Dear 5844

Dear 5844,

At the end of April, I went to Manzanar, and I got your records. 

Even though you were in Jerome (and apparently then Rohwer, which I didn’t really know until now), they were able to find pieces of you for me with the few pieces I have of you. I had your name and your birthday (I didn’t even know the exact year), and I guess that was enough, because here you are, one printed name squished between a hundred others on this one page of thousands that marks you as prisoner number 5844.

I’d like to hope and wish for some benevolent history where you didn’t suffer as a prisoner. I want this number to tell a story of a five year old boy who wasn’t uprooted from his nice life to live in desert heat and then swampy marsh. I hear the soft melodies of you playing violin, studying pharmaceuticals, and loving our family, but sometimes the cries of losing your home to incarceration ring much louder. Staring at these records, those cries are what I hear right now.

Sometimes I wonder, if I was able to do it all for you, if some magic twist of fate gave me the power to take your place in that camp all those years ago, would I do it?

Would I sleep in stuffy horse stables and breathe the fumes of animal feces throughout the heated summer nights? Would I endure the biting winters or brave the swampy springs? Would I wallow in the boggy soil as the rain pounded down on our people? Would I lose it all, my home, my name, my life?

Would I or could I do it all if it meant that you would be here right now?

If it meant that you could have watched my mom and my aunt graduate, would I bow my head and let my country shackle my wrists? If it meant that you could have given my dad the shovel talk and walked my mom down the aisle, would I let my neighbors and peers call me traitorous filth? If it meant that you could have held me the moment I was born, cradled me in your arms, and told me, “I love you,” would I have the strength to endure what you faced?

To live in a barn infested with termites, to shed my Japanese name and tongue, to live a life of uncertainty, would I be able to do it all if it meant I could meet you and call you Grandpa?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’ll never know. I’d like to believe that I would have the strength to carry on like you and Grandma and all my aunts and uncles and the 120,000 other people just like you across the nation did, but I can’t turn back time. I can’t use some magical pendant or wish upon a star to take your place or Grandma’s place or anyone’s place even though I wish I could; even if I’m not sure if I have that kind of strength.

I might have been 5844 instead of you, and maybe I am right now. The 5,844th person to feel this generational weight. The 5,844th person to read your number. Or maybe the 5,844th person to wish things could have been different. In reality, I know I’m more like the 500,000th person to feel that way, and that fills me with both warm kinship and overwhelming grief.

Right now, in this ever evolving present day, I can only keep learning and listening and reading and writing and hoping that somehow these words help me know you. Some of the only words I have of you are what’s printed on these records, labeling you number 5844, but I hope you know you’re more than that, especially to me. You’re more to me than just George or Koichi, and you’re especially more to me than a number. You’re my grandpa, and I love you.

With Love,

Your Granddaughter

‍