Fifty years is a long time, but not so long when something frightening happens, something you can`t help thinking about today, when there is that same edgy, anti-Japanese feeling in America.
Fifty years ago, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering ”all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien,” to evacuate the West Coast. About 120,000 Japanese-Americans and immigrants were sent to internment camps.
Sox Kitashima was 22 years old then. What she remembers is the hatred in the voices of people on the street who called her ”Jap.” The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.
Even Japanese-American citizens could not be trusted in America, Roosevelt decided, despite reports from Naval Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that there was no overriding risk.
Kitashima recalled the day she came upon the evacuation notice nailed to a telephone pole in the California town, now called Fremont, where she was born and raised. ”It sure made me feel like I was an enemy,” she said.
Fifty years later, Kitashima said she again has some feeling of being the enemy. Late at night she listens to a radio talk show on a transistor by her pillow. The voices of the callers, she said, are shrill with contempt for the Japanese. Japan is taking America`s jobs, the callers say. Japan is destroying our economy.
”People say, `Why do you listen?` ” she said. She shrugs. She said she found out 50 years ago that being an American citizen does not guarantee civil rights, that derogatory comments can build to hysteria. ”I just want to know what people are thinking and talking about,” she said.
As the Day of Remembrance of the internment draws near, Kimochi, a senior center in San Francisco where Kitashima chops vegetables in the kitchen preparing lunch for the senior citizens, has received two hate letters, including one that said, ”Death to all former internees.”
The Japanese American Citizens League in Los Angeles has received two hate letters and a bomb threat. Around the time of the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December, a Molotov cocktail was thrown on the lawn of the home of Japanese-American family in San Leandro, Calif.
It is an uneasy time for Japanese-Americans to be remembering the internment camps. There is some solace in the fact that the federal government now acknowledges that the internment should not have happened and was not right.
There was no ”military necessity” for internment, according to a 1983 congressional report. The camps, the report stated, were the result of ”race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”
In a program of restitution that will conclude this year, President Bush sent each living internee a letter of apology. In addition, each living camp survivor will receive a $20,000 settlement.
A long silence
Many of the Japanese immigrants who were put in the camps have since died. Their children, known as nisei, meaning the first generation to be born in the U.S., were the children and young adults of the camps. They are the ones speaking out on this 50th anniversary, along with their children, known as sansei.
”People say, `Why were you so quiet for 50 years?` ” said Chizu Iiyama of El Cerrito, Calif., who was put in a camp in Topaz, Utah, at age 20.
”I has a lot to do with the reluctance of nisei to rock the boat. They wanted their children to be part of the mainstream. But our children convinced us that to protect them, we have to tell what happened.”
Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, anti-Japanese sentiment was prevalent in America, remembers Noriko Sawada Bridges, who was growing up in Santa Ana, Calif., in the 1920s and `30s. Japanese immigrants could not become citizens or buy land. In Santa Ana, Bridges and her parents could use the city swimming pool only on the day before the water was changed. Bridges` father, a Japanese immigrant who had worked as a laborer on the railroad from California to Colorado, leased a strawberry farm. Her mother came from Japan as a ”picture bride,” in a marriage agreed upon through a photograph sent through the mail.
When the word came that they had to evacuate their farm, leaving their crops behind and losing or selling their possessions in a panic, her parents were stricken with fear about what the Americans would do to them.
”My mother was fearful that we would put in the desert were no one could see us and then we would be executed for hostage purposes, if U.S. hostages were put to death in the war,” said Bridges. Still, they went obediently to the buses, ”like sheep,” she said. ”We thought it was patriotic.”
”We didn`t expect a lot of equality,” Bridges said. ”It wasn`t until afterwards that I realized my civil rights had been violated.” She lists them: freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable arrest, the right to a fair trial, due process under the law and protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
Little indignities
Bridges and her parents each took what they could carry in two hands. Bridges carried her high school yearbooks along with sheets and clothing. As they assembled with other Japanese families to wait for buses, tension was high. They were kept ignorant of what awaited them. ”We weren`t even told when we got on the bus we were going to any specific place,” Bridges said.
They drove into the desert and arrived at a camp built on a Mohave Indian reservation in Poston, Ariz., one of 10 internment camps. The other camps were in similarly desolate locations in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas and California.
Bridges shared a 20-by-25-foot cubicle with her parents and a bachelor-stranger. The lack of privacy and the disruption of the family unit were a particularly painful assault on Japanese values.
The internees were given sacks and told to go out back and fill them with straw to make beds. Their first meals in the communal dining room were rice, spaghetti noodles and mashed potatoes, with no meat. The toilets had no doors; the showers had no curtains. Six showers served 150 people. Women took baths in laundry tubs at midnight to have some privacy.
When a friend outside the camp sent Bridges a package of sanitary napkins, a military police officer felt every pad with his hand, searching for something.
”Those are the little things that rankle,” she said.
English only
The English-speaking internees ran the camp, leaving most of the older men, the traditional heads of families, with no power. At camp meetings, the Japanese language was not allowed to be spoken, by military order.
Nearly everyone worked 44 hours a week for pay of $16 to $19. The children went to schools run by the adults. Aside from the barbed wire fence and the armed officers, the U.S. military tried to create an atmosphere of normal life.
Bridges ran a social dancing program teaching the fundamentals of the fox-trot, jitterbug and waltz. At night, internees watched Ginger Rogers and Frank Sinatra movies.
To prove their loyalty to America, young men in the camp volunteered for the all-Japanese-American 442nd combat unit, a highly decorated unit that fought with the slogan ”Go for broke!”
Bridges lived in the camp for three years. Chizu Iiyama, who was interned for six months at a Southern California racetrack, where she and her family lived in a horse stall, and six months in a camp in Utah, remembers her rush to put the experience behind her once she left camp.
”For a long period of time after the war, nobody spoke of it,” said Iiyama, vice president of the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco.
”Everybody was so busy trying to get their lives together. And some of it had to do with the Japanese-American reticence to talk about negative things.”
While the majority of internees returned to the West Coast, many scattered east, settling in major cities like Chicago and New York, said Joy Morimoto, spokeswoman for the Japanese American Citizens League in San Francisco. Because of their experience in beis speak out
As nisei grew older, social movements ripped through American culture. Japanese-Americans saw other groups speaking out, particularly African Americans, Iiyama said. ”When they talked about black is beautiful, we thought, why should we hide our background?” she said.
”Our children went to college in the `60s and `70s and began to demand Asian studies classes,” she said. Some of these sansei became lawyers active in defending civil rights. ”We learned you didn`t just have to take it,”
Iiyama said.
On the eve of the 50th anniversary, she does not want to take it anymore. Her message about the anti-Japanese racism of the past and of today is this:
”Americans come with many different faces. Everybody thinks only white people are Americans.”
