Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [32]
Which is a problem that could fuck up a friendship. Except, being friends, they work it through what they call “the jump-in rule.”
The jump-in rule states the following:
If Johnny and Boone find themselves on the same wave—following the metaphor, it’s just like when someone jumps in on your wave—it’s on. You do what you have to do and it’s nothing personal. Johnny and Boone will go at it like the sheepdog and the coyote in those old cartoons, and, at the end of the day, when they punch out, they’ll still meet at the beach, grill some fish together, and watch the sunset.
It’s the jump-in rule, and if one guy asks a question the other guy can’t answer, or asks the other guy to do something he can’t do, all the other guy has to say is “jump-in rule,” and enough said.
Game on.
This is what Johnny plans to say when he finds Boone—ask him some very pointed questions, and if Boone doesn’t have some very good answers, then Johnny’s going to arrest his ass for impeding an investigation. Doesn’t want to do it, won’t like doing it, but he will do it and Boone will understand. Then Johnny will go in and spring for bail money.
Because Johnny has a thing about loyalty.
Of course he does. If you’re Japanese and you grew up anywhere in California, you have a thing about loyalty.
Johnny’s too young to remember it—Johnny was a long way from even having been born—when the U.S. government accused his grandparents of disloyalty and hauled them off to a camp in the Arizona desert for the duration of the war.
He’s heard the stories, though. He knows the history. Hell, the cop shop that he works out of is just blocks away from what used to be “Little Japan,” down on Fifth and Island, on the south edge of the Gaslamp District.
San Diego’s Nikkei community had been in the area since the turn of the century, first as immigrant farmworkers, or tuna fishermen down in Point Loma. They’d worked their asses off so that the next generation could buy land in Mission Valley and up in North County near Oceanside, where they became small, independent farmers. Hell, Johnny’s maternal grandfather still grows strawberries up east of O’side, stubbornly hanging in there against the dual enemies of age and urban development.
Johnny’s paternal grandfather moved into Little Japan and opened up a bath and barber shop, where the Japanese men came in to get their hair cut and then take long hot baths in the steaming furo down in the basement.
Johnny’s father has walked him through the old neighborhood, pointing out the buildings that still survived, showing him where Hagusi’s grocery store was, where the Tobishas had their restaurant, where old Mrs. Kanagawa kept her flower shop.
It was a thriving community, mixed in with the Filipinos and the few Chinese who stayed after the city tore down Chinatown, and the blacks and the whites, and it was a nice place to be and to grow up.
Then Pearl Harbor happened.
Johnny’s father heard it on the radio. He was seven years old then, and he ran to the barbershop to tell his father. By the next morning, the FBI had rounded up the president of the Japanese Association, the faculty of the Japanese School, the Buddhist priests, and the judo and kendo instructors and thrown them in a cell with the common criminals.
Within a week, the fishermen, the vegetable growers, and the strawberry farmers had been arrested. Johnny’s father still remembers standing on a sidewalk downtown and watching as they were marched—in handcuffs—from one jail to another. He remembers his father telling him not to look, because these men—leaders of their community—were looking down at the ground in their humiliation and their shame.
Two months later, the entire Nikkei community was forced out of its homes and taken by train to the racetrack at Santa Anita, where they stayed for almost a year behind wire before being moved to the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. When they returned to San Diego after the war, they found that many of their homes, businesses, and farms had been taken over by whites. Some of the Nikkei left; others yielded to reality