David L. Ulin: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the California Book Club. I'm David L. Ulin, the Books Editor of Alta Journal. Tonight, we are thrilled to have Naomi Hirahara in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman about her novel, Clark and Division. Our special guest is Kristen Hayashi. I want to explain California Book Club a little bit before we get going.
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Without any further ado, it's a real thrill to welcome Naomi Hirahara tonight to the California Book Club. Please, welcome my colleague, John Freeman, who will take it from here. John?
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Nice to see everybody from Clovis and points elsewhere. Huge pleasure to be here tonight to be talking about Naomi Hirahara's Clark and Division. But unlike other nights, I want to start with a comment from the audience that came in last week. It begins, "I have no question. But I wanted to say to Naomi that on July of 1944, I went as a child from Manzanar to Chicago on the Union Pacific Railroad and lived at the corner of Clark and Division in the second-story room above the bar. That was literally my first stop." This was from Joyce Okazaki, who wrote in and wanted to tell Naomi this.
I think about this and I wanted to begin here because in her own piece, "Why I Write", Naomi Hirahara said, "I see myself as a resurrectionist." And I think that's an important category to add to historical fiction. But I think one of the fascinating parts about that is sometimes you're actually resurrecting what lives in plain sight. That's one of the great geniuses of Clark and Division, which is a novel about two sisters, about a family leaving Manzanar, going to Chicago, where 20,000 people left from the various concentration camps to go back into American society. But there was a lot of things trailing with them, a lot of trauma.
In this book, Rose Ito, who has come to Chicago, has come to a different end. Her sister, Aki, who is narrating, needs to find out what happened to her sister. But first, she has to figure out how to get along and how to go places.
I almost think that Naomi Hirahara as a writer was made to investigate stories like this. If you know anything about her, you know that she was born in Pasadena, that she grew up the child of two survivors of Hiroshima. She went to Stanford. You might even know that she was a newspaper writer, that she, for a long time, edited the largest Japanese American daily, the Rafu Shimpo, where she began working in 1984, covering Los Angeles. Newspaper writers who've become crime writers, it's a great tradition in American life. We've had Michael Connelly on here before.
It took Naomi another 12 years to quit her day job of writing newspaper articles, and she sold her first book in 2003. It became the first of the Mas Arai mysteries about a Japanese American survivor of Hiroshima, who is a gardener who investigates mysteries. She ended up writing two other series. She's probably well-beyond her dozenth mystery, but she's also written lots of works of nonfiction, including Life After Manzanar, which she co-wrote with Heather Lindquist and was writing along the same time as writing Clark and Division.
Investigating the true stories of what happens in plain sight of stories that have been erased, has been basically, it seems like, from reading her work, the driving force in Naomi Hirahara's life. It's such a pleasure to have her here. She's going to be talking with Kristen Hayashi, who is the Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator at the Japanese American Museum. But first, let's bring Naomi on here with a warm welcome. Naomi, you're here with 600 of your closest friends. Come on to the California Book Club.
Naomi Hirahara: Thank you for having me, John. And thanks for that kind introduction.
Freeman: It's a pleasure. Let's jump right into it. As you've noted from the comment I read from the audience, you're writing historical mystery, but you're writing about a collective experience, something that happened to over 20,000 people. Obviously, what happened to the Itos didn't happen to every one of them. How is it different when you're writing something, when someone's going to write back to you possibly and say, "Hey, that happened to me"? Or is that something that you've found has happened with every one of your books?
Hirahara: Pretty much, but more so with Clark and Division. And I think because this is actually my first truly historical mystery, whereas the other ones were more contemporary and had a cold case that was involved with it. But I did want to definitely highlight and spotlight this experience of Japanese Americans in Chicago. Just working at the newspaper, I had a lot of elders I knew who had lived there. There were some other colleagues who had been born there. But it wasn't until I wrote Life After Manzanar when it really hit me. "Oh, this was the number one destination." There's some significance about that, as well as finding information that there had been a high level of juvenile delinquency because the first to arrive were young people.
That wasn't an issue that I saw directly in oral histories that I came across in conversations with people. But when I re-looked at them, there were incidents on the edges. People were saying, "Oh yeah, there was these two gangs that fought." But it was almost mentioned as an aside. But as a crime writer, I became very curious, and I knew that I had to do a deeper dive. It's been interesting to hear the reactions from people who do have ties in Chicago. Some of them have said, "Oh, Clark and Division, but we never really spoke about it." That was not really the Red Light District, but something like that, something from the Japanese American past.
Because later, people relocated to different parts of Chicago, like Lake View, and started to form more solid communities. But Clark and Division, this particular intersection was more like a way station. This book, it takes place during World War II. We're not talking about the post-war experience, but definitely the post-war, post-camp experience.
Freeman: That's right. It's 1944. The Ito family is relocated in the summer. I wonder if you can talk about finding those lacunae within the historical archive. In what way are those missing pieces of information, those tantalizing things that are happening at the edge of the most known material, in what way are those points of interest to you similar to your experience of talking to Nisei women of a certain age? As in, did you find in your experience as a reporter that there were certain silences that you could almost rehear when you re-encounter them in the archive?
Hirahara: Most definitely, Nisei women have always been an enigma to me, quite frankly. I'm actually Nisei-and-a-half. My mother is a Japanese immigrant, so I'm a little bit an outsider to the incarceration experience. My extended family, they were incarcerated, but not my parents because they were in Hiroshima. I was talking to a friend from Hawaii, and her parents were not incarcerated, too. Sometimes being an outsider, although people view us as insiders, I think it allows us a certain kind of perspective that maybe others would not be aware of.
I know when I worked at the Rafu Shimpo, I would try to feature women on our front pages because I noticed that we had a lot of men. But inevitably, aside from politicians or leaders, when I tried to get your everyday Nisei woman story, a lot of times I would get a call right before the paper would go to press. It's like, "Wait a minute, don't put that in." Like a self-censorship. I realized that there was a big cost in terms of their social networks if they said something out of turn. Whereas the Nisei men, they were more like pumping their chest, "Yeah, write this. I don't care what anyone else thinks." It's a different kind of sensibility.
I also realized these women were the ones that kept their families together. Their values, the things that were important to them, was not necessarily just telling their individual story, but the preservation of the family. I was really trying to crack the shell. We have these fantastic Nisei women, leaders, in our community, and one of the people I've dedicated the book to is the late Sueko Kunitomi Embrey. She's an educator, and she fought for Manzanar to be a national historic site.
But I wanted to get more of your average Nisei in this particular experience. My editor actually had to take me to task and I had to dig deeper. Some of it was my own cultural barriers because I am the child of an immigrant. My tendency sometimes is to protect my own parent at times, or not just sink into my own anxiety or my own concerns. But in order to bring Aki to life, I had to go to that place.
Freeman: It pays off because Aki's voice is instantly grippy. We feel we're being spoken to. There's this sense of a pressurized arena in which she's saying things that she cannot say necessarily allowed. That really works. She's born, thankfully, practically on the first page, and Fubiko. I wonder if you can just bring us to that moment so we can all experience what it feels like when this character announces herself.
Hirahara: Sure. This is from chapter one.
Rose was always there, even while I was being born. It was a breech birth; the midwife, soaked in her own sweat as well as some of my mother's, had been struggling for hours and didn't notice my three-year-old sister inching her way to the stained bed. According to the midwife, Mom was screaming unrepeatable things in Japanese when Rose, the first one to see an actual body part of mine, yanked my slimy foot good and hard. 'Ito-san.' The midwife's voice cut through the chaos, and my father came in to get Rose out of the room.
Rose ran; Pop couldn't catch her at first and when he finally did, he couldn't control her. In a matter of minutes, Rose, undeterred by the blood on my squirming body, returned to embrace me into her fan club. Until the end of her days and even beyond, my gaze would remain on her. Our first encounter became Ito family lore, how I came into the world in our town of Tropico, a name that hardly anyone in Los Angeles knows today. For a while, I couldn't remember a time when I was apart from Rose.
We slept curled up like pill bugs on the same thin mattress; it was pachanko, flat as a pancake, but we didn't mind. Our spines were limber back then. We could have slept on a blanket over our dirt yard, which we did sometimes during those hot Southern California Indian summers, our puppy, Rusty, at our bare feet. Tropico was where my father and other Japanese men first came to till the rich alluvial soil for strawberry plants. They were the Issei, the first generation, the pioneers who were the progenitors of us, the Nisei.
Pop had been fairly successful, until the housing subdivisions came. The other Issei farmers fled south to Gardena or north to San Fernando Valley, but Pop stayed and got a job at one of the produce markets clustered in Downtown Los Angeles, only a few miles away. Tonai's sold every kind of vegetable and fruit imaginable--Pascal celery from Venice; iceberg lettuce from Santa Maria and Guadalupe; Larson strawberries from Gardena; and Hale's Best cantaloupes from Imperial Valley.
Rose and I still shared a room, but we had our own beds, although during certain nights when the Santa Ana winds blew through our loose window frames, I would end up crawling in beside her. 'Aki,' she'd cry out as my cold toes brushed against her calves. She'd turn and fall back asleep while I trembled in her bed, fearful of the moving shadows of the sycamore trees, demented witches in the moonlight.
That's it.
Freeman: What a lovely opening. I think this the first sister relationship in one of your books, if I'm not mistaken. I love the way that you map this onto separate spaces. First, in Tropico, and then the camp. And then once Aki, whose name means autumn, comes to Chicago and discovers something terrible has happened and is remapping her sister's own Chicago. Meeting her sister's old friends, even wearing her sister's clothes. At some point, she almost becomes her sister to try to understand what her sister was doing.
Can you talk a little bit about psychogeography and mapping as an element within crime fiction, within this book, and how that works for you and how it's maybe different, say when you're writing history or nonfiction?
Hirahara: Yeah, it's kind of funny. When I was just reading that scene to you, there's different layers. Regarding the geography, it's present day Atwater for the Los Angelenos, but I had interviewed an Issei doctor and he said he had grown up in Tropico. This was years ago, maybe even decades. I just liked that word, Tropico, and it just stayed in my mind. Just as Aki says, "Hardly anybody knows about that place called Tropico." But I just love doing research in Los Angeles and picking up those various little neighborhoods that are somehow forgotten. However, there's usually one existing little business that's named. Here in Pasadena, it was known as Crown City, and there's Crown City Plumbers or something like that. I am intentionally collecting names and places, and that was actually one of the first places that Japanese immigrants did come to, to farm strawberries.
There's also a layer of just personal experience for me because my father was born in Watsonville, California, and today, that's the headquarters of Driscoll's Strawberries. He himself did strawberry farming, tenant farming, truck farming. I had subsequently, for the Japanese American National Museum, written a biography of a strawberry grower. That particular fruit and even just the mention of Larson, just even that one line where I mentioned the different kind of varieties of vegetables and fruits, that represents maybe one book that I wrote about a certain place. I think the specificity of the geography and even the flowers, or maybe produce that was grown on that soil, is very important to me. Yeah.
In terms of ... I'm trying to think of the other ... And just the wind. In terms of the two sisters sleeping outside, we did that in Altadena, California. My grandmother was visiting us from Japan, and it was one of our really hot summers. I don't think we had central air, so we just slept outside. My dog was named Brownie, and he was outside with us, too. It's a strange thing writing fiction because I do pull at, and it's not necessarily representative of the history of 1940s or 1930s. It was more done in the '60s or '70s, but I take liberty and I take those little pieces and sew it together.
Freeman: If you've been watching these California Book Clubs, those of you in the audience, we have had a book set in Watsonville, Jaime Cortez's Gordo, in which there's a family living together and working on farms there. Not farming for strawberries, but some other things. We've also had Julie Otsuka on here before, who's written two books, one set in one of the camps, but another set as mail-order brides are coming to the US; a sort of existence that you reflect on when you describe Aki and Rose's mother coming around that year, 1919, the year of The Buddha in the Attic. I'm amazed at the amount of history that you can marshal into a book that's also in a very specific historical register. It really is coming down to details.
I guess, I want to talk a little bit towards the moment that Rose and Aki go to Chicago. What sort of details did you find? Because I've talked to other writers who've written historical fiction and when it's a traumatic experience, say, Colson Whitehead writing The Underground Railroad, he had to take certain details out because they would've been distractingly overwhelming, even though they were true. I wonder what sort of details did you think, "Ah, this will give me just enough to create the feel of the place"? Is there anything that you can remember leaving out?
Hirahara: Well, I will say something that I put in, and that was courtesy of my friend, Gwen Jensen, who's an oral historian. We had done a book together about the doctors who served in camp. This is her research that was wider, but she had mentioned that women had shared that they lost their periods in camp. That, to me, was such a telling detail. It's very personal, but it just represented internally what were going on in these women's bodies and their emotions. Maybe they wouldn't be crying all the time or articulate their unhappiness, but their bodies were speaking out, that this was an untenable situation.
It's hard, and I would like to talk to Kristen about this, too. I've done so much research about the incarceration, the removal and incarceration. To me, I won't say it's old hat, but it's things I've written about so many times, so I just assume everybody knows about it, everyone's familiar. Actually, my editor had to take me to task and say, "More on Manzanar. More about this experience." I wanted to also consider their ages because I think for young people, it was a different experience. There were a lot of social interactions.
I wanted to not just dwell on everything being taken away from them, but also that they were attempting to build up their lives, whereas sometimes it was romantic. Many people got married in camp, or formed relationships that ended up in long-term relationships. Yeah, it was important for me to focus in on that particular generation of people who are behind barbwire.
Freeman: This does present the perfect time to bring in Kristen Hayashi. As I mentioned, she is the Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator of the Japanese American National Museum, which opened in 1992 and had a notable exhibit called American Concentration Camps in, I believe, 1994. About the 120,000 Japanese who were put in camps, three quarters of them, American citizens. Did an amazing thing for, I think, the knowledge of that experience and has done that in many other ways. Kristen, it's lovely to have you. Take it away.
Kristen Hayashi: Thank you so much. What a privilege to talk with Naomi today. So far, we've heard some important keywords. We've heard trauma and loss and gaps in historical record. I think your book is so important, Naomi, because we know that there's a lot of scholarship on the incarceration itself, but the scholarship really ends in 1945 and skips over 20 years to the civil rights movement. And then the next work is really on redress. I think this is such an important moment in history that isn't sufficiently covered. Your book really gets into the trauma and the loss, and it really helps to fill this gap in the historical record.
I guess, I should just mention that I am at the Japanese American National Museum, and I think it is fitting that I am sitting in front of the barracks. This is a section of a barracks from the Heart Mountain Concentration Camp in Wyoming, and it's one of our biggest and most powerful artifacts. But I think it also is a representation that it dominates this narrative of Japanese American history. We know that the World War II experience had a profound impact, but we don't talk enough about post-camp. That's why your book is so important.
Hirahara: I remembered that Hank Umemoto, I had worked with him on his memoir, and he had been in Manzanar. He had been a young boy, and he said actually the post-camp experience for him was more traumatic. They lived in Skid Row for a while. I think it was also that the Nisei were not recognized as American citizens after World War II, and that it took a big psychological toll on many people. I found that, his observation, to be very poignant.
Hayashi: It's true, and it took a long time for former incarcerations to talk about their World War II experience. My work does focus on the post-camp, like early resettlement period, and I thought it would be really easy to find people to interview. Even just a few years ago, the narrative that I was hearing was, interment was this terrible moment, incarceration was this terrible moment, and then we were successful. There's these few voices, like Hank's, that's really talking about, "Wait a second. Actually, post-camp was even harder than the incarceration itself." I think that's what you're bringing light to.
On page 62, chapter five, you have this really interesting quote. It says, "Being out of camp does things to you. You're finally free, but you're not. It's like there are invisible bars caging you in." I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. Because the War Relocation Authority, they were really promoting places like Chicago as a place where there was a lot of opportunity. They wanted former incarcerees to move in that direction to these cities, like Chicago.
You paint this picture that it wasn't necessarily this magical place, and so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that quote and what that means. What were some of those invisible bars that continue to cage people in?
Hirahara: Well, I think it's interesting that I wrote a bulk of Clark and Division and definitely rewrote all of it during the pandemic. I think it made Aki's experience even more palpable. We were in confinement and there was the big unknown. Finally, we're starting to be released from our homes, but we're not quite sure what's really out there or not. I think that helped me conceive. That must've been crazy, to be in one of the 10 camps, and then you go to one of the ... Chicago was the second-largest city in the US. So big, filled with all these factories, filled with a lot of different ethnic groups that Japanese Americans were not used to, the weather. Also, being told, "Don't clump up."
They were actually informing the incarcerees, giving them little pamphlets and giving them little tips, essentially, "Don't be part of the Japanese American community. Blend in and disappear." That was the message that was given to them. But of course, you're in a strange town and the government has done this to you. You're not going to necessarily trust the government. You're going to trust other Japanese Americans. Of course, people are going to live in apartment buildings in Clark and Division or the South Side. They're going to get leads from maybe a priest, a Buddhist priest that served them in camp. Those are the people they're going to trust. I think that it's just not knowing.
You're still trying to process, "Why was I in camp to begin with?" It's interesting now. I'm being more mindful when I look back at oral histories because there were people who were really pissed off. They wanted to get out of camp as soon as possible, and I've seen it more in male narratives. I don't know if you've seen it in female narratives, too, Kristen. But now, I'm being a little more sensitive because I think that in the past, it was more like a destination type thing. "From camp, we went here and we went here and we went here." But I didn't really see so much of the emotional map that people were going through. Have you seen that, Kristen, in the work that you do? In terms of, have you noted who has been open about their anger, or who has been saying that they had to get out of camp ASAP?
Hayashi: Yeah. That's interesting because I was focusing more on people who had a harder time restarting their lives. They're the ones that stayed in camp the longest. I think you're helping to change my perception of early resettlement, too. I focused, again, on people coming back to Los Angeles, thinking that the younger ones, the younger Nisei who went to places like Chicago, would have an easier time resettling. But that wasn't the case. From what you've showed, they really faced the same challenges that anyone, any Japanese American, faced in that early resettlement period.
But you brought up the example of Hank Umemoto. He's the one that definitely talks about being angry and wanting to leave camp. But I can't really think of too many examples where people outwardly talk about that. Again, I think that's one of the gaps in the narrative. I also wanted to broach another subject, and that's this issue of the model minority myth. Because I think that's really, really important and something I think we both want to do in our work. Back to that whole, I'm paraphrasing, but a lot of survivors of the incarceration experience will say something like, "Again, internment was this terrible moment and then we were successful."
This word, successful, keeps coming up. I feel like without saying it, Rose, in some ways, outwardly, is the epitome of the model minority at the beginning. And then post-camp, when she's in Chicago, there are these rumors of abortion and potential suicide. There's quite a few characters that I think are the antithesis of the model minority, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about dispelling the model minority myth.
Hirahara: Yeah, that's the beauty of crime fiction. Because you're dealing with criminals. Everyone is a suspect and everyone has different motives. I covered crime for Rafu Shimpo, because we all had to. Whether it was ballroom dancing or someone doing a heist somewhere, we covered it all. I think that shame is such a big cultural issue. And I think that some, especially Issei, maybe felt shame about being incarcerated because they thought, "Maybe we had to have done something wrong. Because why were we in camp?" I think there was this added pressure like, well, we have to show, at least this facade, that we're good Americans, we're good people. There was so much pressure, I think, on Japanese Americans to be that way.
If you're part of the community, you know that there's so many ... That's why we have groups like Yellow Brotherhood. In the '70s, there was a lot of Japanese Americans that were dealing with drug addiction. We have individuals who've committed crimes, and we wanted to sweep that under the rug. I think that what I love doing is showing the humanity of us. We're not superheroes. We're not like this Japanese American action figure; we're able to deal with anything that's thrown to us. No, we're humans, and things happen. Babies are born out of wedlock in Chicago. Nobody really talks about it, but it was on the Chicago Resettles Committee's list of things to be concerned about.
There were other crimes, too, and I think those kinds of things actually reveal the fullness of who we are. But that's just something that I think our community, even within families, we try to hide and not show. Because we just feel like, in order for our children to progress, we can't be totally honest of who we are. How many decades has it been? 75, 80 whatever, some odd years. I hope we're at a place when we can look more honestly about who we are. A lot of times, Japanese Americans specifically have been used as this weapon. "Look at these people. They were locked up and then they're fine. They're well-educated and they're wonderful people."
Whereas the truth is, actually, some people really had to pay their price emotionally, and they had to struggle just like anybody else. I think that truth would be better for us today in terms of interracial relationships for people to understand what Japanese Americans went through. And their response was perhaps very similar to other people's responses to other trauma in their lives.
Hayashi: Thank you for sharing that.
Freeman: I'm going to come back in here. I would love to bring you back, Kristen, not only because this conversation has been so illuminating, but also, Kristen's research about resettlement in Los Angeles neatly dovetails with the just released sequel to Clark and Division called Evergreen, in which we follow Aki to Los Angeles in the 1950s, a migration that many Japanese Americans did themselves. We'll bring you back in about 15 minutes. Questions are beginning to pop up left and right, and I want to come to them in one second.
But I want to talk a little bit about something that was emerging from your discussion just here, which is, people like Aki in the book, who has just left the camp, she's 20 years old. I'm trying to figure out another word other than the model minority, but she's also a little bit of a goody two shoes. She's definitely going to try to do the right thing, and among the first people she meets are gangsters wearing zoot suits. I wonder if you can talk about that, that mixing that would've happened in the city if it was different for people resettling than the camp. Or would it be more obvious that there was mixing because certain lifestyle ways of being would be suddenly more available to them?
Hirahara: Well, it was really interesting because I've also written a book on Terminal Islanders and that particular fishing village, a lot of the young men, they were referred to in camp as Yogores, which is the dirty ones. They were just darker than the other Japanese Americans, but it was an enclave and many of them did actually speak Japanese, which was kind of unusual. There's a lot of comradery. There's a lot of machismo in a fishing community. When they arrived in Manzanar, there was a little bit of conflict. There were people from Bainbridge Island, this very idyllic, very civilized little island over near Seattle. Yeah. Again, I guess we're talking a little bit about geography when we get all these little pockets together in this pressure cooker, and just seeing how different types of people react.
To set the book in Chicago was nice, in that you get people from all 10 camps altogether. That makes it interesting as well. But it was important for me to make Aki like a goody two ... She is definitely a middle class, a more upper middle class for a Japanese American. I was very intentional of having a woman like that because I wanted to show how she would encounter the Red Light District on Clark, and how that would transform her and make her reconsider her preconceived notions of her middle-class upbringing. That was important to me.
Hammer, the zoot suitor, he actually was raised in ... There were orphanages in Los Angeles specifically for Japanese, and he was part of that. It was based on a person that someone had described to me. I have a picture of him, too. He actually committed a crime in Manzanar and was sent to Boys Town in Nebraska. He broke out of Boys Town and ended up in Chicago. Of course, myself as a crime writer, I'm naturally going to gravitate towards a person like that. I just think it's really fascinating how these people in different walks of life are suddenly all together because they're all on Clark and Division. Before, they could be more siloed in different neighborhoods, but that's no longer the case.
Freeman: Do you think you could read a tiny bit from that section?
Hirahara: Sure. Let's see. This is where Aki goes to visit Rose's apartment.
At the foot of the stoop were Nisei boys in zoot suits, loose-pleated pants and boxy jackets with wide lapels and chains hanging from their belts. I'd seen the pachukes back in Los Angeles, around Downtown or Boyle Heights, where a lot of Japanese Americans lived alongside Mexicans, Russians, and Jews. I heard stories in camp that the boys would steal the chains connected to the sink-stoppers in the block lavatory to adorn their outfits. I hugged my purse to my chest and for a second, I regretted making this trip on my own.
'Hey, Manzanar girl. Twenty-nine,' a boy on the stoop called out, causing me some confusion until I recognized our block number. I had no idea who this boy was, but I wasn't in the mood to talk to him. In camp, there were certain boys you knew you needed to steer clear of. With the Issei elders all around, there were lines that they couldn't cross. But that wasn't the case in Chicago. I got the feeling that young people ruled here.
I put my head down and continued up the stairs. I had trouble opening the glass door, and the same boy came around and jimmied the latch. He smelled strongly of musky cologne that almost made me sneeze. 'That's how it's done,' he said. I tucked my chin away from him and pushed the door open with my left shoulder. I went up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. A cockroach skittered by and I remembered Rose writing that the city was infested with bedbugs. I suppressed the urge to scratch my ankles. Insects were the least of my worries.
On the left side of the stairs was the number four, my sister's residence. I almost dissolved into tears, but I took two big breaths. 'Ochitsukinasai,' I ordered myself. I needed to hold it together for Rose's sake.
Freeman: I love that scene. A lot of questions coming in here. When you were talking with Kristen before, you talked about trust as something that would have to be given to others because survival depended on working together. Yet, the situation in which Aki finds herself, she can't completely trust everybody because something terrible has happened to her sister, and she needs to know who to trust. I want to read a comment from Mizu Sugimura.
He said, "My folks were teens when they got out of camp, and I believed the admonition not to hang out with fellow Japanese Americans in the same situation when they were released from camp. And blend in, not only defines their immediate post-camp life, but bled into the family life that they presented when my sensei, brother, and I grew up. Some of it was unintentionally absorbed by us. As post middle-aged people," he says, "it's become easier to recognize, but we weren't always aware that this had happened. It became eventually part of our own legacy."
You're there in the moment now, in 1944, when these dynamics are shaping and shifting. One of the interpretations that the novel tracks and plays out is, how much do people pay attention to the "don't gather in groups"? How much do they trust? I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, how much awareness you feel as a novelist that you're at the beginning of not just a resurrected part of history, but the beginning of a psychological aspect that's going to have ramifications down the road.
Hirahara: Yeah, that's a really interesting comment. One thing. My husband, his maternal side of the family, they were incarcerated in Heart Mountain. Kristen was seated in front of that barrack near Cody, Wyoming. We've talked a lot about that intergenerational trauma and how it manifests itself. One just funny observation is, I think we've said we've watched when ... This is a stereotype, but I'll just say it. But we've noticed when African American men maybe pass each other or see each other. They're strangers, but they'll just say, "Hey." They'll just acknowledge each other. Whereas in other spaces, I've noticed this is probably maybe when I was maybe 30 years, when I was in my 30s, when another Asian American sees another Asian American, they will ignore each other.
I think it's changed now. I think young people are different now. But I think growing up in the '60s, '70s, it was like, "I don't want to be too associated with a person who might be other." We're not others. We're going to be part of the mainstream, whatever that means. I know even for writing, people in my family were saying, "Don't write about Japanese Americans. Write about white people because you're not going to make any money. You're not going to gain any success if you just write about Asians." Even, I guess for me, a Stanford graduate to go and work at the Rafu Shimpo in Little Tokyo, which had once printed ... I don't know if you know this, John, but basketball is very important in the Japanese American community.
I'm less than five feet tall, and I played basketball growing up. It used to publish my scores for Pasadena Bruin. And here I was, going to work there. I think people were saying, "Well, why don't you work for mainstream? Work with David Ulin at the LA Times." Maybe myself just actually working at a place like Rafu Shimpo, in a way, was not an active resistance, but I was definitely swimming in a different direction than other people were. I didn't know what would happen to me, but I am very glad that I made that decision to work with a community newspaper.
Freeman: I want to go back a little bit to a question from the audience, from Maryanne Gwen. Maybe we should have set this out a little earlier. "But why did Chicago become such a magnet for people who had left the camps? Why was the Relocation Authority sending people there as opposed to other cities?"
Hirahara: Well, it was the second-largest city at the time. It was located right in the middle of the country, away from the military zones, and it needed laborers. Unfortunately, the government didn't inform some of the labor unions all these Japanese Americans would be coming and working for factories, so there was a little bit of conflict there. But some people even worked for defense factories, which doesn't make any logical sense if you're saying these people are seditious. "Okay, let's send them to work in the military factories."
For all of those reasons, and the American Friends Service, the Quakers, they also had ties in Chicago, and they were facilitating this transition of Japanese Americans back into public life. For all of those reasons, that's why there were so many. The other spots were Denver, I believe, Detroit, Cleveland. There was also a movement to get young people into colleges, and usually there were some colleges that were open throughout the Midwest. But there were quotas. There's maybe only one or two students that could go to each college, but that was happening as well.
Freeman: It's shocking to read if only because I think as many of the commenters have pointed out, if you're of a certain age, you could have grown up in California and learned of the camps quite late. But on top of that, the resettlement is another vast trauma because it's not like people could go back to where they were from, as you're pointing out, that they were sent elsewhere and told to restart their lives in hostile environments. That hostility is part of this story, and the story of how mostly women at the center of this book form various interlocking networks of mutual aid that are working against men that are supposedly supposed to be helping them. That, in some way, solves a mystery of the book.
But there's a commenter who says, "We're very interested in knowing how Japanese people recovered from the confiscation of their property and businesses." That's somewhat the story of this book, but I wonder if I could bring in Kristen again to talk to you about that question. Because I think Kristen, that's a big part of your research.
Hayashi: Yeah. Sure. Sorry to comment on the question earlier about not congregating together. I think that was something that former incarcerees were told is not to do that in wherever they were going. But I think that's an important story of resilience. Well, I'll just say that the War Relocation Authority was about to dissolve soon, and so the government really left Japanese Americans behind, and they were forced to try to restart their lives on their own.
I think it's really these community organizations that get together. So churches, mutual aid societies like Gardeners, clubs, these different organizations that are helping to provide the assistance that people need to restart their lives. They would lend money to each other to help them restart businesses or those types of things. Because again, the government really did not provide the aid that they needed after the war, or after camp. Yeah.
Hirahara: Well, there was so much that was lost because a lot of people didn't own the farms. They were leasing the farms. Many of them, because it was spring, they had full crops and they just had to abandon them. The lucky ones were the ones who actually owned the land, and it depended on the situation. Some people had good caretakers that did take care of the land, and they were able to get it back.
Some people couldn't pay their property tax while they were in camp, and that was lost. There was a kind of endemic move to compensate the Japanese American. One of the early ones, Christian Wright, I think it was under Truman. It was in the 1940s. It was pennies on the dollar. I think there was a lot of paperwork you had to fill out in order to get any kind of money back, so it really wasn't that useful, I think.
Hayashi: That's right. Yeah, I don't think very many people were successful in getting financial support to compensate for their losses right after the war. Yeah.
Hirahara: I will say this, Nisei soldiers were able to take advantage of the GI Bill. I think that was helpful for those people. That was very different from African American soldiers because they should have gotten loans from banks, but banks refused to give many of them any kind of assistance. I learned that relatively recently, so it's just interesting how certain policies determined a whole family's trajectory in the future.
Hayashi: Yeah. I think in also, the case with the Ito family, that Mrs. Ito works for the first time after the war. I think that was the other thing too, is that some of these housewives who weren't working before had to find work to support their families after the war, or the young children had to support their families, too.
But I think one thing that isn't spoken of enough is assistance, public assistance that people were on, too. That wasn't the case before the war because they were financially somewhat stable. But then after the war, when you lost everything, you are having to depend on other government forms of assistance to restart your life, too.
Freeman: I love the fact that the opening of the book, the end-papers is a map of the neighborhood, and it has all those societies and associations that Kristen was talking about, including Newberry Library, where Aki ends up working. They're all publicly-shared spaces. They're places of assistance, help. I want to come to a question that another person in the audience has asked that both of you can address, which is, "Can you talk a little bit about Evergreen, particularly the place where the children are living?" This is the sequel to Clark and Division. "Is it based on a real place?" The person says, "I appreciate your writing a bit about the kinds of relationships between Black and Japanese community in LA during resettlement." This is Karen Madealmond asking a question.
Hirahara: I don't know if she's asking about the particular hotel, but definitely Little Tokyo, during World War II, had become a place where African American defense workers came and lived. And it was a bit overcrowded. But because of racial covenants, these families and individuals had no other place to live. They had jazz clubs. It was a very vibrant place. It was interesting when the Japanese Americans returned.
Some people feared that there was going to be some kind of riot, a race riot between those two groups. There was definitely some tension, but that kind of riot never occurred. Some of it, I'm sure, was due to the California Eagle and African American newspapers that were very supportive of Japanese Americans and their plight. But what are your thoughts, Kristen, about the whole transition of Bronzeville back to Japanese Americans?
Hayashi: Yeah. That's, I think, another understudied topic. I think the way it's portrayed is that it was Bronzeville during World War II, and then as Japanese Americans slowly returned to Los Angeles, it just naturally turned over to Little Tokyo again. I don't think it was as neat of a narrative as suggested, so I think there's a lot of interest in that. I think for a time, these two communities coexisted in Little Tokyo, but I think there probably had to have been more tension, and a little bit of conflict then is portrayed. I think that's an area that needs a lot of research. Yeah.
Hirahara: I think because these people were from the Deep South, they were a bit disenfranchised themselves. Because I think we want to find those oral histories from the African American perspective, and I don't think there's many out there. Hopefully, we can find some families who have just some stories, family stories that could be passed down. Because that's a big gap, and we want to see that filled in.
Freeman: I love the way that your book, Naomi, is intersecting with so many other books on the California Book Club reading list. One of the first books we read was Devil in a Blue Dress, which is a little bit after this period of when Bronzeville transitioned back to Little Tokyo. But the characters in that book would've moved out to Los Angeles to work in the defense industry, among other things. I want to end up with one final question from Robert Shogi who asks, "Besides Aki, who your favorite character in Clark and Division/Evergreen is, and why?"
Hirahara: Definitely Hammer, the zoot suitor. Because I think his perspective, he has nothing, but he's still a fighter. He has a lot of personality and he's empathetic. He's kind in his own way, maybe not on the outside. But he's very sympathetic to other people's situations, and I admire him for that. Who doesn't love a bad boy? There's always that kind of attraction. But yeah, I will have to say Hammer.
Freeman: This is why you write crime fiction.
Hirahara: Yeah.
Freeman: Oh, it's so wonderful talking to you, Naomi Hirahara and Kristen Hayashi. It's been lovely having you here and having your wisdom and perspective on this book and this time period. I would love to do this again when Evergreen is in paperback, or sometime, and continue the journey that Aki is on. Thank you, everyone, for coming. I think David Ulin is going to come back on and welcome Naomi in open arms into the post-LA Times universe.
Ulin: Yeah, it's the only universe. All right. Thank you all so much for that phenomenal and fascinating conversation. Big thanks to Naomi, to Kristen, to John. I want to remind everyone that this interview was recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com. I also want to remind everybody that next month, in the California Book Club, we'll be talking to Kelly Lytle Hernández about her book, Bad Mexicans. You do not want to miss that.
A reminder too about the Alta membership. Altaonline.com/join, or the $3 digital membership. We'd love to have you be part of this community with us. Please, participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as this event ends. Take care, everybody. Happy August. See you all next month. Goodnight.•
