the Rhinelander, the schottische, and the hambone. Everybody came out – hay farmers, clerks, merchants, fishermen, crabbers, carpenters, loggers, net weavers, truck farmers, junk dealers, real estate brigands, hack poets, ministers, lawyers, sailors, squatters, millwrights, cedar rats, teamsters, plumbers, mushroom foragers, and holly pruners. They picnicked at Burchillville and Sylvan Grove, listened while the high school band played sluggish Sousa marches, and sprawled under trees drinking port wine.
One part bacchanal, one part tribal potlatch, one part vestigial New England supper, the entire affair hinged on the coronation of the Strawberry Princess – always a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder – in an oddly solemn ceremony before the Island County Courthouse at sundown of the inaugural evening. Surrounded by a crescent of basketed strawberries, she received her crown with a bowed head from Amity Harbor’s mayor, who wore a red sash from shoulder to waist and carried a decorated scepter.In the hush that ensued he would announce gravely that the Department of Agriculture – he had a letter – credited their fair island with producing America’s Finest Strawberry, or that King George and Queen Elizabeth, on a recent visit to the city of Vancouver, had been served San Piedro’s Best for breakfast. A cheer would fly up as he stood with scepter high, his free hand about the young maiden’s shapely shoulder. The girl, it turned out, was an unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice who allowed the festivities to go forward with no uttered ill will.
The next day, at noon traditionally, the Japanese began picking raspberries.
Thus life went forward on San Piedro. By Pearl Harbor Day there were eight hundred and forty-three people of Japanese descent living there, including twelve seniors at Amity Harbor High School who did not graduate that spring. Early on the morning of March 29, 1942, fifteen transports of the U.S. War Relocation Authority took all of San Piedro’s Japanese-Americans to the ferry terminal in Amity Harbor.
They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on, people who had risen early to stand in the cold and watch this exorcising of the Japanese from their midst – friends, some of them, but the merely curious, mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything.
During the morning recess the accused man’s wife had come alone to the row of seats behind the defendant’s table and asked permission to speak with her husband.
‘You’ll have to do it from back there,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘Mr. Miyamoto can turn and face you all right, but that’s about it, you see. I’m not supposed to let him move around much.’
Once each afternoon, for seventy-seven days, Hatsue Miyamoto had appeared at the Island County Jail for a three o’clock visit with her husband. At first she came alone and spoke with him through a pane of glass, but then he asked her to bring the children. Thereafter she did so – two girls, eight and four, who walked behind her, and a boy of eleven months whom she carried in her arms. Kabuo was in jail on the morning their son began to walk, but in the afternoon she brought the boy and he took four steps while his father watched from behind the visiting room windowpane. Afterward she’d held him up to the glass and Kabuo spoke to him through the microphone. ‘You can go further than me!’ he’d said. ‘You take some steps for me, okay?’
Now, in the courtroom, he turned toward Hatsue. ‘How are the kids?’ he said.
‘They need their father,’
One part bacchanal, one part tribal potlatch, one part vestigial New England supper, the entire affair hinged on the coronation of the Strawberry Princess – always a virginal Japanese maiden dressed in satin and dusted carefully across the face with rice powder – in an oddly solemn ceremony before the Island County Courthouse at sundown of the inaugural evening. Surrounded by a crescent of basketed strawberries, she received her crown with a bowed head from Amity Harbor’s mayor, who wore a red sash from shoulder to waist and carried a decorated scepter.In the hush that ensued he would announce gravely that the Department of Agriculture – he had a letter – credited their fair island with producing America’s Finest Strawberry, or that King George and Queen Elizabeth, on a recent visit to the city of Vancouver, had been served San Piedro’s Best for breakfast. A cheer would fly up as he stood with scepter high, his free hand about the young maiden’s shapely shoulder. The girl, it turned out, was an unwitting intermediary between two communities, a human sacrifice who allowed the festivities to go forward with no uttered ill will.
The next day, at noon traditionally, the Japanese began picking raspberries.
Thus life went forward on San Piedro. By Pearl Harbor Day there were eight hundred and forty-three people of Japanese descent living there, including twelve seniors at Amity Harbor High School who did not graduate that spring. Early on the morning of March 29, 1942, fifteen transports of the U.S. War Relocation Authority took all of San Piedro’s Japanese-Americans to the ferry terminal in Amity Harbor.
They were loaded onto a ship while their white neighbors looked on, people who had risen early to stand in the cold and watch this exorcising of the Japanese from their midst – friends, some of them, but the merely curious, mainly, and fishermen who stood on the decks of their boats out in Amity Harbor. The fishermen felt, like most islanders, that this exiling of the Japanese was the right thing to do, and leaned against the cabins of their stern-pickers and bow-pickers with the conviction that the Japanese must go for reasons that made sense: there was a war on and that changed everything.
During the morning recess the accused man’s wife had come alone to the row of seats behind the defendant’s table and asked permission to speak with her husband.
‘You’ll have to do it from back there,’ said Abel Martinson. ‘Mr. Miyamoto can turn and face you all right, but that’s about it, you see. I’m not supposed to let him move around much.’
Once each afternoon, for seventy-seven days, Hatsue Miyamoto had appeared at the Island County Jail for a three o’clock visit with her husband. At first she came alone and spoke with him through a pane of glass, but then he asked her to bring the children. Thereafter she did so – two girls, eight and four, who walked behind her, and a boy of eleven months whom she carried in her arms. Kabuo was in jail on the morning their son began to walk, but in the afternoon she brought the boy and he took four steps while his father watched from behind the visiting room windowpane. Afterward she’d held him up to the glass and Kabuo spoke to him through the microphone. ‘You can go further than me!’ he’d said. ‘You take some steps for me, okay?’
Now, in the courtroom, he turned toward Hatsue. ‘How are the kids?’ he said.
‘They need their father,’
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