“Dog Bait” & Nisei
Image from Breakwater Review
Story: “Dog Bait”
“Dog Bait” by Christopher Berardino is an open wound looking to be addressed. Winner of the 2021 Breakwater Review Fiction Contest, “Dog Bait” peers into the often-overlooked span of U.S. history during World War II when Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed into internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The story, though, takes us outside the camps and into another, rarely explored, snapshot from that body of time, showing the reader a single, detailed moment that reveals not only the abuse of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government but a brief glimpse at the dehumanization that was inflicted and the wounds that remain.
As the dog jerked and strained, its eyelids retracted into the recesses of its boxy skull, exposing, for a moment, a strange and unnatural fire burning bright beneath the glassy black. A psychopathy, warped and flickering. A rage. Something blind and hateful of all that was alive, wrathful against all that was living.
“Dog Bait” follows the day of a young Nisei private in the Army as he’s used as bait to train attack dogs for the military to use in their fight against Japan. Nisei (literally second generation in Japanese) is a term that denotes a person born in the U.S. or Canada whose parents immigrated from Japan. The private wonders, while hanging from a tree and waiting for the dog he’s training to find him, if “the dogs could really smell the Jap in him” like they’ve been told by the U.S. Army, but when he’s found by the dog he’s surprised that it doesn’t attack. Instead, the “German Shepard [sits] patiently among the tree’s tangled roots.” When the dog’s handler arrives, a sergeant, he forces the private to do everything in his power to instigate the animal. He forces the private to cover himself in horse blood and to act aggressive. He even forces the private to speak Japanese at the dog, revealing that the private doesn’t have a strong command of the Japanese language as he struggles to think of a word until he manages to produce “benjo” after the sergeant berates him, finally degrading the private in nearly every way possible.
The narrative does something interesting here, in the first section of “Dog Bait.” We’re held at a distance from the private, who goes unnamed until the sergeant speaks to him, calling him by name, and even then the narration itself doesn’t acknowledge the private by name until after the German Shepherd, Socks, is also called by its name by the sergeant. It’s at this moment that “Private Nobu” is addressed, and given a proper name. The dogs, too, are always described by their breed and not generalized, making an important distinction between them in the same way that the Army sees the difference between its soldiers and the Nisei who can be tracked by their Jap-ness alone. These are clever ways to weave into the narrative how Nobu, and the other Nisei, are treated as inhumanely as the dogs, drawing clear connections between the treatment of both by the Army. And they’re painfully effective techniques. We are shown that both are treated as mere tools of war and not considered as living, feeling beings.
Back in the bivouac, the narrative shows us the other Nisei who are also wounded and scabbed, blood staining their fatigues. A medic briefly examines Nobu’s leg wound from two days before, when a “Doberman had rushed and bowled the private’s ankles, dragging him by the leg into the warm shallows of a salt marsh.” The medic tells Nobu the wound’s “infected bad. You could be in some real trouble here” before he’s called away to address the arm wound of another Nisei soldier returning to camp. It’s this wound that anchors us to Nobu throughout the narrative, from the memory of how he got it at the story’s onset to its current infected state when he returns to the bivouac, right up to the very end when Nobu submerges his leg in the Mississippi surf and “let the salt bite his throbbing wound, let the pain settle heavy and electric into his tender marrow.” It’s through this wound, suffered and endured, and infected, that we are connected to Nobu and the story.
Socks began to bleed worse from the slash, barking and howling between each strike. She desperately wagged her head from side to side, pleading for help from onlookers with retched squeals. The other Nisei sitting at the table looked on, benumbed and weary, quietly playing a card or striking a match.
The most heartbreaking, and pivotal, scene in the story happens just as the soldiers are getting ready to depart for the mainland from the small island off the Mississippi coast, where they’ve been bivouacked. The sergeant stops Nobu and forces him to retrain Socks because the dog hadn’t attacked him on sight. The sergeant, forcing a braided whip into Nobu’s hands, instructs him to “hit the bitch.” Nobu does, repeatedly, at the sergeants urging, as Socks moves through pain and fear into rage and anger, until the dog “barked uncontrollably, savagely, … [and] lunged at the private, bowing the fence as she pulled” while the other “Nisei sitting at the table looked on, benumbed and weary, quietly playing a card or striking a match.” At the least, we’re shown the inhuman treatment of animals who are being broken and made into tools of war, living things seen as mere means towards ends. But the pain runs deeper here. Nobu, too, is being broken. Forced to beat an animal that had earlier shown him no malice, he savages Socks until she’s reduced to an animal that will, the next day, hunt Nobu with the same hate as the Doberman that gave him his leg wound had, with the same hate for him as Americans like the sergeant have. He’s made to create the tool of his on inhuman treatment, forced to reduce himself to nothing more than another implement of war, one more mean towards an end, a hollowed-out person made numb from dehumanization because he’s a Nisei, and therefore different; because he’s seen as Japanese and not American.
“Dog Bait’s” real power is in its moving and violent language that evokes a visceral landscape of abuse and shows plainly the unaddressed horrors endured by Japanese Americans during the rarely spoken-of time during WW II that lingers still. The story reminds us that this suffering—this ugly wound—persists and has been left unaddressed even now, during more modern times. And in the story’s final, aching moments, Nobu wades into the Mississippi coast and looks towards the island where Socks and the other dogs are kept and he hears “the far off sound of calamitous barking. Like some hellish refrain, the dog’s yelps and cries and howls rose and fell according to a rhythm and meter not of the sane.” It’s here, in this last turn, that we’re shown how the dogs as metaphor were misunderstood: they’re not meant to represent the Nisei but the rest of America, instead. Hate is learned. It’s taught. And like innocent Socks, who had no reason to hate or hunt Nobu until the fear and hate was beat into her, the rest of America’s hate for others isn’t natural, and it isn’t sane.
Perhaps, like Nobu’s wound, that hate has grown worse from being left untreated, and has become infected as history begins to repeat itself in the current anti-Asian rhetoric that’s causing real harm to American communities, and to Asian Americans specifically, because they’re seen as un-American, as “other”. The sentiment of “Dog Bait” is a lesson not only in empathy and compassion but in memory: that by acknowledging and addressing the hate and dehumanization of Japanese Americans by the U.S. in the past through rhetoric and fear, we can work to improve the present and prevent spreading the same demonizing rhetoric and unnecessary suffering, and work to heal the unaddressed wounds that still remain. If we don’t, and allow those who fear and teach hate to have a voice, then all that will remain will be “a tortured choir, unrestrained, wailing a melody to make all things innocent flay and flake until there is nothing, and nothing more.”
Cocktail: Nisei
As the young private readjusted his hold on the branch, a slender silhouette parted a balding thicket of sweetspire. The private braced himself for the familiar agony along his thigh and shin, but oddly, felt no pain.
There was no barking. No snarls. He loosened his hold around the branch and searched the feathered swatches of seaoat. A German Shepard sat patiently among the tree’s tangled roots, her brass nametag stealing crumbs of fire from a low delta sun.
This week’s cocktail is called Nisei because it’s built with a second-generation spirit, American-made Japanese whisky, that’s complemented with sake, dry vermouth, green tea, and a strong, sweet rye whiskey syrup. A smooth, round, and herbal cocktail, it’s a sipper that’s easy to enjoy without a bite. The complicated nature of the spirit is the heart of the cocktail, itself having a long and interesting history before coming into existence.
The history of Japanese whisky begins with two men, Shinjiro Torii and Masataka Taketsuru. Torii, a pharmaceutical wholesaler began importing western liquor in the early 1900s and decided to begin making whisky for Japanese people, and so he opened a distillery in Yamazaki and hired as his head distiller Taketsuru. Taketsuru was a Japanese chemist who had moved to Scotland in 1918 to study organic chemistry in Glasgow. In 1919, he began his apprenticeship at Longmorn distillery and after, in 1920, found himself working with Torii. Since the beginning of that first distillery, Japanese whisky has followed closely to the flavor profile of Scotch whisky and is known for an array of flavors from sweet, floral, and herbal to smoky, oaked, and chocolaty. Until around 2000, Japanese whisky was mostly consumed in Japan but around 2001 it broke into the world’s view and has become a major player in the US market leading to other spirit imports from Japan including vodka made from rice, shochu made from barley, sweet potatoes, or buckwheat, and most prominently gin that uses local ingredients unique to Japan including yuzu, cherry blossom, and sencha green tea. The uniqueness of Japanese spirits has become such a phenomenon that US distilleries are now making American-made Japanese whisky, which is more a marketing term than a unique differentiation since a single malt of any whisky, whether it’s a Scotch or Japanese or American single malt, uses 100% malted barley as the base; and to be classified as a whisky (from scotch to bourbon to rye) the distilled spirit must not only made from cereal grain, like corn, rye, or barley but it must also be aged in oak barrels. There are many types of oak wood in the world, with American and French (or European) Oak barrels being the most predominant due to the high production of Bourbon and Rye (which must both use fresh, new, charred American oak barrels) and Cognac (which must use a French breed known as Limousine). Japan has its own oak, Mizunara, which is far scarcer and infrequently used for barrels because the tree doesn’t grow straight and the trees need to be around 200 years old before they can be harvested for barrels; during WW II, when getting American oak barrels was impossible, the few Japanese distillers began to use Mizunara to age their whiskies when possible.
The whisky used in Nisei is called Baller and it’s a Japanese style whisky made By St. George Distillery in California, which opened in 1982. The whisky uses 100% malted barley like the single malts Masataka Taketsuru studied in Scotland. The distillate is split and aged in both ex-bourbon barrels and French oak barrels and after that initial aging, the spirit is blended together and aged in whisky casks that previously held house-aged plum liqueur, otherwise known as umeshu. This whisky has a light smoke up front, is sweet and mildly herbal with a deep and lingering chocolate finish. It doesn’t have much bite, and is enjoyable neat as readily as it is in a cocktail. It’s soft, so don’t over work it with heavy modifiers, and second guess citrus. More importantly, it’s as close to the spirit of a Nisei-style whisky as I can get a hold of. There are smaller distilleries in America that are Japanese American owned, but they don’t distribute throughout the country, but I would encourage you to check out the American Shochu Company in Maryland if you can.
I wanted to embrace the spirit without overpowering the delicate flavor. I intended to use yuzu juice but fresh yuzu is not only hard to come by but citrus doesn’t play well with the whisky, so I instead infused it with shiso, or beefsteak plant, which is a relative of mint that’s used a little like parsley in America but is far more flavorful having a sweet, almost baking spice aroma and taste. This infusion rounds the whisky even further and brings forth the herbaceousness of the spirit. I complemented the whisky with sake, dry vermouth, green tea, and the rye whiskey syrup. Like many things “American”, the rye syrup is loud and threatens to dominate the cocktail, but, in small amounts, lends not only sweetness but the addition of spicy notes that American rye whiskey is known for, elevating the cocktail with the syrup’s tempered presence.
Nisei
1.5oz Shiso Infused Japanese Whisky* (Baller)
0.75oz Genshu Sake (Lucky Dog)
0.75oz Extra Dry Vermouth (Noilly Prat)
0.75oz Green Tea
0.25oz Rye Whiskey Syrup**
Add all of the ingredients together in a tin or glass and give a few stirs without ice.
Optional: Place the mix in the refrigerator for two hours (or longer) to chill.
Place a large ice cube into a glass and pour the mix over the ice; garnish with shiso leaves.
Sip and heal. Sip and heal. Acknowledge what’s unaddressed, then sip and heal some more.