We’re back in Japantown the next morning for our guided walking tour. Its residential streets, where Karyn’s mom lived through the early eighties, are lined with unremarkable houses that people in Seattle would give their eyeteeth for: solid one- or two-story numbers in the airport’s shadow and new condos overlooking a nice park, backed up against the railroad tracks. It’s as if Georgetown had been colonized sixty years ago.

We started the tour on Jimi Standard Time, walking peripatetically in the hot sun for a grand total of maybe three blocks. Jimi’s story was a blend of antebellum childhood memories and the greater contours of the times. He pointed at the stairwell wall-dog up to the second floor above the now-abandoned pharmacy, and told us about how he’d go up there to retrieve his father from the 24-hour card game. He also spoke about the economic windfall that came from locking up the local Japanese-Americans: being as a two-percent minority owned more than half of the vegetable farming and distribution interests in the area, suddenly a wide-open market was there for the taking — a good old-fashioned Harrison’s Hoss Race.

Lunchtime came and went, and Chauncey was listless and panting when we finally made it to the museum and handed off the trunk. We barely had time for a little siesta before the festivities. San Jose’s Obon is too big for a lumbering white guy to really stand out; I’m sure my nephew Logan, who goes most years but wasn’t there this time, is grateful for this anonymity. Like Christmas or an American Wake, there’s a carnival vibe permeating what should be a solemn occasion. I’m not sure where that vibe was coming from. Maybe it was the street food. Or the dancing. Or the cheap beer, the bingo tent, or the ring toss. Alls I know is, try as I might to take a moment to honor my dad, whose wedding ring Mom had given me in Portland two days prior, it was extraordinarily difficult to hold any sadness for long.

This feeling nearly approached the level of cosmic joke the next morning at Oak Hill Cemetery, where Karyn’s okasan and obachan remain in an open-air columbarium. We’re there placing flowers, and the vase itself looks like it’s crying, when we notice the sound of a mariachi band approaching. We look out and see the procession, which has to number in the hundreds, and watch it flow slowly behind the hearse, around our car and up the hill. It was a Mexican version of the classic New Orleans funeral: huge, participatory, and only a little bit somber. Karyn may well have felt a little intruded upon, but still recognized what a beautiful moment that was. On the other paw, Chauncey didn’t bother to uncurl herself from the croissant position to appreciate the river of mourning around her, but the moment we got back she was up in her mama’s lap in an uncharacteristic show of sympathy.

Next we spent some time in cool, shady Kelley Park, in the manicured Japanese Friendship Garden (formerly Meiji Treeline of Advantage) where K. has an iconic family photo from 1965 or so. Then back for a second night of line dancing and an all-too-brief visit with my brother and some of his kids, who were headed home from a weekend at Pismo Beach. Despite the scrapping K. and I endured over their visit, and despite the sweat-and-kelp funk emanating from their truck, it was still nice to see ‘em, however briefly.

Pictures are still here.

The next day started with a short drive to Redding for my first-ever In-n-Out burger. There’s nothing like doing it double-double Animal Style at 10:30 in the morning. Then we went into the restaurant [rimshot]!

The inland heat caught up to us somewhere on I-5, and we finished the drive into San Jose by way of the industrial East Bay, got set up in our justifiably value-priced hotel room, and headed to Japantown to meet Jimi Yamaichi. He’s the director and curator of the Japanese-American Museum of San Jose, and when Karyn contacted them to set up a walking tour of the area, he was to be our docent. We had brought with us a steamer trunk that belonged to her uncle, which he used to emigrate to the U.S. to a San Jose address, and which Karyn wanted to donate to the museum’s collection. As a result of this, or maybe simply as a greater act of hospitality, Jimi invited us to come down the day before Obon was to start for a peek into the preparations.

Everybody knows Jimi! Jimi knows everybody! We couldn’t get fifteen feet without a handshake or a brief conversation. “How’s your mother recuperating?” “Come by the office on Tuesday.” He’s like a Californian Uncle Bob. We watched as rows upon rows of volunteers put beef, onions and peppers onto skewers. Others were working the rice, the great ten-gallon tubs of teriyaki, the thirty-foot-long charcoal pits. Unlike other volunteer efforts I’ve been part of, there was a collective cheer in this room, like a samba school the day before Carnevale. Everybody just seemed to know where they were supposed to be.

One thing Jimi started to tell us about was a program during World War II in which the US orchestrated kidnappings of prominent community leaders in 13 Latin American countries and took away their passports before landing them in US internment camps, so that they arrived here as both prisoners and illegal aliens, and were treated accordingly. In addition to a 1998 settlement, petitions for Congressional redress of this little-publicized crime are still in the works even today, after many of those directly affected have died.

When the Peruvians agreed to the American request to detain the Japanese immigrants, most of the logistics were arranged informally, with phone calls and face-to-face meetings between officials and diplomats. Few decisions were committed to record, Gardiner says, because the officials involved were aware that “they were operating in a highly questionable area in terms of international law and in terms of fundamental morality.”

The first U.S. ship, the Etolin, sailed from Callao in April 1942, with 141 Peruvian Japanese. The abductions continued for the next three years.

Did you know about this? I sure didn’t. But Jimi laid it out for us on a personal level. Hearing it from him, even though I didn’t believe him at first, I could appreciate how these scapegoats got the shaft no matter where they turned. They had no homes to return to their home countries. Certainly the US wanted them only for their collateral value in prisoner exchanges. Nor did Japan want them, or the shame of acknowledging complicity in their treatment.

Afterwards, we had dinner at the counter at a diner called Gombei (no website). Karyn had the saba, her go-to menu choice in “kitchen restaurants” like this, and I had the kaki fry. The woman taking our order thought I had asked for a “Kentucky Fry,” and we all had a good beery laugh at that.

Pictures, as always, are here, and more about Obon later.