Christian Reclamation Center

a drive-in restaurant

THE BUDDHIST church up on the hill next to a playground

“I'm going to Portland with him tomorrow.”

They walked a few blocks to a freshly painted frame house that was situated behind a neatly kept lawn. “Nice house,” he said.

They walked six blocks, then six more, and still another six before they turned into a three-story frame building. The Ashidas, parents and three daughters, occupied four rooms on the second floor.

Wonder Bread bakery way up on Nineteenth, where a nickel used to buy a bagful of day-old stuff. That was thirteen and a half blocks, all uphill. He knew the distance by heart because he'd walked it twice every day to go to grade school, which was a half-block beyond the bakery or fourteen blocks from home.

The grocery store was the same one the Ozakis had operated for many years. That's all his father had had to say. Come to the grocery store which was once the store of the  Ozakis.

He walked past the pool parlor,

A shooting gallery stood where once  had been a clothing store; fish and chips had replaced a jewelry shop

movie house

Jackson Street started at the waterfront and stretched past the two train depots and up the hill all the way to the lake, where the houses were bigger and cleaner and had garages with late-model cars in them. For Ichiro, Jackson Street signified that section of the city immediately beyond the railroad tracks between Fifth and Twelfth Avenues. That was the section which used to be pretty much Japanese town. It was adjacent to Chinatown and most of the gambling and prostitution and drinking seemed to favor the area.

Chicago

New York

Pearl Harbor

He walked toward the railroad depot where the tower with the clocks on all four sides was. It was a dirty looking tower of ancient brick. It was a dirty city. Dirtier, certainly, than it had a right to be after only four years.

TWO WEEKS AFTER HIS TWENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, ICHIRO got off a bus at Second and Main in Seattle.

the branching timeline in Charles Renouvier’s 1876 Uchronia (Utopia in History): An Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might Have Been, depicting both the actual course of history and the various alternative paths that might have been if other actions had been taken.

But none of this made Priestley’s chart any less striking in its day. In fact, the idea of a timeline was still strange enough in the mid-eighteenth century that it required a certain amount of explanation.

Over the course of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the convention of the timeline was progressively naturalized.

“I saw Eto.” “That jerk. What'd he do? Spit on you?” “Yeah, how did you know?” “We got troubles, but that crud's got more and ain't got sense enough to know it. Six months he was in the army. You know that? Six lousy months and he wangled himself a medical discharge. I been hearin' about him. He ever try that on me, I'll stick a knife in him.”

Ichiro regarded the bottle skeptically: “You drink all this?” “Yes, tonight.” “That's quite a bit.” “Ya, but I finish.” “What are you celebrating?” “Life.”

“He has suffered, but I make no apologies for him or for myself. If he had given his life for Japan, I could not be prouder.”