Akiko
Copyright© 2025 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 3
The morning of November 7, 1950, arrived gray and wet. Rain drummed on the roof of the small post chapel in Honolulu, turning the world outside the windows into a blur of green and mist. The kind of rain that felt less like weather and more like the island itself weeping—though whether from joy or sorrow, Akiko couldn’t say.
She wore a borrowed dress—pale blue, slightly too large, hemmed hastily by Mrs. Yamada the night before. The fabric was cotton, simple, nothing like the silk kimonos her mother had kept wrapped in rice paper for special occasions. But it was clean and pressed, and Mrs. Yamada had woven a small plumeria blossom into her hair.
“You look beautiful,” Mrs. Yamada said, adjusting the flower one last time. “Your mother would be proud.”
Akiko’s throat tightened. She touched the blossom gently, wondering if her mother was alive somewhere to be proud, or if she existed now only in memory and the garden vegetables Akiko had learned to grow from her teachings.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For everything.”
Mrs. Yamada pulled her into a brief, fierce embrace. “Be happy, child. That’s all any of us want now—to be happy despite everything.”
The chapel was small, built to serve a military post rather than inspire awe. Wooden pews, plain walls, a simple cross at the front. No flowers except the one in Akiko’s hair. No music except the rain.
Steven stood at the altar in his dress uniform, buttons polished to a mirror shine, hands clasped behind his back in a way that didn’t quite hide their trembling. Beside him stood Corporal Diaz and Private Chen, both in their dress uniforms, bearing witness.
Captain Morrison sat in the front pew, having been granted special permission to attend. Sergeant Klein stood in the back, arms crossed, his expression unreadable. Chaplain Ellery waited at the altar with a worn prayer book, his reading glasses perched on his nose.
When Akiko entered, Steven turned. For a moment, they just looked at each other—five years of waiting, four rejected petitions, countless stolen moments at fences and in supply closets, all distilled into this single point in time.
She walked down the aisle alone. No father to give her away, no family to bear witness. Just her, a borrowed dress, and a promise she’d kept through starvation and bureaucracy and the slow torture of hope deferred.
When she reached the altar, Steven offered his hand. She took it.
Chaplain Ellery cleared his throat and opened the prayer book. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today...”
The ceremony lasted maybe ten minutes. Ellery read from the book—words about love and commitment and two people becoming one. He asked if they took each other, for better or worse, in sickness and health, until death parted them.
“I do,” Steven said, his voice steady.
“I do,” Akiko echoed, her accent careful around the English words.
Ellery nodded. “By the power vested in me by the United States Army and the territory of Hawaii, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” He paused, a small smile appearing. “You may kiss your bride, Private Sims.”
Steven leaned forward carefully, as if Akiko might disappear if he moved too fast. The kiss was brief, tentative—their first real kiss, witnessed and legal and finally, finally allowed.
When they pulled apart, Akiko was crying. Not from sadness, but from the sheer relief of a door finally opening after five years of pushing against it.
Steven pulled something from his pocket—a thin gold band, simple and unadorned, bought with two months’ pay. He slid it onto her finger, next to the parachute cord ring she’d worn for five years and refused to remove.
“Now it’s real,” he said softly.
“It was always real,” she replied. “Now it’s just legal.”
Behind them, Diaz cleared his throat and said in careful Japanese, “Omedetou gozaimasu.” Congratulations.
Akiko turned and smiled at him through her tears. “Thank you. For everything.”
Morrison stood and shook Steven’s hand, then surprised Akiko by bowing slightly—a gesture of respect that made her chest tighten. “You’ve been an exceptional nurse, Mrs. Sims. The infirmary will miss you.”
“Mrs. Sims,” Akiko repeated, testing the name. It felt foreign and familiar at once, like a coat that would take time to fit properly.
Even Klein stepped forward, his expression still unreadable. “Sims. Mrs. Sims.” He nodded once, sharp and brief. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Steven said.
After the ceremony, they stood on the chapel steps under a shared umbrella, watching the rain. There was no reception, no cake, no celebration beyond what they carried in their chests—the quiet knowledge that they’d survived something that should have broken them.
“What now?” Akiko asked.
“Now we wait for your immigration papers,” Steven said. “Could be weeks, could be months. Then we go home.”
“Oklahoma.”
“Yeah. Oklahoma.” He looked at her, suddenly uncertain. “It’s not like Hawaii. It’s flat and dry and the winters are hard. The people...” He hesitated. “The people might not be kind at first.”
“I know,” Akiko said. “I not expect easy.”
“Good. Because it won’t be.”
She leaned against him, feeling the warmth of his body through the dress uniform. “We survive war. We survive five years of wire. We survive Oklahoma too.”
Steven kissed the top of her head. “Yeah. We will.”
The immigration approval came on a Friday in February 1951. A single sheet of paper, stamped and signed, granting Akiko Yamamoto Sims entry to the United States mainland as the spouse of a U.S. serviceman.
She read it three times, sitting on her cot in the medical barracks, before she let herself believe it was real.
Mrs. Yamada cried when Akiko told her. “I’m happy for you,” she said through her tears. “So happy. But I’ll miss you terribly.”
“I’ll miss you too,” Akiko said, embracing her. “You’ve been like a mother to me.”
“Then take a mother’s advice: don’t let them make you small. You survived what should have killed you. Remember that when they try to make you feel less than you are.”
Akiko promised she would.
Steven’s discharge papers came through a week later. Six years of service, an honorable discharge, and a train ticket home to a place Akiko had only seen in his descriptions—flat land, red dirt, a farmhouse that needed paint.
They left Hawaii on a transport ship in early March. Akiko stood on the deck as the islands disappeared, watching the mountains sink into the sea. Five years of her life, held in a gulch of red dirt and wire. She thought she’d feel relief at leaving, but instead she felt something closer to grief.
“You okay?” Steven asked, standing beside her at the railing.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “That place was prison. But it was also where I learned to be alive again. Where I met you. It’s strange to leave.”
“Yeah,” Steven said. “It is.”
The journey to San Francisco took six days. Then a train across the continent—through California’s mountains, Nevada’s deserts, the Rocky Mountains’ impossible heights, and finally the great flat expanse of the plains.
Akiko pressed her face to the window and watched America unfold. So much space. So much emptiness. On Okinawa, every inch of land had been precious, fought over, claimed. Here, land stretched to the horizon without apparent ownership or end.
“It’s so big,” she whispered.
“Wait till you see Oklahoma,” Steven said. “Makes this look crowded.”
They reached Veneta on a February afternoon so cold it felt like breathing glass. The wind cut through the wool coat an auntie in Honolulu had stitched for her—too thin, made for island winters that never truly bit. Snow lay in gray piles along the platform. The sky was the color of old metal.
Steven’s mother waited by a truck, arms crossed, face carved from drought years and loss.
Her name was Dorothy Sims, and she did not smile when Steven introduced them.
“Ma, this is Akiko. My wife.”
Dorothy looked Akiko up and down—the borrowed coat, the careful posture, the eyes that had seen too much and absorbed it all without breaking.
“Well,” she said finally, her voice flat as the land around them. “I suppose you’d better get in the truck before you freeze.”
It wasn’t welcome, but it wasn’t rejection either. Akiko climbed into the truck’s cab, wedging between Steven and his mother, and tried not to shiver visibly as the engine coughed to life.
The farmhouse was twenty miles outside town, down a dirt road that turned to ice ruts in winter. It was small—wood frame, weathered the same gray as the sky, a porch that sagged slightly on one side. Chickens pecked in a yard defined more by habit than fencing. A barn leaned at an angle that suggested stubbornness rather than structural integrity.
Dorothy walked ahead without waiting, boots heavy on the porch steps. Steven carried Akiko’s single suitcase inside.
The house smelled like wood smoke and old coffee. Dorothy showed Akiko through the rooms with short, clipped sentences.
“Kitchen. Stove’s temperamental—you have to jiggle the handle. Pump’s outside, freezes sometimes so you keep a bucket filled inside. Bedroom’s there. Outhouse is out back, about fifty feet. Chickens need feeding twice a day, morning and evening.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Akiko said carefully, her breath still fogging in the cold.
Dorothy paused, studying her. “You understand English?”
“Yes, ma’am. I learn in camp. I speak okay now.”
“I expect you will,” Dorothy said, and walked away without further comment.
That first month, Akiko learned what cold really meant. Not the damp chill of Honolulu’s rainy season, but a bone-deep cold that made her hands ache and her breath fog inside the house. She learned how to stoke the wood stove without letting the fire die, how to keep the pump from freezing by running water at a trickle through the night, how to move through a space where she was tolerated but not welcomed.
Dorothy was not cruel. She simply withheld warmth the way the winter withheld mercy—not from malice, but from a lifetime of learning that warmth was a luxury you couldn’t afford.
In town, it was worse.
The first time Steven took her to the general store, the grocer served her last—after every other customer had been helped, bags packed, change counted. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, just muttered the total and took her money with the tips of his fingers, as if contact might contaminate him.
At the post office, the woman behind the counter asked Steven if his wife spoke English, as if Akiko weren’t standing right there.
“Yes,” Akiko said clearly. “I speak English.”
The woman’s face reddened, but she processed their mail without further comment.
At church—which Steven insisted they attend every Sunday—people nodded politely, then turned away. Akiko heard the whispers, not loud enough to confront but loud enough to cut.
Enemy. War bride. Steven’s mistake.
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