And then came Sunday, December 7, 1941, and the Japanese navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor. For the 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ethnicity who lived on the West Coast, everything suddenly and dramatically changed.

  Those on the Custodial Detention List—most of them leaders of local organizations who were, somewhat fancifully, deemed a likely threat—were arrested on the spot by FBI agents. For the rest, like the Aramakis, mother and son, there were two months of agitation and nervousness, before President Roosevelt, on the advice of his army chiefs, decided to act. On February 19, 1942, he signed the infamous Executive Order 9066. This promptly sealed their fate.

  The order declared the western halves of the states of Washington, Oregon and California, together with a smaller portion of Arizona, to be henceforward combined into one large military district, from which anyone could, on the order of the armed forces, be excluded. The order made no mention of any specific peoples, but its intent was crystal clear, and the intended sanctions soon began. All ethnically Japanese men, women, and children, whether American citizens or not, were ordered during that strange and frightening springtime to surrender themselves into army custody, to be sent first to a number of hastily created and temporary assembly centers. They would remain there, in generally execrable circumstances, while ten isolated concentration camps, most located in remote quarters of the west, were readied for them. These 120,000 people, together with such few items as they could carry, were then dispatched into the hot, dry, and dusty innermost wildernesses of America to spend the rest of the war locked up and rendered harmless, secure under military rule, no longer a danger to anyone. As though they ever had been.

  Akira Aramaki and his mother, Towa dutifully did as they were told. Their assigned assembly center, which they reached by train late in May 1942, was named Pinedale, down in the blistering heat of the southern California desert close to Fresno. They were housed there for several tedious months—the tedium broken for Akira, as it happens, by the presence in the camp of a twenty-two-year-old woman named Hanako Tanako, originally from Sacramento, who caught his eye. The pair began a friendship which would lead to their marriage. But not quite yet: mother and son were suddenly dispatched without rhyme or reason back up north to a camp set down among the pillow-lava fields of far northern California, Tule Lake.*

  Here they remained for rather more than a year, before being transferred in September 1943 to the Minidoka camp in southeastern Idaho. Whereupon three things happened in quick succession. Akira and Hanako were promptly married by the camp commandant. Seven months later, on April 24, 1944, they had a child, whom they named Alan; and on the very same day their boy was born, Akira was released from camp and—despite being temporarily separated from his newborn son—began his long and protracted journey, ultimately getting back home to the strawberry fields of Bellevue.

  Which is where he promptly discovered that his land was in the process of being taken away from him. And this was a circumstance which, for many of the returning detainees, was all too often the case.

  Prewar hostility to the Japanese among the white farming communities of the west had now been well established, had gathered momentum more widely after Pearl Harbor, and had broadened still further during the detainees’ prolonged absence in the camps—a period that coincided, of course, with the increasingly intense fighting against the Japanese in the Pacific theater, and the increasing number of white American casualties.

  The Minidoka concentration camp in southeastern Idaho housed some nine thousand ethnic Japanese during the war. It was one of ten camps established by the FDR administration as part of a policy since repudiated as a grave mistake.

  The hostility had been particularly unpleasant in the weeks and days in the spring of 1942 before the Issei and Nisei reported for their detention. The more callous of their white neighbors, eager for a bargain, bought the Japanese Americans’ possessions—cars, domestic appliances, bicycles, furniture—at insultingly low prices, ransacked their shops, looked to move into their soon-to-be-abandoned homes, taking full advantage of their abruptly humiliating circumstances. To be sure, in many cases the white neighbors were kindly—promising to look after domestic pets, assuring the Japanese their houses would be looked after, their lawns watered and mowed, their possessions guarded, their lands preserved. The departing Japanese could do little else but trust the assurances they had been given, and hope for the best.

  The situation of the detained farmers—of people like the Aramakis—was somewhat different from that of those who lived in the towns. For them, vital to the economy as producers of food, the government had strict rules. Up until the very day of your departure for imprisonment, you were ordered to maintain your farm and its lands as a matter of national security. You were bound by government instruction to keep on tilling, milking, sowing, ploughing, or combine-harvesting. If you failed to do so, either out of sheer ill feeling toward the government that was planning to incarcerate you or because you were too busy with getting ready to leave, you could be arrested and charged with sabotage, a seriously felonious breach of the law.

  Akira Aramaki had not wanted to fall foul of this regulation, as he explained to an interviewer in the 1990s. As instructed, he applied the fertilizer, turned the soil, tied up the sweet peas, began to cut some lettuces. “I had my farm all ready to harvest,” he said, remembering the early ripeness of his main crop of strawberries, in that warm early spring of 1942. “And then we had to go and sign up [for the camps] and everything. If I didn’t get someone in there [to help], the government called us saboteurs, we were sabotaging.

  “So I had to get somebody, and I got this good friend of mine, an Italian boy, [and] put him in there.”

  Aramaki might have seen the warning signs. He might have smelled a rat, once the tables were turned, once he was out of his property and the “Italian boy” was established there in his place. As he told the interviewer: “And gosh, the minute [he] took over—I wanted to stay in the house until I went into camp. And he even charged me rent. Yeah, and he’s going to take over all my vegetables free of charge, and harvest the vegetables, and then he charged me rent!”

  After which, silence. For the next two years Aramaki had no idea what was happening back at the ranch—until that April day in 1944 when finally the taxi from Seattle station brought him home.

  The house, the fields, the outbuildings, all were in fine condition—except for the fact that the “Italian boy,” now two years older and quite accustomed to his comfortable life in the Aramaki home, declared that he and his family were most certainly not going to move out. He was staying put. The farm was now his.

  In his 1990 interview, Akira Aramaki reported that first encounter. “He said to me, ‘The Japs aren’t coming back; this land is never gonna be back—we’re gonna have this land.’

  “They took all my tractors, and all my irrigation pipe, and took it to their farm. They just ransacked the house. Because we had it all locked up in the rooms. And I didn’t think they’d take it. But they took it.”

  Much the same was happening all across the American west in the mid-1940s. Camp by camp, person by person, those imprisoned were being set free, their detentions finally declared no longer a military necessity—not that they ever had been. Some, like Aramaki, were freed while the war was still raging; most were handed their money and their travel vouchers later, in 1945, when peace was finally declared. When at last they reached their various homes out west, their relief was more often than not tinged with disappointment and disillusion. Anti-Japanese sentiment had now reached a fever pitch in some communities; the houses they had left behind had often been vandalized and their possessions stolen; and in many a case the title to the land a Japanese family had once possessed had somehow vanished, like a will-o’-the-wisp, and they found themselves just as landless as when their parents had arrived, decades before.

  The racial hostility may have been unworthy, and the theft and vandalism unacceptably terrible. But the misappropriation of land was on an entirely different level, and quite unforgivable. To these migrants and their descendants—as to all newcomers of whatever race or persuasion everywhere—the acquisition of land had an inexplicable, elemental importance. Those who by hard work or good fortune had come actually to own some acres were, simply by having done so, ineradicably bound to their new country. To have that bond severed had a singular effect on those who came home to find it so.

  Of those Japanese, both older Issei and younger Nisei, who lived in the western states immediately before the outbreak of war, a little less than a quarter of them actually owned the acreage they worked. A very small number managed the farms for other, white, owners. The great majority, some 70 percent, were tenants—and as such did not feel quite the same bond with the country, were quite literally not so invested in it. If, when they came out of camp, they found hostility and their house vandalized and their tenancy canceled, then this, despite its evidently traumatic nature, was a survivable change of fortune. Many of them could and did leave the land. They often quit the west. They started up again in many cases moving to a community or to a distant state where there was less evident hostility.

  But this option was not quite so readily available for those Japanese who were, or who had been, actual landowners. Their emotional investment tended to act as a drag on their willingness to move. And so for a while, well on into the 1950s, many of these people, even if their land had been wrested from them, even though their life has collapsed around them, tried to stay on.

  Their land had been taken in many ways, but no matter the manner, confiscated nonetheless. Most often in California—and most cruelly, since the victim of the confiscations were absent and held essentially incommunicado miles away in a concentration camp and quite unable to defend their own position—the alien land laws were brought into play. Legal arguments were offered by the state to the effect that the owners had no actual right ever to have owned the land, and so-called escheat proceedings were promptly initiated—just as if the landowner had died without a will and without any known beneficiary. If the lawsuits were successful—and they often were, since virtually no defense could be offered—then the land became the property of the state of California, which could dispose of it as it wished.

  Other devices were employed. Tax regulations, in particular, required a lien to be issued if the landowner defaulted on his tax payments—and imprisoned Japanese often fell afoul of their creditors because the government had already frozen all their bank accounts, and they weren’t able to pay their bills. An incarcerated Japanese might have the theoretical wherewithal to pay his taxes, but unless he could persuade a neighbor to pay for him, he was unable to do so, given that he himself had no access to his own money. The land then had to be foreclosed, on orders of the county or city to whom taxes should have been paid.

  And then there was absolute theft (which seems to have been rare, the law providing some measure of protection) or else the much more fugitive notion of squatter’s rights—whereby a person occupying the land, especially if he had done so for some while, could claim de facto ownership, or at least a right to remain on site, no matter what the real owner had to say about it.

  Which last was the exact situation that Akira Aramaki encountered, when he arrived home that warm springtime evening in 1944. The Italian boy refused to move, point-blank. As it happens Aramaki did not crumple at his refusal, even though Bellevue was awash with anti-Japanese sloganeering, and even though his decision to stand up and fight to get back his modest acreage was initially greeted with jeers and derision. His battle took many months—but in the end judgment went in Akira Aramaki’s favor, and he was indeed able to reclaim his house, and eventually to work his fields again, and to produce a modicum of crops, some of them strawberries, just as before the war.*

  But by the summer of 1945, when his wife and child were released from the Minidoka camp, it seemed that his enthusiasm for agriculture was waning. Before long, and as with so many other Japanese farmers of his generation on the West Coast, he decided to abandon his chosen way of life, to sell up, change his career, and transmute himself instead into a classic icon of fifties American suburban prosperity. He became a real estate agent.

  He died in 2004, aged ninety-one. His brief obituary in The Seattle Times recorded simply—and with a poignant elision—that “Akira was a lifelong resident of Bellevue, except for an interlude during WWII. He started as a truck farmer at Midlakes, retiring as a realtor.” His wife, Hanako, lived on until 2016. Their son Alan lived out his working years as an engineer, remaining close to Bellevue and the eastern suburbs of Seattle. But his connection with agriculture was finished. That was all history.

  Bellevue is a large and modern city now. The farms have nearly all vanished. The land of which Akira’s father had been so proud, and which Akira himself had tended so carefully before he was taken away as a result of FDR’s wartime policies, has long since been paved and cemented over. It now underlies a distribution center for the Safeway supermarket chain, and trucks roar in and out at all hours, bringing in and taking away boxes of cereal, detergent, lightbulbs, ice cream—and, no doubt, strawberries, grown on other tracts of well-watered land far away, and tended by people not Japanese, not anymore.

  Part V

  Annals of Restoration

  1

  Māori in Arcady

  Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart—

  On us, on us the unswerving season smiles,

  Who wonder ’mid our fern why men depart

  To seek the Happy Isles!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, THE “AUCKLAND” STANZA OF “THE SONG OF THE CITIES” (1893)

  Change comes with great and impressive swiftness to New Zealand, and it does so for two reasons.

  New Zealand was the last country on the planet to be discovered and settled by a human population. The Polynesian canoeists were first, sighting the long chain of islands in, it is now generally assumed, the mid-fourteenth century. And then, three hundred years later, came the Europeans—with New Zealand’s best-known ecologist, Geoff Park, noting drily that his country’s fertile plains “were the last that Europeans found before the Earth’s supply revealed itself as finite.”

  As well as being the last place on the planet to be found, New Zealand was also the first country on the planet to install as its chosen political system the most genuine kind of democracy, with voting rights early on extended to both sexes and to all residents—indigenous peoples included—quite regardless of their ethnicity. And further: Maori men were in fact given the vote in 1867, fully twelve years before their white counterparts, making New Zealand the first settler state in the world to give the vote to its indigenous population—and almost a century before Australia next door gave the vote to her aboriginals.

  So, all of this country’s human history, settlement to suffrage, has been compressed into a period of little more than five hundred years. Everything that happens and has happened in New Zealand’s human evolution has taken place, when compared with elsewhere, at something approaching warp speed.

  As recently as the 1970s, for example, there was little doubt about New Zealand’s identity: everything about the place blared forth the notion that this was an indubitably and self-consciously British place, preserved in 1950s amber and set down comfortably in the southern seas. It was a place of daffodils and lawn bowls and afternoon tea, country constables on bicycles and cavalry twill and Marmite and well-attended Anglican churches. The nation’s anthem was “God Save the Queen.” And the name of the country was plain, simple, unadorned, giving just a nod to the Dutch sailors who first saw it: New Zealand.

  But in the short span of the fifty years since, much has changed. The country’s name now has an addendum: the Polynesian word Aotearoa, meaning “the land of the long white cloud,” is now firmly co-opted into the old national title, and there are moves afoot to make it fully official. Aotearoa New Zealand: this triple-star of an appellation is what many like to call the country now. And the anthem—now officially and with the consent of Buckingham Palace coequal with the “Queen”—is also “Aotearoa,” and the first of its five verses are an approximate Maori rendition of a locally beloved Victorian poem called “God Defend New Zealand.”*

  The anthem says much about the country and is widely held to be one of the most pleasing anywhere, remarkably free from jingoism and seen more as a prayer of humility than an exercise in nationalistic exultation, more a national hymn than a declaration of patriotism. The first time it was sung on a global stage was after New Zealand’s rowing eight won the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich: the sight of the nine grown men in black standing and weeping as it was played remains etched indelibly into the popular New Zealand imagination.

  Much more has changed than national titles and stirring songs, however. A very real effort was begun in the mid-1970s fully to incorporate into today’s exceedingly white New Zealand—into today’s Aotearoa, more properly—the 780,000 Maori people to whom the country should—and indeed, once did—belong. This change in emphasis, which percolates through all aspects of the country’s society today, and while well intentioned is not without its failings and its critics, began with what is now a concerted national effort to answer and deal with this most fundamental question: Who exactly owns the country’s land?