by Gene Cowan
My father would always say to me, "Don't go in the backyard. There's all sorts of disease-ridden things back there.” Of course, this would not have been had he cut the grass now and then. It stood four feet high, and had remained that height for a good year now. We assumed that it could not grow any higher due to nature's vast plan of grass in general. We were wrong.
I was the first one to notice the wisps of green creeping up over the side of the deck, which was five feet off of the ground… ground we hadn't seen for years. Was there still anything solid under that grass? Maybe the grass was the same height, and the deck was sinking down into whatever was under that broad mat of green, a color which looked like the back of some huge, indescribable monster, crouched and ready to spring.
The house we lived in was by no means fancy– it was, in fact, a smallish cottage in rural Fairfax County, and our closest neighbors were 3 miles away. There was no shadow government, no homeowners association from suburbia to tell us what lawn to cut and when. At one point, our humble home was a summer residence for some of the big wigs from Washington, but that was many years before the population and business boom that brought Fairfax to the forefront of the Washington area. This was before anyone had ever thought of a beltway or Springfield Bypass. This was history, and our house had it's own history as well. Some remarkable events occurred here, perhaps the most remarkable is the story of Jeffrey Kim, the lawyer from Washington. He was a defense lawyer who specialized in all sorts of arcane law, and he was a well-known and respected man of Japanese/British descent. In 1941, December 18, to be exact, he took his own life right here in our backyard. His body was never found.
There really wasn't too much more to the story, a Japanese American kills himself after Pearl Harbor. His body is never found. Well, I asked myself, how do they know he killed himself? That, I thought, was the interesting part. According to some old-timers that still hang around the area, living in those mustard-and-brown townhouse condominiums down the road, he took pictures. The old story of Japanese loving their cameras was true, it seems. I've never seen the photos, but they purport to show him committing Hari-Kari right in the midst of tall grass in the rear of the backyard. Obviously, he was too busy to cut it as well.
The most interesting part is that the third picture in the sequence (How he took these pictures, I've no idea, maybe automatic shutter). The picture is said to show his spirit, a faint white smudge over his slumped over, bloody body. A spirit which appears sharply in the next photo, grimacing and being pulled down into the ground by an unseen assailant. The look on it's face, said the old man in unit 12A, was horrible to see. As if he were being dragged down to Hell.
The camera was discovered by his mother, an elderly Japanese lady, as she stopped in to say goodbye before she was transported to a detention center with the rest of Fairfax's Japanese population. No one saw the body, but the grass which had grown up over the spot on which he sat had turned a deep red.
I saw these pictures one day while searching through the National Archives for a genealogy lab I had been assigned at school. They were published in the Washington Evening Star of December 20, 1941, and I made microfilm photocopies of them. And the old man was right. They were bizarre.
The photocopies are tacked up on my wall over the desk in my bedroom, where I can contemplate them as I do my homework.