Displacement

Content Warning: This section deals with wider issues of racial discrimination and injustice, including unjust incarceration and inter-generational trauma. It contains references to racially motivated murder.

The community receives only a couple of days’ warning before moving to their permanent camp at Topaz, Utah. Though Kiku hopes that she and Aiko will be able to share a room again, Aiko doubts it, and they say goodbye to each other before boarding the train. On the train, all the windows are covered with paper so the passengers cannot see the route they take. Kiku thinks this is pointless and paranoid but feels powerless to do anything about it. After a long train ride, they reach their destination, and “emerg[e] into a landscape like nothing [they]’d ever seen” (139). The Topaz Relocation Center in Utah is barren and flat, with a strong wind and dust that makes it difficult to breathe or see. All the buildings are wooden, hastily constructed, identical, empty, and offer no insulation from the bitter cold.

Kiku does not get to stay with Aiko again, and instead lives with a family of three women: a mother named Haruko Yoshimoto, and her daughters Sachiko and Emiko. Haruko’s husband, a teacher, is not with them, as he was arrested just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.