suitcase each, and head to bleak camps where barracks became dwelling places.

I wrote Under the Silk Hibiscus with the help of materials I received from Artie's mom. I was also able to interview Terri Takiguchi, a woman in my church who was sent from her life in California to a camp in Arizona during the war.

And this time I listened. At my computer, I heard the voices of dozens of others as I watched videos about one camp in particular---Heart Mountain in Wyoming. This camp became the setting for my fictional family, Nathan Mori, his siblings, mother, and aunt.

When I got the news that my high school wants me to come to Japan as an alumni author in residence, I couldn't believe it! Even now, most days, I think that I'm still dreaming. It's been since 1988 when I was there last as a teacher of English.

Early next year, I'll be flying to Japan, the country of my birth and childhood. In addition to going on a field trip with ninth graders to Hiroshima, I'll share about being an author and how I researched for my novel. I hear authentic food calling my name, too: Unagi, katsudon, chirashizushi, oyakodomburi, an pan, and of course, green tea ice cream (as pictured below).

I know it will be a most wonderful reunion.


You can read more about Under the Silk Hibiscus here.

After the barracks . . .

"We knew we were second-class citizens," a woman I interviewed for my newest novel said to me. She had been a young woman in an internment camp in Arizona during World War II.

Even after the war, Japanese-Americans were treated harshly, finding that the people in their old home towns did not want them back. Those who had struggled inside barbed-wire fences while living in small, crowded barracks, were eager to go back home. But what would they find there?

In my novel, the Mori family returns to San Jose, California. No one wants to rent to them because they are not Caucasian. They sleep on the floor of a local church until they find a landlord willing to rent them a small apartment with a leaky faucet. They're cramped, but they were used to being without much room during their three years at Heart Mountain.

The plight of my family is fiction, true, but the prejudice feelings and hatred did exist. In the streets, in the schools, and in the newspapers.

How dangerous this thinking can be and how damaging it is for those who had to live through it. It's truly debilitating for people when they are slandered against because of the color of their skin.

I'm surprised how little North Americans know about the internment camps that existed in this country during the Second World War. There were ten of them, purposely built to house those of Japanese descent who looked like the "enemy", i.e., the Japanese military who had dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. History books seem to omit so much.

It's time to learn from the past and vow to never repeat it.

Chapter One, Under the Silk Hibiscus

When a Japanese-American family is sent to an internment camp, torn from all they know, they each struggle with loss, betrayal, and anger, but hope is what ultimately gets them through.




Under the Silk Hibiscus

Chapter One
As an afternoon wind blew over the camp’s sagebrush terrain, I wiped dust from my face with a handkerchief that once belonged to Papa. Frustration, like the surrounding barbed wire fences, taunted me. At breakfast, something vile overcame me; I’d demanded to know if anyone knew about Papa. I targeted my aunt because she was the easiest to bully. As I continued insisting that she tell me what she knew, the families at the nearby tables lifted their faces from bowls of dry rice. Shut up, I could read from the older men’s and women’s expressions. We’re at war; this is no time for you to become hostile. Besides, you are only a child.

Since there had been no communication from Papa after that fateful day in February when two FBI agents entered our home in San Jose, I was certain he was dead. They had taken him away in handcuffs. “Spy,” the tall one with a crew cut had called him. “We know you are working with Japan’s military.”

As the memory of that day burned in my mind, I trudged toward the camp’s latrine, bucket in hand. Yesterday afternoon, Lucy had smiled at me; I’d nearly danced across the dirt road. Today, I felt almost as despairing as the day Mama, my aunt, my brothers, and I were told we had forty-eight hours to pack up for relocation.

“Relocation,” Mama had cried, the word obviously foreign to her. “We don’t need to go anywhere. We are happy here.”

But happiness had not been the point. Fear seemed to be. Was it the picture of Emperor Hirohito on our living room wall that made Caucasian men tremble? Did they think that Mama was sitting under her knitted grey shawl at the kitchen table, sending messages across the Pacific to the enemy?

My thoughts sprang, one bouncing off another. An army truck sped past toward the mess hall, creating a blanket of dust around the row of bleak barracks. The roar of its engine brought me back to reality, and I increased my pace. If I weren’t careful, I’d wind up like my ten-year-old brother, Tom, who seemed to live in his own world of poetry books and fantasies. Tom could get away with it on two accounts. One, he was only ten, and two, he’d had polio, so was lame in his right leg. But I, Nathan Mori, was able-bodied and must not dilly-dally. Dilly-dally, that had to be my aunt Kazuko’s favorite word. She used it as often as she could. When I’d set out with a bucket just moments earlier, she had called out, “Don’t dilly-dally.”

At the communal lavatories, I hoisted the metal bucket to the sink and watched it fill with water. I splashed some of the tepid liquid onto my forehead, cheeks, and nose. Using Papa’s handkerchief, I wiped my face again. Papa, where are you?

“How is your mother?” an elderly woman stopped to ask as I made my way back to our barracks. She was one of the few who wore a kimono. Today, she was dressed in a charcoal one, the color of Heart Mountain at dusk.

I wanted to give her a hug for showing concern, but that would probably set her off. She was the same woman who complained in the mess hall that we should have seaweed. How, she’d shouted, was she supposed to eat steamed rice without a piece of nori? Aunt Kazuko had warned me not to tell this woman too much about our family affairs because she was a busybody. She’d been known to spread gossip quicker than sagebrush blew over the campsite. However, after my outburst this morning, keeping our family concerns a secret was over. Everyone now knew that I was angry. What did I have to hide?

“Your mother?” the woman asked again. “I didn’t see her at breakfast or at lunch.”

I felt the weight of the bucket in my hands, almost as heavy as the thoughts of my mother. “She’s all right.”

It was a lie, and something told me that Mrs. Busybody knew it. For a second I thought she was going to accuse me of not telling the truth; it wouldn’t have been out of her character.

She shielded the sun from her face with a thin hand pocked with liver spots. “Well,” she said, and gave a deep sigh. “Well.” With a nod, as though she had just recalled what to say next, she added, “I think she needs ginger root. My grandmother swore it helped her when she was pregnant. Is she sleeping at night? She needs her sleep.”

I didn’t want to go into all the details of how Mama had spiked a fever and moaned last night, keeping all four of us in our living quarters awake until the sun broke through the dark Wyoming sky, its broadcast of a new day. Only then had she calmed and settled into sleep. “I can come over. I’ll have tea with your aunt.”

I nodded, tried to smile, and said I had to go. As I took a step toward our barracks, the woman called out after me.
“You know, your father is not a spy.”

At her words, unexpected tears swarmed in my eyes. “Yes.” I drew a breath. “I know he isn’t.”

“He’s just in a camp. Like this one. No seaweed there either.”

Suddenly, I was aware that time had slipped, and I was late. The wrath of Aunt Kazuko was near, I could feel it. I hurried toward our barracks, allowing myself one last glance over the plains at the limestone mountain that emerged from behind the camp’s barbed wire fences. That was Heart Mountain, a strange name for a mountain by a camp that seemed so heartless. There were days I wished I could run to the mountain’s knobby peak and hide out until this war ended. But with looming guard towers strategically placed around the facility, there was no hope of that happening.

Once I stepped inside our family’s one-room unit, constructed of wood and insulated with tarpaper, my aunt rushed toward me like a military Jeep. “Where were you? I am dying here.” She had a robust face and stocky body to match, and I doubted she was anywhere near death.

At the lone table that stood in the middle of the room with cots to the left and right, Aunt Kazuko removed a glass and steadied it as I carefully poured water into it. This was a ritual we were familiar with, and no words were needed.

Aunt Kazuko carried the glass to Mama, who lay in one of the cots, a cotton sheet pulled over her protruding belly. As she helped Mama up, my aunt barked at me, “You need to go to hospital and tell them to come here. Your mother need medicine.”

I dismissed her choppy orders, spoken in a language she had not quite mastered. Yesterday, I made a trip to the hospital and, after waiting for fifteen minutes, a nurse came to my aid. She followed me to our barracks to check on Mama. She probed and asked a few questions while Aunt Kazuko and I stood around Mama’s bedside, trying not to appear anxious. The nurse told me that the baby would be here any minute now and to make Mama as comfortable as I could. She’s going to be fine, I said to myself, recalling the nurse’s words from yesterday.

Lifting a wobbly chair, I placed it closer to my mother’s bed. I smiled at her, remembering how she used to button my sweater on winter mornings and, with a playful smile, tell me that I was her favorite son named Nathan. “Hey, Mama.”

With Aunt Kazuko supporting her, Mama took a few sips of water before easing onto the uneven mattress filled with hay. She gave a weak smile. “Nathan,” she breathed. “My favorite Nathan.”

Aunt Kazuko moved to the table, poured her own glass of water and nibbled on a sugar cookie, one she had stowed away in her sleeve after dinner last night. She was always hiding morsels of food. If anyone ever wanted a late night snack, digging through my aunt’s sleeves would be a good move. I was grateful that my aunt gave me some time alone with Mama. Usually, she was flittering about, interjecting her worries. I took Mama’s hand in mine, noting the slender fingers, the simple gold ring that signified her union with Papa. Papa, who was somewhere, but had not been heard from in over six months.

Stroking Mama’s palm, I wished. It is a scary thing to wish when you know the wish can’t come true.

Nevertheless, I wished that she could play the piano like she used to. It seemed that no matter what was going on in my life, when Mama played Chopin or Beethoven, the world was a tranquil place. I was about to form a prayer of asking. In my opinion, people usually pray on one of two occasions—to ask for something or to thank God for something. I had no time to offer up a prayer of asking because my mother interrupted my thoughts.

“You work too hard.” She spoke as though the words sapped all her energy. I wanted to hear her voice, yet at the same time, I wanted her to rest and not tire herself by talking.

“Are you too warm?” Before she could nod yes, I picked up a silver and red silk fan that rested against the top of her leather suitcase under the foot of her cot. Opening it, the scent of sandalwood permeated the air. I moved it across her pale face. The breeze from it fluttered strands of hair into her eyes.

I brushed the black strands, smoothing them with my fingers over her scalp. I’d seen my father do this once and was captivated by what an act of sacrifice it was. He had taken time, time away from the business, time away from a game of chess—his love—to spend time with my mother and do something for her. The thought of that scene made it hard to swallow.

I needed to get a grip, as Ken, my seventeen-year-old brother always told me. Recently I’d been plagued with too many tears. “I ask God to give you some time for fun,” Mama said, pausing between each word. “You need fun.”

“Not everyone can run around and play,” I wanted to say, but I was sure if I said it, she’d accuse me of being too hard on my older brother. Ken felt life should be a playground and neither work nor household chores seemed to get in the way of him doing what he wanted.

She winced and closed her eyes. “Nathan,” she said after a moment. “I want you to make a promise.”

I leaned in closer as her dark eyes looked intently into mine. “The watch . . . You keep it safe.”

Immediately my view shifted from her face to beneath her cot. Inside her leather suitcase was the family heirloom, the gold and diamond pocket watch my grandparents had brought over on the freighter from Hiroshima. Of course, I knew of its importance, of the story that was behind that expensive piece of craftsmanship. I’d heard Papa tell how a member of nobility had requested a local craftsman to design the watch. When my grandfather saved the nobleman’s daughter from a raging river, the watch had been presented to him in appreciation for his act of valor. It had been in the Mori family ever since. Mama gasped for air, coughing. “Nobu?”

I sat straight. It was seldom that she called me by my Japanese name. “I will,” I vowed, recalling the Boy Scout promises I once held important. “I’ll keep it safe.”

Moistening her lips, she closed her eyes. “Good,” she whispered as the sun vacated the sky, casting shadows through the window onto her blanket. “Good. I know I can count on you.”

*

After dinner, Ken, Tom, and I walked from the mess hall over to the Yokota’s barracks which was parallel to ours, just across the dusty dirt road. Ken matched Tom’s slower pace—slower than most due to Tom’s right leg brace. The two conversed about baseball, recalling a game some of the boys had played at the camp when we’d first arrived. I hadn’t played or watched as I’d been searching for spare pillows for Mama so that she could sit comfortably in her cot during the day. She liked having pillows propped around her back and belly.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen you get a home run,” Tom said to Ken.

“Just call me Babe Ruth.” Ken laughed.

“I bet you were beat after that. I know I’d have been. That was a lot of running.”

“Ah, when you’re that happy, you don’t feel tired.”

I lagged behind, feeling a little sick, as the noodles and chicken I had just eaten thickened and soured in my stomach. The searchlights scoured the camp, I watched their beams and then looked beyond them over the barbed wire fence toward Heart Mountain. The mountain seemed close, like if I reached out, I could touch it, but I knew it was miles away.

At the entrance to the Yokota’s barracks, Ken paused and turned toward me. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Nah. Can’t,” I mumbled. Of course I wanted to hear Fusou Yokota sing. To my ears, her Japanese name of Fusou had to be one of the most beautiful names. And it matched everything else about her. Ken argued that Fusou wasn’t that great of a name. “It’s just a name. Nothing else.” What did he know anyway? I bet he’d never taken the time to repeat it several times in a silent room and watched how that name filled every dark corner with light. He didn’t know how it sounded as it pushed over his lips like a puff of air. He called her by her American name, Lucy, which was not nearly as special. In fact, everybody called her Lucy. Even she went by Lucy.

That evening, although I wanted to join my brothers, I rushed into our barracks to check on Mama. Someone had to be responsible. I hoped that the bowl of rice I had for her was still warm enough for her to enjoy. I entered our living quarters and shut the front door.

Seated next to Mama, Aunt Kazuko removed an object from her pocket. As I drew nearer to her and to Mama’s cot, I saw that it was a small sugar cookie. “I need a little pep,” my aunt confessed as she chewed. “Dinner was too small. A little pep for pep-me-up.”

Mama groaned. “Kazuko, you will turn into a cookie.”

I laughed. Ever since she’d been bedridden, Mama had been uncomfortable, but when her words showed that she still had her
humor intact, I knew that she couldn’t be suffering too much. I handed her the bowl of rice as my aunt scurried around the barracks for a pair of chopsticks.

Wanting to hear Lucy, I opened the wooden front door. Immediately, dust flew into our quarters, burning my eyes.
“You always forget to open slow,” my aunt chided. “Slow is best way.”

I also knew that quiet was best way, but now was not the time to pick a fight with my aunt.

Aunt Kazuko complained about not having shampoo that she liked. “My hair is like dried shrimp when I use that green stuff.”

“You should head over to the salon,” said Mama, referring to the hairdresser two barracks down who cut hair for fifteen cents. “She might have some better shampoo.”

My aunt finished her cookie and wiped stray crumbs from her lap.

“I need hair color, too,” she said and then explained in her native tongue about how her roots were looking grey.

We were forbidden to speak Japanese inside the camp. All the signs reminded us of this. Yet, there was something comforting about hearing the language of my people spoken. There were words for which English had no equivalence like gambare and gaman, words of encouragement and endurance.

Suddenly, my aunt stopped talking. From across the camp we heard the sweet voice of Lucy. Tonight she was singing about God watching over us.

“Go on,” Mama said to me as my aunt lifted a bite of rice on wooden chopsticks to Mama’s mouth.

“Go on what?”

She chewed the rice, swallowed and then shifted in her bed, her large belly protruding underneath the sheet. With a weak gesture, she brushed back hair from her forehead. “Go over to her house.”

My whole being lurched into one word: YES! Yes, I would head over there, yes, I had Mama’s blessing and yes, yes, again, yes, this would be my chance to get Fusou Lucy Yokota to notice me.

Inside the Yokota’s living quarters, men, women, and children were seated on mats on the floor. To the left of the stove hung a rope with an assortment of garments on it—a man’s shirt, a woman’s skirt, a hand towel, and a blouse.

Lucy stood near the table; cots had been pushed to the walls to make room for the crowd. I found a spot on the floor crammed between Tom and my classmate and friend from San Jose, Charles. Lucy had finished one song and was preparing to sing another. I was just in time! Charles’s elbow accidently jerked into my side, but I didn’t care. Pain didn’t matter, I was in the presence of Lucy!

All conversation stopped as Lucy nodded at the gathered group, the cue that she was about to sing. Her song was one I had never heard before, something about a lost canary finding sanctuary in a hollow log.

We were confined to a camp, away from all we knew, many of us separated from family members, but to hear her voice, that soprano timbre that was distinctly hers, made the smile stay on my face during her entire song.

When she finished, we clapped. A man in the front, with a boy on his lap, asked if she could sing a song in Japanese for his son, one about
he rain.

Ken rose to his feet, stepped over seated bodies, and moved toward Lucy. He poured water into a cup from a metal bucket that sat on a birch table, a table identical to the one we had in our unit. Gently, he handed it to her.

Why couldn’t I have done that? The answer was simple—that thought never crossed my mind. Whenever I saw Lucy, all I could think of was how pretty she was, how I couldn’t wait to hear her sing, and how I hoped that she’d look at me. I couldn’t think about actually doing something more.

She thanked him, her lips then pressed into a tiny smile. Ken winked at her and then slipped back to where he had been
seated.

Why couldn’t I be more like my older brother? I’d prayed to be, feeling that it must be all right to ask God to make a person more suave. After all, the Bible said somewhere that God opens His hands and satisfies all His creation with their desires. Ever since we’d come to camp, Lucy had been my desire.

When I drifted off to sleep that night, the sound of Aunt Kazuko’s snores penetrating my thoughts, I wondered how I could get Lucy to notice me. Dreaming about her was easy; it was the actual communicating that left me in a quandary.

In August, after we first arrived at camp, I saw her walking on the road, the wind in her long hair, a pensive look on her face. I decided I could do it and summoned the courage to speak to her. I’d seen her at the assembly center in Santa Anita, but had never said a word to her during our months there. Here was my chance! Standing in her path, I waited for her to approach me. She stopped, cocked her head to the side and said, “Hello.”

My throat was as dry as the summer air. “Uh . . .” She waited, a smile on her lips.

I’d almost forgotten what I’d wanted to say.

Looking me in the eyes, she asked, “You’re Ken’s brother, aren’t you?”

Borrowing strength from somewhere, I blurted, “Why do you want to be called Lucy?”

For a moment, her hand toyed with the silver barrette behind her ear. I was afraid that she wasn’t going to answer. “We are Americans,” she said at last. “Fusou is the old name for Japan. I can’t be associated with Japan now.”

“But you can still use that name,” I protested. “Your mother and father gave it to you. It’s . . . it suits you.”

The smile she flashed made my heart quiver. How could one person cause another to feel such . . . such tenderness toward her and affection? I swallowed and kicked a rock with my shoe, just for something to do, just because I didn’t want to be caught staring at her.


Read more by going here.

Historical Romance, Under the Silk Hibiscus

And in less than four weeks, my sixth novel, Under the Silk Hibiscus, will arrive!

This novel takes place in an internment camp in Wyoming where many Japanese-Americans were sent after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There's upheaval, frustration, pain, and sorrow. Families are separated. Some members are accused of being spies, like Nathan Mori's father.

To balance the discrimination that evolved during this time period, I had to rely on humor and romance.

One of the most fun relationships I enjoyed crafting was between the main character, Nathan, and his aunt Kazuko. Even though she's single and has no children of her own, Aunt Kazuko knows how to keep Nathan and his brothers in line. She knows truth----particularly that a body can't live on hard work alone. She loves cookies and keeps morsels in her sweater sleeves, taking them out when she needs a "pep".

And of course, there's young romance. Nathan dreams of the lovely singer, Lucy, and wants her to notice him, but she seems more interested in his older brother, Ken.

There are two characters which are not people---one is Heart Mountain, the mountain viewed every day from those in the barracks at the camp. Then there is the Mori family's coveted gold watch, a family heirloom from Japan.

So the questions form: Will Nathan get the girl? What happens to the family heirloom during the war and after the war ends? Does Nathan's father return? How does war and discrimination change hearts? How does God's love prevail?

Here's the book blurb:

During World War Two Nathan and his family are sent to Heart Mountain, an internment camp in Wyoming for Japanese-Americans. Nathan's one desire is to protect the family's gold pocket watch, a family heirloom brought over from Japan. He fails; the watch is stolen. Struggling to make sense of his life in a bleak camp as the only responsible man of the household, Nathan discovers truths about his family, God, and the girl he loves.

Read more at Amazon.

Under The Silk Hibiscus, my newest novel

Unfortunately, our country has a history of discrimination. During World War Two, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese-Americans were targeted. Out of fear, the United States government had those on the west coast sent to internment camps. Even though many of them were American citizens, they had to evacuate their homes, sell their belongings, and leave their businesses and friends.

Under the Silk Hibiscus, my sixth novel, is a story of such a time as this. The main character, Nathan, tells his saga through his fifteen-year-old eyes when he and his family were sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. As he grows older, we continue to hear, not only about life in the camp where his family lived until the war ended, but about life after the war when they returned to their hometown of San Jose, California and tried to rebuild their lives.

Excerpt:

Early the next morning before faint sunlight crept through our billet’s slats, Aunt Kazuo screamed. “The baby is coming! The baby! Somebody help us!”

Ken wasn’t in our barracks. His cot was empty, untouched; in fact, both the pillow and wool army blankets were still in place as though he hadn’t slept there at all.

As usual, it was going to be up to me. I scrambled out of my own cot. One of my blankets fell onto the floor. From the back of a wicker chair, I pulled off a checkered shirt and then grabbed a pair of trousers that were in a heap at the foot of my bed. Once dressed, I worked my feet into my shoes and looked for my jacket. I didn’t wait for Aunt Kazuo to tell me not to dilly-dally. Sprinting toward the clinic, the frosty autumn air didn’t bother me.

By the time I reached the clinic, my face was damp from sweat. The main door was locked. I banged on it; I had to get a doctor.

Mekley, one of the uniformed soldiers assigned to the camp, appeared from the clinic’s vicinity. “What in tarnation are you doing?” he cried.

“I need a doctor.”

“Well, I need a million dollars.” He spoke with a drawl. Everybody told me it was southern. I didn’t know for sure. I’d never heard a southern accent before. I just knew that he was ornery. That characteristic had nothing to do with accents.

“I need a good woman too.” He winked, but it wasn’t a wink like Ken’s; it made me feel dirty to have witnessed it. “Know where I can find one?” he asked.

Thirst cloaked my throat and I tried to swallow to ease the dryness. Mama needed help and it was up to me. “Where’s the doctor? Where’s Doctor . . . ?” My mind suddenly became like a boarded-up window. What was the doctor’s name from San Jose? “Yamagata.”

“Ya-ma-ga-ta?” He said, drawing the surname out like it was a piece of taffy, the kind you got at the fair. “What happened that you need a doctor?”

“My mother’s having a baby.”

He grinned. “A baby, huh? Another one?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. I knocked on the door again and then heard a strong and familiar voice from behind. “Are you looking for me?”

Turning around, I tasted relief. Dr. Yamagata stood before me, a Dunlap hat on his head.

“You have to come. My mother is in labor.”

“Can’t she come to the hospital like all the other mamas?” asked Mekley.

Under the Silk Hibiscus will make her debut on Veteran's Day, November 11---an appropriate date.


Under the Silk Hibiscus can be pre-ordered on Amazon.