ABSTRACT

HAN A MAS U DA, the young Nisei woman who had come to us straight from one of the "relocation centers," was un-able to cope with what was happening to Bette and me. During the five years she had been with us, watching circumstances tear at us, watching us turn on each other, and then hearing that I must go to prison, she had grown increasingly upset. She had become part of our family. Bette and I were two people totally in love; Hana agonized over the tension and quarrels she witnessed. We were the same two people. What was happening to us? She tried to understand why I was going to prison. She said to me once, "You and Bette are the most generous and honorable people I ever knew. It makes no sense. It's like the thing that happened when they put us in the concentration camp." And then one night, it was clear that she could no longer stand the tension in the household. We called her family on the Coast, and her brother came east for her and took her back to California. We had met her brother while he was still in uniform, a part of the Nisei battalion that fought so gallandy in Italy and Germany.