A True Story
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and courage: the special Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights, even if it meant imprisonment.
In 1941, there were forty-five million radios in the United States, and on any given Sunday most of them were likely to be turned on. Radio programming was enormously popular throughout the country, particularly on Sunday afternoons, after church, when life offered working Americans an opportunity to finally sit down, pick up some knitting needles or a newspaper or a panful of peas in need of shelling, and enjoy a broadcast. But when the first bulletins about Pearl Harbor came crackling across the airwaves that day, whatever they had been doing, whatever they had been listening to, faded instantly into insignificance for millions of Americans and their allies around the world. In Los Angeles and in Omaha, in London and in Toronto, people leaned closer to their radios, beckoned others to gather around, and listened intently. In those first few minutes, most of them understood that whatever else the news signified, it meant that a generation, their generation, was about to be defined forever.
One of the radios turned on that day was in a small apartment over a small commercial laundry in a beaten-down neighborhood called Hillyard, on the shabby side of Spokane, Washington.
Hillyard was a rough-hewn place, a mile or so of old brick storefronts and small, wood-frame houses squatting on weedy lots alongside the sprawling, five-hundred-acre rail yard of James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway. With a roundhouse capable of holding twenty locomotives at a time, massive sheds for the manufacture and repair of more locomotives, enormous tanks for storing oil, a lumber mill for making railroad ties, gravel pits, machine shops, and rows of boxcars with their wheels removed and converted into cheap housing for workers, the Great Northern yard was a bedlam of clanging steel, shrieking whistles, and engines belching steam, day and night. It was a world of grime and grease and grit, of soot and sweat, of perpetually soiled overalls and grubby work shirts — the kind of place that needed a laundry nearby.
Just half a block from the yard, the Hillyard Laundry occupied the downstairs portion of a narrow two-story building on East Olympic Avenue. The laundry’s busy proprietors, Kisaburo and Tori Shiosaki, were at their ease that morning after another long week of work. Six days a week, the Shiosakis arose well before dawn to begin their sixteen-hour workdays, firing up the laundry’s huge boilers, operating the whirring extractor that spun most of the water out of hundreds of pounds of wet clothes and bedsheets, wrestling the still wet laundry into two large electric dryers, pulling it all out, and then ironing, shaking, and folding it, until it was finally time to open the shop at 7:00 a.m. and greet the day’s first customers.
Most of the Shiosakis’ customers, indeed most of Hillyard’s residents, were recent immigrants — mostly German, Irish, Scandinavian, or Italian laborers, the majority of whom worked for the Great Northern in one capacity or another. A few were Japanese, from a colony of railroad workers who lived in the boxcars on the other side of the tracks in a place called Dogtown, the only place in the Spokane area that could be called a step down from Hillyard. Whichever side of the tracks they came from, their customers were almost universally fond of the Shiosakis, whom they called Kay and Mrs. Kay, monikers that the pair liked and happily embraced for themselves. Pretty much everyone in town enjoyed stopping in for a few minutes to exchange pleasantries and a bit of morning gossip with Kay and Mrs. Kay before they dropped off their laundry and got on with their day’s work. But that December Sunday was a day for resting up, for Kisaburo to sit back, read the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and enjoy a few of the big, White Owl cigars that he favored. It was a cold, mostly clear day in Hillyard, not quite freezing, but just on the edge of it. The snow from a storm the week before had mostly melted, but the streets were still icy, the ground rock hard, the vegetation in James J. Hill Park over on Nebraska Avenue brown and withered. Driven by a chilling north wind, a few high clouds scudded rapidly across a nearly white sky. Small as it was — just two bedrooms, a sitting room, and a kitchen — the apartment over the laundry was pleasant, cozy, and warm, the wet heat rising from the big boilers downstairs, steaming up the windows. And it was full of the usual comfortable Sunday morning smells — eggs frying, toast browning, tea brewing on the stove.
If she had time, Tori Shiosaki thought she might go downtown to the Methodist Mission Church in Spokane to visit with some of the Japanese ladies there. After a week of struggling to communicate with her customers in English, she always enjoyed being able to speak Japanese.
The Shiosakis’ seventeen-year-old son, Fred, had turned the radio on. He wasn’t really looking forward to the next morning. The school week usually dragged for Fred. He was a competent but not particularly enthusiastic student at John R. Rogers High. He was vice president of the school’s photography club and popular on the track team, but he really lived for his weekends, particularly his Saturdays. His Saturday mornings, like his weekday mornings, began at dawn with chores, mostly cutting and splitting the seemingly endless supply of firewood required by the boilers, but by afternoon he was free to play baseball with his friends in one of the town’s many vacant lots, take photographs around town, ride his bike down to the Rialto Theater on Diamond Avenue to catch a matinee western, or wander among the sagebrush and ponderosa pines up in Spokane’s dry, dusty hills, plinking at tin cans with his .22 rifle.
At five feet six, Fred was a slight, bespectacled young man, light-skinned with a tendency to pink up in the cheeks when the weather turned cold or he got excited. He had a twinkle in his eye, a ready smile, a surprisingly hearty laugh, and a ready willingness to poke fun at himself. He was polite, and courteous as a first instinct. In a tough town like Hillyard — and it was a very tough town, particularly if you were a kid trying to hold your own out on its potholed streets — he looked at first glance like someone you could steamroll, pick a fight with, and walk away a winner. More than a few Hillyard boys had made that calculation over the years, and nearly all of them had quickly come to regret it. For all his genuine good nature, Fred had a core of steel. If someone tried to take advantage of him, the politeness melted away in an instant. He wound up in so many scuffles that his father threatened to stop buying him new eyeglasses if he kept coming home with smashed pairs. At fifteen dollars a pair, it was straining the family budget. More often than not, the fights arose because in the ethnic stew of Hillyard race and ethnicity were often a bully’s first and most potent line of attack. Fred would not abide being bullied, and above all he would not abide being called a Jap. It didn’t matter a whit how big the boy hurling the epithet at him was. Defiance would rise in Fred like a cobra. With narrowed eyes and a clenched jaw, he would hiss out the first cussword he could think of, clench his fists, and go at the offender in a flash. He didn’t always win, but he never backed down.
At 11:30 a.m., Fred was listening to the opening of The World Today, a regular CBS news show, when an agitated voice abruptly broke into the broadcast: “Go ahead, New York!” Then a different voice, the show’s anchor, John Charles Daly, was suddenly on the air. This voice was urgent, crackling through the speaker: “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by air, President Roosevelt has just announced.” Fred looked up, startled, trying to comprehend. Daly went on, “The attack also was made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of O‘ahu.”* Fred called to his father in the next room, “Hey, Pop. The Japanese have attacked Hawaii.” Fred’s parents, his brother Floyd, and his sister, Blanche, all gathered around Fred and the radio. His parents suddenly looked drawn, pale, tense. After listening for a while, Kisaburo murmured, “It’s not going to last long.” But he didn’t look convinced, and Fred couldn’t decipher what exactly his father meant. Why wouldn’t it last long? Troubling thoughts began to worm their way through his mind: What would happen to the laundry? What would his friends and neighbors do? What would happen at school the next day?
As the noon hour passed, Fred put his homework aside unfinished and sat in front of the radio stunned as the word began to pour out, over and over again, sounding more and more venomous each time.
“The Japs.” “The dirty Japs.” “The dirty yellow Japs.” This time, though, the word wasn’t coming from adolescent bullies on the streets of Hillyard; it was coming from adults, from stern-voiced news announcers, from military officials issuing emergency proclamations, from figures of respect and authority.
It was serious, sober, cold, official, and it seemed to be coming from the heart of America itself.
Excerpted from Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown, permission of Viking. Download Buzz Books 2021 to read more of this title, as well as dozens of other excerpts of forthcoming books.
