In U.S., Patriots Speak Out

We Americans like things simple.

Weak is bad. Strong is good.

American politics, stomped down to the grass roots, is a series of litmus tests. Red or blue, right or wrong, where are you ?

Ambivalence is neither here nor there, Purgatory on earth, a road to nowhere fast.

We won the war in the Persian Gulf.

Say that with conviction, without any tone in your voice, and leave it at that. It was fast. It was clean. Do not look at the enemy’s blood. Do not look at what is happening now.

Just follow the leader and you will be fine. Remember that dissent is out and doubt is not right.

Politicians know this better than most. Look at how they voted on the war and then look at their chests. They are either puffed out or concave, depending on which way they went.

Even a city, San Francisco, is being accused of traitorous intent. San Francisco, full of radical freaks, had declared itself a sanctuary for conscientious objectors to the war.

Now the city must pay! Conventions are canceling. Politicians in Orange County say the boycott should spread. They are urging that the League of California Cities move its October conference from the city too.

All of the above is dangerous, dangerous stuff.

Fumi and Yozo Kobayashi have seen such polarization up close. It has fangs.

Fumi went to a political demonstration once, a couple of years ago, in front of Irvine City Hall. A woman came up to her, grabbed her by the arm and told her to go back to her own country, where she belongs.

Fumi Kobayashi was born in Los Angeles. She is 76 years old.

Fumi and Yozo Kobayashi used to live in Leisure World, in Laguna Hills. Yozo went on that community’s cable TV network to talk about being interned during World War II, with Fumi and their toddler son.

Yozo was born in Hanford, Calif., but his parents were living in Hiroshima, Japan, during the war. Today Yozo is 84.

Yozo doesn’t go on television anymore. He got hate letters after the show. People told him he was lucky. What a break, they said, to be housed and fed, without having to work. He could have been cremated too.

Yozo and Fumi Kobayashi have moved to Mission Viejo. They lead quiet lives. I wanted to put their picture in the newspaper, but they declined.

I came to talk to them because a local group that has benefited from the Kobayashis’ largess gave me a call.

Yozo and Fumi each recently received a check for $20,000 in the mail. It is their share of the reparation settlement that the U.S. government has agreed to pay Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

The Kobayashis are giving the money away, to pay for their granddaughters’ college educations, to a friend in need and to groups working for peace and for different environmental causes.

“As long as we received a formal apology from the government, that is what is important,” Fumi says.

Still, the images linger of a nation split over war. They will never disappear.

Yozo and Fumi, who were living in Riverside at the time, volunteered to go an internment camp in Poston, Ariz. They went by bus, with shades drawn over the windows. They thought, surely, all of this would be cleared up soon.

It was not.

“I’ll never forget it,” Yozo says. “When we arrived, the official who was in charge said, ‘Welcome to Poston!’ ”

Yozo gives a little laugh, then shakes his head.

The Kobayashis’ only child, Byron, was 2 1/2.

“It was horrendous,” Fumi says. “Byron was bewildered. He kept saying, ‘Mommy, where are we going?’ ”

And after being fingerprinted, photographed and assigned to their barracks, the internees were each given a sack to stuff with hay, on which they would sleep. The bales were dumped outside. A desert sandstorm made it nearly impossible to see.

“We had to tie cloth over our faces,” Fumi says. “It just peels your skin off practically. My son was inside the barracks, hugging his panda bear. I can’t forget it. He kept saying, ‘Don’t cry, panda. Don’t cry.’ ”

The Kobayashis stayed in the camp about a year and a half. They were released early because Yozo, at the age of 36, volunteered to fight in the war. He wanted to prove that he was loyal to the land of his birth.

Fumi and her son were sent to Michigan, where she worked in a preschool. Yozo was assigned to an Army artillery unit. He made corporal. He served in Italy, France and Germany. His unit, the 522nd, went into Dachau to help free the Jews.

After the war, the Kobayashis were told they could not return to the West Coast.

When, finally, they did, it was because Yozo was offered a job as a radiologist at the Ft. Miley Veterans Hospital in San Francisco. He was made supervisor and retired from there after 30 years. Fumi had her own beauty shop.

“I can see the futility of war,” Yozo says. “From World War II on, it hasn’t settled anything. The only means I can see now is peaceful means.”

“I think people have got to learn to get along together,” adds his wife. “I think the country needs to grow up. We need to mature, to go beyond war. That’s my feeling. It is coming from my gut level. I feel it, even though I can’t articulate it well.”

Which, of course, is not true. The Kobayashis are modest people, raised, they say, never to make a fuss.

“Put up and shut up, that is how we were brought up,” Fumi says. “That is what our parents said. There’s even a word for it in Japanese, to just put up.”

Now the Kobayashis have learned to speak out.

Because, in America, that is what patriots do.