Haru

Haru

June 19, 2014

Haru Tokuno was born on December 29, 1910. She was not named after the season of Spring (which is “haru” in Japanese), but for a word in one of her father’s haiku poems, evocative of that season. For the first ten years of her life, she was to be the only girl among a scrabbling group of four brothers. This had its advantages and disadvantages. She quickly became the joy of her father, who despite being the son of a samurai had enough sons to not despise the one daughter. She was specially treated, perhaps not only because she was the only girl, but because of her delicate nature. She was always of very tiny build, despite a very durable quality about her that would allow her to survive a number of hardships throughout her life. One of those hardships was her brothers, who treated her the way brothers often treat sisters.

When she went to school, she had had almost no exposure to the English language, especially its literary side. Tony, being three years older, had to help orient her to this strange environment. Their mother would note that Haru followed Tony around like a lost little puppy. Not wanting any part of a maternal image, Tony treated her gruffly. Haru usually got lots of dolls for Girl’s day and other occasions and Tony and her younger brother Ted, would take the fraternal pleasure of pulling their heads off. Even a sweet looking, beautiful Japanese doll that Haru treasured among all others was not immune from this decapitation ritual.

The people in the neighborhood were unusually kind to her. When she walked the mile to school, young boys would offer to carry her books. Their next door neighbor to the south, Alice Chase, took a special liking to Haru and welcomed into her into her house for cookies or other treats and take her shopping or to church. Being an unmarried lady with no children of her own, she directed her love at this petite Japanese girl who was so quiet and well mannered. When she died tragically it is no wonder that the 11 year old Haru suggested that her newest sister be named Alyce.

By this time, Haru, now the sister of two little girls, as well as all those brothers, had to spend a lot of time helping her mother attend to the endless routine of labor in their camps. Haru had to be like a mother to her sisters, feeding them, changing them, and keeping an eye on them for Suye, who had enough to worry about. Haru also had to do all of the family laundry. Coming home from school each day she had to scrub the dirty clothes with the wash board in a tub, after filling the tub with water heated on a wood stove. Then she would have to hang all the clothes on laundry lines that seemed to stretch endlessly in the back yard.

By the time she was in high school, she was used to such work. Ironically, the school officials took one look at her tiny body and told her she could not participate in the Physical Education classes with the other girls. She was not always in good health. In her junior year in high school, she was in the hospital with a bad case of measles. Like all her siblings, she attended Oroville High School, trailing along after her brother, who was a senior the year she started. They were among very few Japanese Americans there, so she did not date, although she counted as her best friends, three hakujin girls, including Mabel Reynolds and Iris Hawkins. She had grown up with them since grammar school when they used to collect rocks to assemble into toy houses they could play with as though they were matrons of grand estates. Aside from spending time with her friends, Haru was not very active in high school, there was too much work to be done at home for her to enjoy any extracurricular activities.

When she graduated from high school in 1930, a respite was in sight. Her family decided to send her to Armstrong Business College in Berkeley. She spent only six months there before Tony came to get her, telling her that the family needed her too much to let her stay in school. Going to business school in Berkeley was not a total loss, however, as she was able to attend church there where she met a studious looking Japanese man named Kozo Fukushima. He should have looked studious because he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley, where he eventually earned a Master’s Degree in electrical engineering. He had received his undergraduate degree there in 1929 as a foreign student. Even though her family had taken her far from the ivy covered halls of Berkeley, Kozo held fondly his memory of the kind, fragile young women he had met in their church. He wrote to her regularly and was even able to visit her at Palermo two or three times. On one of these occasions, he asked Bunda and Suye for permission to wed their eldest daughter. It was granted. They married in the Old Palermo Church on June 18, 1933. He was 30, she was 23.

They were a closely bonded couple who were meant for each other. Kozo was already beginning to bald. He was short, not too much taller than 5 feet tall, and wore eyeglasses. Haru was very small in stature with a long, thin face. She was about the same height as Kozo. Neither was what anyone could call attractive, but they were both possessed of good hearts, very decent young people who cared about each other and were willing to work hard to become successful. They were not aware that day in June of how hard life would become for them. A day after the wedding, as she and Kozo were leaving for their new home together in Los Angeles, Haru got an inkling of their future. As he bid the couple farewell, Bunda Tokuno began to cry, uncharacteristically. His eldest daughter asked him why he was crying and he replied that he knew he would never see her again. He must have had a premonition.

They had one good bit of fortune. They knew a couple, Mr. And Mrs. Mugi, who had located for them a brand new, affordable apartment just above a garage in Boyle heights. They would make it their home for three years. Since the Mugis were next door, they would also know someone else living in the area.

When the honeymooning couple arrived at their apartment in Los Angeles several days later, they rested a day, then Kozo began to sort through all his mail, finding many congratulatory letters and telegrams. One of the telegrams, though, was from his new brother-in-law, Tony. It told them that Bunda had passed away just two days after they had said good-bye to him in the dusty driveway of the Palermo home. Stunned, Haru caught a plane flight to San Francisco so she could be with her family in their grief. From San Francisco, a harrowing ride in a two seat biplane, and a trolley train ride to Oroville got her there in time for the funeral.

Just a year later, tragedy struck again after Haru became pregnant. The doctor told her that her uterus was too small, that the child would have to be aborted. Two other miscarriages later, the doctor told her that if she ever got pregnant again, either she would have to have another abortion or die trying to give life to a child. Kozo reluctantly told her that he would not be able to have a life with a child without a mother to care for it, so the couple chose to spend their years childless.

At the same time Kozo was frustrated by his inability to get a job using his education in Engineering. Since he had finished school, all he had been able to do was work for the Japanese Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Fujioka, his boss, was very kind, having even given him tickets to go to Palermo for Bunda’s funeral. Still, he was an Engineer, not a public relations man. It soon became clear that between the Depression and racial discrimination against him, he would never get a job with an American firm. He decided that he and his bride would need to go back to Japan so he could begin a career.

They moved to Japan in 1936 and Kozo soon found a job with Nippon Electric Corporation. Certainly Haru was sad to be so far from her family, but she was determined to go where her husband went, just as her mother had followed her father to a strange land 30 years before. For the next five years, she could at least count on occasional letters from home, blurry black and white photos of her nephews, her brothers and sisters, and her beloved mother. For almost a year from fall of 1937 to fall of 1938, Haru visited her family in Palermo, taking her mother back with her in 1938 for a return to her homeland. Although the travel was slow by ship across the wide Pacific, these visits made the world seem a bit smaller. At the end of 1941, these all stopped after the United States declared war on Japan.

They tried to get out of Japan, believing that Japan would be far less safe a place during the war. Of course, history proved them right. Unfortunately, the United States had laws that now prevented Kozo, a Japanese citizen, from going there, so they were trapped. Early in the war, when Japan was enjoying victories in its Pacific campaign, the Fukushimas did not notice the effects of the war. By 1943, however, food had become scarce and rationing had begun. Each family was given only one daikon pickle, 2 to 3 inches long, some rice, and whatever fish was available to eat. Hunger became a problem. Haru was able to find some napa (cabbage) seeds to plant in their yard and that helped a bit.

Then the bombing started. The Allied forces had pushed close enough to Japan so that their heavy bombers were able to reach Tokyo and the other cities. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like with the city all blacked out, the scream of sirens tearing through the night, and the terrible explosions. Since many Japanese houses were still made of flimsy material, such as rice paper, fires easily spread as a result of the bombs, increasing the loss of life. Nippon Electric evacuated the families of its employees to areas they though would be safer. Haru was moved to Okayama sine it was close to Hiroshima, a city largely ignored by the bombings.

In August 1945, one bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that destroyed the entire city. This was the atom bomb. An hour away in Okayama, Haru felt the explosion and lost at least one friend, her hairdresser, to radiation sickness following the fall-out from the bomb.

Kozo still worked in Tokyo. Only three days after the Japanese surrendered he was ordered to report to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters. MacArthur was the commanding general of the allied forces and was now, in effect, the military ruler of Japan. When the victorious American army occupied Japan, Kozo had to get used to having soldiers question him about his company’s role in manufacturing weapons for Japan. This was because he spoke English so well.

The family had totally lost contact with Haru and Kozo during the war. No one knew if they were safe or even alive after the terrible bombing that had devastated the Japanese Islands almost constantly in 1944 and 1945. Haru’s younger brother, Shiro, had been sent to Japan by the U. S. Army to help the Japanese population with their recovery from the damages of war.  He set about using what spare time he had to try to find his sister and brother-in-law. All he had was the address they had sent before the war, so he went there first. A woman who lived there, Sei-chan, told him that they had moved to Okayama, but that he could probably still find Kozo at Nippon Electric’s offices in Tokyo.

When he got there, he was amazed to see all the employees shivering and wearing long underwear. The company could no longer afford to heat the building. Kozo was not there at the time, so he sat at his desk and waited, conspicuous in his army uniform, in that cold office. When Kozo returned, he didn’t recognize his brother-in-law, who he had last seen when he was still in high school. What he saw was a soldier and he wondered what they wanted to ask him now. Shiro, though, recognized Kozo, stood up, shook his hand and asked him how he was. Hearing his voice and looking more closely at his face, Kozo was happy to realize that this was Haru’s younger brother. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Kozo told Shiro where his sister was now living.

Kozo did not tell Haru to expect her brother’s visit, so one day in late fall as she came home from work, she was very surprised to see Shiro standing there, smiling at her. He told her he was glad to see her alive and they immediately began to talk about all that had happened to the family since they were last in touch. When her sister Tey and her two daughters, arrived in Japan to be with her husband, Henry Imaoka, and Shiro’s wife, Asako, came to join him, a good portion of the Tokuno family was now assembled in Japan. Even though Henry and Tey were based north of Tokyo in Sendai, they were able to spend time together. It was a brief time. By 1948, Shiro and Asako had returned to America, with their newborn son (me). Even though Shiro came back for awhile and the Imaoka family was still there, Haru missed her native country.

Japan was a wretched place after the war. The buildings, those left standing, were all burnt out or ruined. The people were poor and hungry. There was much work to be done to rebuild the once proud land. Haru returned to the U. S. once in 1952 for a visit, but that only made her long to return for good. In 1956 an opportunity finally arose. The vice president of Northrup Aircraft, a major aviation firm in California, was visiting Japan. Kozo was translating for him. The man was impressed not only by Kozo’s skill with English, but his knowledge of engineering that he offered him a job in Los Angeles. He accepted and they made plans to go to California.

Ironically, Suye had been visiting with her daughters there for the past year. She was scheduled to go back to Palermo in March. Usually, when Haru had parted from her, Suye would be very sad. When she saw her oldest daughter off at Haneda Airport, though, she was happy to think that she would be able to visit her in California and she told Haru that. Waving goodbye to her mother, Haru, as with her father, had no idea she would never see her alive again.

Once she got over the shock of her mother’s death, Haru was able to begin to build a new life for herself and her husband in Gardena. They had been there about three years when the vice president of Northrup left. In the wake of his departure, Kozo was released from the company, despite the protestations of many of his co-workers, who found him to be a hard-working, capable employee. Kozo at once set about trying to convince his old company in Japan, Nippon Electric, to set up a headquarters in Los Angeles. Finally convinced of the worth of this idea, they made him the head of their new office in Newberry Park.

Meanwhile, Haru had gotten a clerical position with the federal government, so she could supplement the family income. In 1960, they settled into their final residence in Canoga Park. By this time, Kozo was a distinguished looking gentleman. He had lost most of his hair and his bald head and eyeglasses made him look like a college professor. When he died of cancer in 1978, I felt the loss very deeply because of the way he supported my early interests in science, once taking me to the La Brea tar pits and sending me books about electricity.