Free Farewell to Manzanar by James D. Houston Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

began to smg songs in Japanese, warming their hands on either side of the stove, facing each other in its glow. After a while Papa sang the first line of the Japanese national anthem, Kimi ga yo. Woody, Chizu, and Mama knew the tune, so they hummed along while Papa and the other woman sang the words. It can be a hearty or a plamtive tune, depending on your mood. From Papa, that night, it was a deep-throated lament. Almost invisible in the stovers small glow, tears began running down his face.
    I had seen him cry a few times before. It only happened when he was singing or when someone else sang a song that moved hhn. He played the three-stringed samisen, which ICiyo and I called his "pinko-pinko." We would laugh together when we heard him plucking it and whining out old Japanese melodies. We would hold our ears and giggle. It was always a great joke between us, except for those rare times when Papa began to weep at the lyrics. Then we would just stare quietly—as I did that night—^from some hidden comer of the room. This was always mysterious and incomprehensible.
    The national anthem, I later learned, is what he had sung every morning as a schoolboy in Japan. They still sing it there, the way American kids pledge allegiance to the flag. It is not a martial song, or a victory song, the way many national anthems are. It is really a poem, whose words to back to the ninth century;
    Kimi ga yo wa chiyoni
    yachiyoni sa-za-re Ushi no i-wa-o to
    na-ri'te ko-ke no musu made.
    May thy peaceful reign last long. May it last for thousands of years. Until this tiny stone will grow Into a massive rock, and the moss Will cover it deep and thick. 64

    It is a patriotic song that can also be read as a proverb, as a personal credo for endurance. The stone can be the kingdom or it can be a man's life. The moss is the greenery that, in time, wiU spring even from a rock. In Japan, before the tmn of the centiu^, outside my father's house there stood one of those stone lanterns, with four stubby legs and a small pagodalike roof. Each morning someone in the household would pour a bucketful of water over his lantern, and after several years a skin of living vegetation began to show on the stone. As a boy he was taught that the last line of the anthem refers to a certain type of mossy lichen with exquisitely tiny white flowers sprinkled in amongst the green.

    nection was her job as dietician. A whole half of one barracks had fallen empty when another family relocated. Mama hustled us in there almost before they'd snapped their suitcases shut.
    For all the pain it caused, the loyalty oath finally did speed up the relocation program. One result was a gradual easing of the congestion in the barracks. A shrewd househunter like Mama could set things up fairly comfortably—^by Manzanar standards—^if she kept her eyes open. But you had to move fast. As soon as the word got around that so-and-so had been cleared to leave, there would be a kind of tribal restlessness, a nervous rise in the level of neighborhood gossip as wives jockeyed for position to see who would get the empty cubicles.
    In Block 28 we doubled our living space—^four rooms for the twelve of us. Ray and Woody walled them with sheetrock. We had ceilings this time, and linoleum floors of soUd maroon. You had three colors to choose from—^maroon, black, and forest green—and there was plenty of it around by this time. Some families would vie with one another for the most elegant floor designs, obtaining a roll of each color from the supply shed, cutting it into diamonds, squares, or triangles, shining it with heating oil, then leaving their doors open so that passers-by could admire the handiwork.
    Papa brought his still with him when we moved. He set it up behind the door, where he continued to brew his own sake and brandy. He wasn't drinking as much now, though. He spent a lot of time outdoors. Like many of the older Issei men, he didn't take a regular job in camp. He puttered. He had