The Diplomat’s Daughter Read online

  Their destination was the port of Mormugao in Goa, a Portuguese territory on the west coast of India. Arriving in Goa meant much more than being able to walk on solid ground for a few hours. It meant the day of the switch. The Japanese and Japanese-Americans would disembark from the Gripsholm and the people the U.S. government deemed “real Americans” would be loaded on. The passengers on the Gripsholm were told that the whole process would only take a few hours, so they wouldn’t have time to see anything in Goa besides the port and their new ship, the Teia Maru.

  “I don’t think anyone on this boat wants to waste their time sightseeing now,” said Chiyo. “This certainly isn’t a pleasure cruise.”

  “I’d have to agree,” said Keiko. “I think we are all just ready to be in Japan and not on these choppy waters. I don’t know how much longer my stomach can take it.”

  “It better get stronger quickly, Kato-san,” said Chiyo, her expression indicating that she was enjoying Keiko’s admission of weakness. “After we trade boats in Goa we have to travel around the southern tip of India to Singapore, then on to San Fernando Bay in the Philippines, then to French Indochina, which I hear has the most beautiful cranes, though I doubt we will see any. Then we are to go on to Hong Kong, then Shanghai, and finally Yokohama. Would you like to see a map? I have one in our room. It’s still a very long journey. How many days?” she asked her smirking daughter.

  “Very many more,” said Naoko. “At least thirty.”

  “Did you hear? At least thirty,” she said to Keiko. “So time to toughen up, Kato-san. There are no servants to wait on you here and certainly not on the next boat, run by the Japanese. Unless you think that’s what we are. Your servants.” She executed a deep bow in the style reserved for the highest dignitaries, and then righted herself and gave Keiko a pitying look.

  “Come, Emiko,” said Keiko, pleasantly. “Let’s go down and finish packing our things.”

  “If we are rooming with the Kuriyamas on the Teia Maru, you can just leave me in India,” Emi whispered to her mother as they walked away. “Contracting typhoid and dying alone seems less painful than another month with that pair.”

  When the boat finally pulled up to the shore the morning of October 15, the salted warm air wafted up, smelling foreign and thick with humidity, unlike that of even Washington, D.C., or Tokyo. Would anyone try to run from the boat and stay in India? Emi wondered. She looked out at the dark-skinned men on the dock, most of them shirtless and barefoot, busily trying to maneuver the giant ship into position, and was jealous for a moment that they got to live in a peaceful country. Maybe, she thought, she should be the rogue passenger who stayed in India. Keiko’s hand brushed her shoulder and Emi remembered that even though she was twenty-one, as an unmarried woman she wasn’t free to make her own choices.

  The Teia Maru had not yet arrived, so the public spectacle they were destined to create was still modest. All the same, by the time they’d been at anchor for an hour, the crowd of Indians at the dock was growing. The Portuguese officials in Goa, who were helping with the transfer, managed to keep most of the civilians back, but a group of teenagers broke away and ran onto the pier closest to the Gripsholm, waving their hands and screaming. From that moment on, the chaos of the day was in full swing.

  When the Teia Maru finally appeared, Emi saw illuminated crosses along the sides, the same as they had on their boat, to help keep them safe from enemy submarines. The men in charge of the switch, all Portuguese military men, didn’t waste any time. They made sure the ships were docked end to end and a short metal walkway was placed between their decks. The Gripsholm passengers were instructed to walk onto their new ship without speaking a word to the Americans leaving the Teia Maru.

  “Avoid eye contact,” the Portuguese officials suggested. “It will be much easier if you look down.”

  When everything was as organized as possible, the passengers from each ship crossed in two horizontal lines, like ants on a log, with just a few yards separating them on the wide walkway.

  It was impossible, Emi and the rest of the passengers immediately realized, not to make eye contact with the Caucasian faces streaming past them. Do they know where we have spent the last year? Emi wondered to herself. Were they in internment camps, too? Do they want to go back to America? She stared at them as they passed by in their tight, orderly line, almost all looking back at her with friendly, exhausted faces. “These are the kind of Americans who would not put Japanese people behind barbed-wire fences,” she whispered to her mother. “They chose to go to Japan. They’ve lived like we have.”

  It took more than two hours for all the passengers to make it onto their new boats, but no happy sounds floated out from the Japanese arriving on board the Teia Maru. The Japanese boat, built by the French a decade before, was thoroughly inferior to the Gripsholm. It was smaller, much dirtier, the facilities were rudimentary, and it had a capacity of only seven hundred. One thousand five hundred and three Americans had just disembarked from it and almost that many Japanese had boarded. Emi sighed and leaned against the wall, trying to avoid having her feet trampled and suitcases pushed into her body. The Teia Maru was as packed as the swimming pool at Crystal City after sunset.

  As the boat pulled away from the dock that evening, the passengers heard singing from the Gripsholm. Many of the Americans being repatriated were missionaries, and Emi knew from attending Christian church at her schools in Europe and Washington that religious Westerners all knew the same songs. It seemed to be the case on the ship, too, for even as the Teia Maru sailed farther away, the singing on the Gripsholm grew louder, as if more people were joining in. Emi could still hear the song even when their faces were blurred: “In Christ there is no East or West, in Him no South or North, but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide world.”

  “Maybe they’re singing that song to us because they’ve seen their luxurious new boat and feel sorry for us on this rowboat,” said Emi.

  “You complain too much,” her mother replied crossly, but Emi could tell that she was just as disgusted by the Teia Maru as her daughter was.

  When the two went down to their cabin, they saw immediately how much worse this leg of the journey would be. Theirs was a room for two, but four would apparently be sleeping in it, as a pair of straw pallets had been placed on the floor, shoved tightly against the narrow beds. Keiko said that Emi would have to sleep on one of them, even though they were in the room first, and she propped one pallet up temporarily against her own bed to make room for the other passengers, who soon arrived. Emi looked up to see the downcast faces of Chiyo and Naoko Kuriyama.

  “Of course,” hissed Emi to her mother when they had unpacked their things and left the cabin. “Why don’t they just have me sleep next to a horse?”

  The other problem on the Teia Maru was that while every cabin had a small washbasin—with the water on for two hours a day, from six to seven in the morning and from five to six at night—there were only two real bathrooms on their ship. After just a few hours at sea, the ship smelled worse than a stable.

  But Emi and Keiko soon discovered that they were lucky to have a room at all, for many of the men did not. In good weather they had to sleep on straw pallets on the deck; in bad, they were in the hallways. This was problematic not only for them, but for everyone on board because of the threat of fire. As there was so little to do during their long, tedious days at sea, many passengers chain-smoked, and while they were ordered to throw the cigarette butts into the water, they often missed and the straw pallets continuously caught on fire. Adding to the unpleasantness of the journey, the Japanese crew had surprisingly miscalculated how much rice the Japanese passengers would eat compared to the Americans, and by the time their eighty-three-day trip was coming to an end, the only rice that was left was infested with worms.

  Because of the poor food and their inability to sleep well in their claustrophobic space, Emi and Keiko could both put a fist in their pant waistbands by the time they were three
days out from Japan.

  “Your father will be worried when he sees us starved like this,” said Keiko as the two packed a few more things in their suitcases. Emi had been almost completely packed for the last week, desperate to finally be off the boat. She wondered if she would be able to stay on deck when Japan finally came into view or if the desire to be on familiar dry land might impel her and hundreds of others to jump off the boat and try to swim ashore.

  She turned to sit on her straw bed, as beds were the only place to sit in their cabin. As soon as she was somewhat comfortable, and her mother next to her, the door opened and Chiyo came in. Emi had stopped bothering to smile at Chiyo now that the trip was almost over, as the older woman had become much more unpleasant on the Teia Maru than she was on the Gripsholm. If the Japanese coastline didn’t lure Emi into jumping ship, she thought, the prospect of getting away from Chiyo surely would.

  “Oh, you’re both here,” Chiyo said as she closed the door behind her. “I was just finishing my lunch on deck when I thought how sad you must be, Emi, now that we’ve almost reached Japan. I know how you feel more comfortable around gaijin. Now that one cook on the Gripsholm, the young one with the blue eyes, he reminded me a bit of the boy you had the affair with in Crystal City,” she said, dropping her packet of cigarettes on the bed. “I imagine you miss him. The boy from Crystal City, not the Gripsholm cook.”

  To Emi’s surprise, her mother responded before she did, her voice calm but resolute.

  “Kuriyama-san, I do think this arduous journey is going to your head. You are speaking as if you have some intimate knowledge of my daughter’s life, which you do not. We have just been unlucky enough to have to room with you for nearly three months and this must have you thinking that you know certain things about our lives. But let me take this opportunity to correct you. You do not know a thing about my daughter, or me, other than the positions we sleep in. If you are entertaining the idea that it would be amusing to spread wild rumors about Emiko when we are back in Japan, I will take this opportunity to remind you that we are not returning to the Japan we used to know. People, especially ordinary people, are so powerless when a country is at war, and they wouldn’t want to find themselves in an even more difficult situation just because of a rumor they’d taken pleasure in spreading. So, Kuriyama-san, what was it again that you said about my daughter?”

  Chiyo looked at Emi with disdain and frowned at both of them. “I said that it was an honor rooming with her for the last eighty days and that I will cherish the next three.”

  “What a thoughtful thing to say,” said Keiko, standing up. “Emiko and I were just going to go take some air. I’m glad we were able to see you before we left the room. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

  Emi and her mother left in silence and walked up to the most private part of the deck near the roaring engine. Emi turned to her mother and started to cry.

  “No,” said Keiko. “You can’t. Not here.”

  “Then where?” Emi asked, sniffling. “In our shared room? In one of the two bathrooms that have a line of a dozen people or more night and day? Where can I cry, mother?”

  “You can’t cry at all, Emiko,” said Keiko. “Not over a woman like that. And besides, you know what she is saying is true. You did have an affair and you can’t expect the bad apples of the world to ignore it. You made your choice and you are living through the consequences.”

  Emi wiped her eyes and managed to swallow the rest of her tears. “It was stupid of me, I know. Careless. But Christian, he was the only good thing that happened in over a year.”

  “I know,” said Keiko. “But it’s often the things you enjoy that have the most devastating consequences. Come,” she said, turning to walk inside. “Let’s not speak of it anymore. You can’t undo it, and from the sound of it, you wouldn’t want to anyway. It’s been a long time since I threatened someone. It felt rather good. Let’s just hope it works. And never, ever mention Christian Lange to your father.”

  “When have you ever threatened someone before?” asked Emi, ignoring her mother’s last warning. It went without saying that Norio Kato was never to know the details about her time in Crystal City.

  “Women,” she said to Emi, “have fascinating lives before they become mothers. Perhaps I was a little bit different before I married your father and had you. A little more daring.” She looked at her daughter and smiled. “A little more like you.”

  On the last three days of the trip, the weather cooperated and Emi and her mother decided to sleep on straw pallets on deck instead of in their room with the Kuriyamas. “Better to be cold than to be insulted,” said Keiko as she reached for her daughter’s hand.

  “It is,” said Emi. “And I suppose we should enjoy being outside, without worrying about bombs dropping on our heads. Here, we just worry about rain.”

  CHAPTER 21

  EMI KATO

  NOVEMBER 1943

  Unlike in New York, where everyone had appeared happy to see them depart, some hurling insults at them as easily as they might toss a flower, coming into port in Japan was a heartening experience. The dock was packed with people desperate to reunite with their relatives. Before the passengers on the Teia Maru were close enough to pick out individuals in the crowd, they could see the sea of small flags waving in welcome.

  “Perhaps the country will be difficult to live in when we arrive,” said Keiko. “But here, from a distance, it’s beautiful.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Emi reaching up to fix her hair, caring for the first time in eighty-three days how it looked.

  The thrill of returning to Japan was somewhat dampened by the inspection they all had to succumb to after they docked. Eager though they were to disembark and find their families, the passengers had to line up again in their orderly rows under the watchful eye of stern government officials, this time Japanese. Small wooden tables were set all around the deck of the ship and Japanese military men questioned them at length. The small man with a red and white armband assigned to the Katos was astonished to learn that Emi and her mother should have gone back with the diplomatic corps in 1942.

  “But why didn’t you come home with your husband?” said the man, looking at their papers.

  “My daughter was very sick with tuberculosis. Here, we have her medical papers,” Keiko said, pushing the stack of documents at him, though they were all written in English. “She could not travel. We were banned from the boat in 1942 as they were afraid she would give the ambassador and the other diplomats tuberculosis.” The official took a long look at the yellow and pink papers, then stamped everything with an intricate red stamp before dismissing them to bow to a photograph of the emperor.

  “How strange to see so many men in military uniform,” said Emi when they had gathered their belongings, “and to see the military flag, the navy flag instead of our usual one.”

  “Things are going to be very different,” said Keiko, walking slowly. “It will not be the Japan that we last saw in 1939. You read your father’s last letter in Crystal City. It’s a blessing that you are not going to school here, as all your time would be spent learning how to be more obedient. Never your strong suit.”

  “I’m surprised that made it past the censors,” said Emi, knowing her mother was right.

  “I’m sure they let in letters that seemed disparaging to Japan.”

  “But Father is loyal to Japan. He’s working for the Foreign Ministry.”

  “Of course he’s loyal, as we must be,” said Keiko just above a whisper. “But you know your father. He will question everything, though he always wants what’s best for our country.”

  “And not for the West,” said Emi, trying to move ahead of a group of particularly slow women.

  “The West is behind us now,” said Keiko. “No longer a part of us. I am sure we will see much anti-Western propaganda at home, especially against America and England. For some of the diplomats, for you, that hatred may be hard to comprehend, but we must simply ignore it.” Emi was abo
ut to protest but her mother interrupted her. “Instead of arguing, how about we try to get off this boat and never set foot on it again.”

  Emi shook her head in agreement and together the Katos walked down the metal plank to the dock, not bothering to turn around to see the ship one last time, and were instantly absorbed into the chaos. Despite the jostling and shoving of the crowd, Emi and Keiko stayed side by side, their angular bodies pressed together, weary legs braced, looking out for Norio Kato.

  “There!” cried Emi after ten minutes battling the crowd. She pointed to where she’d spotted her father’s profile. She had inherited her height from him and he stood half a head above the men around him. “Otōsan! Otōsan!” she called before realizing that everyone was screaming the Japanese word for father. “Vater!” she called instead, using the German word. “Vater Kato!” He heard it the third time, then spun round and saw them, his expression changing quickly from confusion to joy.

  “There you are!” he exclaimed, reaching them first. “My family!” He gave his daughter a long hug and kissed his wife’s head, making a happy humming sound as his lips touched her. Though public affection was not at all the norm in Japan, especially on such solemn occasions, Norio Kato had lived abroad for so long that different instincts guided him in emotional moments. Emi threw her arms around her father, not caring about any sort of cultural norms, and laid her face on his shoulder, something she hadn’t done since they were all together in West Virginia in 1942.

  “Father!” she said after she’d pulled away. “You look gaunt! Where is your belly?”

  “Gone,” said Norio, opening his coat buttons and showing off his flat stomach. “It looks better, doesn’t it? Nothing like war to help take the pounds off a man. I’ve been trying to lose them since we left Austria.” He sighed and helped his wife and daughter find their things, before going to reserve a taxi. “It’s been a very difficult year,” he said when he came back. “And Tokyo, you’ll see, it’s not the same.”