"Security did not compel any interference with the Japanese in Hawaii, where they outnumbered the rest of the population. It did not result in the imprisonment of the Germans or Italians, despite the nation being at war with their homelands.
...And, in final proof of the terrible injustice, not a single case of sabotage or other anti-American acts was ever proved against any Japanese-American during the entire course of World War II."
---Earl G. Waters In his syndicated column
On July 31 President, Jimmy Carter signed the "Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act." To most Americans this act does not mean a thing, but to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were removed from the West Coast during World War II, it is the beginning of the epilogue to their story.
President Carter remarked as he signed the bill: "Senate Bill 1647 establishes a seven person commission that will work during the next 18 months to look into one of£ the most disappointing and sometimes embarrassing occurrences in the history of our nation. "In February of 1942 the president signed a proclamation setting aside certain areas of our country from which American citizens could be excluded and within which American citizens and resident aliens could be interned. "This was in a time of war but no German-American citizens or aliens were incarcerated or were Italian-Americans interned, either. The only ones who were interned were the Japanese-Americans . . . I believe that it will be very helpful for this commission to assess this episode in American history to see if adequate compensation has been awarded under previous efforts . . . And we also want to make sure their efforts will prevent any recurrence of this abuse of the basic human rights of American citizens and also resident aliens who enjoy the privileges and protection of not only American law but of American principles and ideals." Reading President Carter's remarks fanned within me a host of memories. As painful as these recollections are, they are a part of me. I hasten now to write them down before passage of more years makes them irretrievable. I think I owe my children an explanation of this piece of their legacy. (In passage through the public school system they never read anything in their texts about this episode in American history.)
The sense of rejection and futility during the war had devastated me. With no formal charges or warrants, no trials, no due process-- just suspicion that some of us might aid the enemy, Japan--I, along with 120,000 other Americans living in California, Washington and Oregon, was removed from my home. Somehow, the very act of being incarcerated, being held behind barbed wire, leaves a person tarnished, shamed. When the presidential order for us to leave Los Angeles was issued in May 1942, we were allowed approximately one week to dispose of our household goods. Each person was permitted to take only what he or she could carry to the internment camp.
I remember my parents selling everything In our rested house to anauctioneering--everything except our new spinet piano We put a "Piano For Sale,” sign in our front window and a well dressed Chinese gentleman purchased it and paid cash The last two nights before our departure my family and I slept in a hotel owned by friends. I could not eat or sleep during those last few days--what would become of} us ? The first camp we were sent to was called an assembly center. The second, more permanent camp was the relocation center; en Such euphemisms! A concentration camp is a concentration camp. There were 10 relocation centers, all located in unpopulated, barren ant isolated regions of the country.
My family, consisting of my parent my older brother and myself, was held in the Turlock Assembly Center in central California for two or three months. Frustration and anger were swelling in me at a time when I was awkward and unsure of my adolescent self. When I woke in the mornings. I was alternately angry with Japan for Pearl Harbor ant angry with the American government for putting us in such a God-forsaken place. At a time when my body was developing and I was anxious about privacy, the communal toilets, showers, mess halls--communal everything-- more than my mint and body could bear. Not long after we entered Turlock I became covered with a weeping rash and spent two weeks m the camp infirmary. The doctor came to examine me every day but told my mother he didn't know what the ailment was. He said there was a man in the meets ward with the same strange affliction.
It took me years to realize that my eczema was an allergic reaction--I was allergic to the degradation, the injustice the shame of eviction and incarceration. Although the problem, mostly cleared up by the time we left Turlock it was to reappear whenever feelings of frustration or helplessness overwhelmed me. Turlock had been a race track and so we were housed i n former horse stables. The room allotted to my family was approximately 16 by 20 feet. The walls between the rooms stopped where the sloping roof started so we could hear almost everything that was said and done in the whole building . I never got used to the everyday sounds of strangers talking and arguing and snoring. The showers, lacking partitions like the outhouses, at least had running water.
The relocation center was the Gila River Cam? in Arizona. Very desolate, barren and sandy. The ares was so dry and bare of vegetation the' any breeze churned the fine sand into a dust storm. This dust seeped into the numerous cracks and crevices of the hastily built barracks.
One dust storm that I especially recall occurred during a high school assembly. All a! our assemblies were open-airones, held ;in front d a wooden stage/platform A teacher was leading us in singing ``God Bless America." We were not enthusiastic to begin with, and when the wind came D and the sand began to swirl hardly anyone was singing. But the teacher was persistent in trying to get us to sing heartily. Not only were we to swallow any little pride which remained but as much dirt as would enter our open mouths. Of my teachers, roughly hair were Caucasian and the other half were "Buddhaheads" as the young fellows referred to Japanese Americans. I vividly remember two of my Caucasian teachers, dedicated and effective, although many students were hostile and uncooperative in the classroom, probably taking out their resentment on them. Who were these individuals who gave up the freedom and comforts of the "outside" and chose to pursue their profession in the dreary camps? They must have been compassionate and selfless persons. Like most high schools, ours had Friday evening dances, with music provided by Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey records. On the agony of sitting on a bench along the wall, pretending to be engrossed in talking to the girls, hoping to be asked to dance, acting nonchalant if no boy did.
Our room at Gila, about the same size as the one at Turlock, had also been assigned to an attractive widow and her 20- year-old SOD. He was so embarrassed to sleep in the -tame room with us that he set up his cot outside and slept under the stars., As soon as more barracks were constructed, they moved to their own quarters My brother, 17 at the time, built an off-the-floor dresser attached to the wall studs. Now each member of the family had one drawer for clothes. He also created two standing frames which my mother covered with cloth to serve as room dividers. The wood for these simple furnishings came from the camp's scrap lumber pile. We had a semblence of privacy now for dressing and sleeping, but I could hear sounds during the night of my mother joining my father in his single cot. Our room was also equipped with an oil stove for the cold desert winter.
The communal meals served in the block mess halls were not conducive to family stability. My brother preferred to eat with his buddies or with his girl friend. My mother encouraged me to come late to the mess hall after her waitressing was finished, so we could eat together. My father, being a cook, never ate with us. One day, my best friend casually told me that a certain girl in our block was dropping out of school. I asked why. She would only say, "Aw, you know why." Well, I did know the girl frequently visited the bachelors' barracks in our block. (Almost every block had a separate building for these unmarried males, most of whom were older men without family of any kind.) After I discovered this girl had become pregnant, I looked for something, anything, in the little school library that would explain bow this phenomenon bad come about. (I was 15 at the time, but miserably naive and uninformed.)
Luckily for me there was a slender volume, illustrated,. that explained the whole process of conception and birth. I held the book inside of a larger one, hoping no one would notice what I was reading or how much I was blushing.
After about a year at Gila I developed a pain on one side of my body. After several days passed and the pain persisted, my mother took me to the camp clinic. The doctor, a man of 50 or so, had me undress and lie under a sheet. With my mother standing right beside the examining table, the doctor molested me! My mother was totally unaware of (and to this day she does not know)) what was happening. I knew he was doing something wrong but I didn't know how to stop him without appearing like a fool. Afterward I washed and washed myself in the shower. The pain in my side soon disappeared but the unclean feeling persisted for some time.. I have often wondered how many other young girls this doctor took advantage of.
By mid-l943 the government was encouraging evacuees to leave the camps and relocate to the Midwest or East. (Perhaps somebody in Washington feared a "reservation mentality'' developing in us.) My mother and I left Gila in early December of 1943. My brother had left immediately after graduating from high school to work as an orderly in a St. Louis hospital. That fall he entered a small men's college in Iowa. My father had gone to Evanston, Ill., in November with assurance of work m a nursing home and he then sent for my mother and me.
Attending the local high school was a culture shock for me. The students seemed so articulate and sophisticated. About half the girls smoked, and they all talked about dating, mostly servicemen. I truly felt "right off the boat." All the while I was a student there, I felt strange and uncomfortable, although I made several longtime friends and did not encounter any overt acts of prejudice or racism. Eventually I attended the University of Chicago where I met my husband-to-be. He, too, was a veteran of one of the camps, but his internment had been twice as long as mine. He and his family did not leave Minidoka (in southern Idaho) until the war ended. Now, 38 years after our train had chugged out of the Los Angeles depot, my heart sinking deeper with every click of the wheels, I find myself a quite ordinary, middle class homemaker, happily married, with three independent children and one very dependent grandchild.
Will the American conscience permit such travesty of the civil rights of an entire group to occur again? All the civil rights legislation of the '50s and '60s and, more recently, the attitude toward the treatment of Iranians in this country by our government are encouraging signs that the answer to this question is a resounding no. And when the commission created by Senate Bill 1647 reveals to the American people all the facts pertaining to the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the writer of this narrative will breath a deep sigh and close the curtains on that part of her life.