Dad never talked about Minidoka.
That was the noble thing.
Before World War II,
there was Garfield High School for him,
ice skating on Greenlake,
dances at Lake Wilderness Lodge,
later his ownership of Elk Grocery
on Seneca Street.
He and my mother were
married in 1941,
ten months later to be removed
…forced… into the Minidoka concentration camp.
Mom was five months pregnant in August
with my older brother, Alan.
With black-out curtains drawn, the train
left Puyallup and climbed the Cascade mountains
until the land flattened and the inescapable sun
transformed the train cars into a moving sauna.
People gasped small, panicked breaths
from the superheated air.
Shikataganai—“It can’t be helped.”
The train stopped by the side of an unmarked road
in the Idaho desert, released
its passengers miles from any station.
Rumors spread they would be shot
or marched to death – their bodies stacked, then
carted to some awaiting ditch.
Nowhere to run, they walk in their best shoes
in the gritty sand as on the face of the moon.
The heat caused some to faint
as they carried all they could.
Three years later, Dad returned
to Seattle after the War,
developed a bleeding ulcer,
lost his janitor job at the Earl Hotel.
Depression took Mom away
like invisible armed guards.  She was
a stranger—a stick-like figure with arms
and legs poking out of a white smock,
pacing the sidewalk next
to the Western State Hospital turn-around.
Dad never talked about it, none of it.
I never heard him say the word Minidoka….
Gaman, “endure the unbearable with dignity.”
Shikatagani, my best friend’s mother chose pills for suicide.
After school, Randy my neighbor, opened the garage door
and found his father in a black suit, his best, hanged
by the neck, shikatagani, the same path other
Seattle Japanese chose—
numbers unknown.   Shikataganai.
We, however, never talked about it.
That was the noble thing to do.

© 2021 Elaine Ikoma Ko / The North American Post