The Japanese American Internment Our Story

Harbor it was a time of national strife the enemy seemed to be at our backdoor ready to burst in the next day President Franklin D Roosevelt addressed the Congress of the United States some busts 7th 1941 a date which will live in infamy with confidence in our armed forces with the unbounding determination of our people we will gain the inevitable triumph so help us God how did this provocative threat by the Japanese Empire affect Americans especially those who were of Japanese heritage and living on the west coast closest to the enemy's guns Milton S Eisenhower the director of the War Relocation Authority explained what happened in the following months Pearl Harbor our West Coast became a potential combat zone living in that zone for more than a hundred thousand persons of Japanese ancestry two-thirds of them American citizens one-third aliens we knew that some among them were potentially dangerous but no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores military authorities therefore determined that all of them citizens and aliens alike would have to move in early 1942 just two months after Pearl Harbor President Roosevelt signed an executive order number 9 oh six six requiring all persons of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast to be transferred by the United States Army to areas deep in the American Interior away from the possible war zone away from their friend away from their farms and jobs away from their religious temples and churches away from their schools away from their homes over 100,000 Japanese American citizens and aliens were bused to what were called internment camps located in isolated areas of Idaho Wyoming California Utah Colorado Arizona and Arkansas although the government tried to make this mass migration as easy and as painless as possible for most of these people were United States citizens and had broken no laws still this uprooting had a profound effect on those who were forced to give up their basic freedoms by force of law hello I'm Jo Ann McKay an instructor in secondary education at Iowa State University I'm one of the instructors who works in multicultural non-sexist education and this afternoon we are fortunate to have gathered here grace and min Amamiya serve in der Waal and Diana Jackson to discuss with the Army is their memories of the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States in 1942 surrender I think you had a question to start us out today I do I was wondering um what it was like after right after Pearl Harbor there was a lot of war hysteria I believe because there was such a shocking thing to happen and people like Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell and the Hearst newspaper kept saying well nothing has happened therefore it's going to happen and so we were under suspect I think at all times so they were expecting you to fight back or something or get organized or they thought something like that would happen I think they had expected us to be organized already to performs on the espionage for the Japanese forces which was not true and because nothing happened the feeling was there getting just getting ready to for it to occur and it was one of the the fears of the time yeah I think there was just strictly racial discrimination don't you think yes yeah and those many of the organizations came out right and showed their discrimination and it was beyond their comprehension that non Caucasians who spoke a foreign tongue could be good Americans and they stressed that a lot and so we were viewed with fear and they kept saying well yellow skin was not fit for the white supremacy picture the President issued the executive order 906 six that authorized the military to detain all undesirable persons it didn't specify the Japanese as a race it included the those of Italian and German descent but certainly as history will show the Germans and the Italian descendants were not affected by this executive order just those of Japanese descent were affected well then did you have any idea what to take or where you were going or anything once you heard about this order no they the order was that we had to dispose of our homes our property and other things that we owned or if you were in business you had to sell your business and the bank's throws a lot of the assets of people who did have money so they were having difficulty with their financial you know aspects of this at the time as soon as you were told to dispose of things you put some things in storage well we did and our church was nice enough to say that we could store some of our things in the second story of the church but while we were gone I think to vandalise as well all the people who had taken the things there and they weren't of monetary value but they were a member yes and like mothers come on and think that we had high school awards and pictures of our relatives and things that as I said was of no monetary value to anyone else but it was a big loss for us and then we had to turn in our cameras and radios and and guns and knives ceremonial swords that some of the families had did you know that the military was going to come and get you or how soon before they came did you know well about five or seven days before they would let us know they said and so pack up your house that's right uh-huh and well we were told to pack up but they said that they would within five days to a week they would let us know when the specific date would be and so then we were told to get ready and we could have one si bag of bedding and then two suitcases full of things which included everything and it was just what you could carry with you well I think it's you can imagine being asked to leave your hometown with that which you can carry with you and not knowing where we were going or for how long and I think one of the questions that students often ask is you know why didn't you resist you know we're in the 80s we think boy it was strange that the people didn't resist so well we were told that this was our way to prove our loyalty to the United States and as a group we were just too young to to have any strong feelings I guess about it and we're told to obey therefore we obeyed and we didn't have any civil rights groups to fight our cause and we didn't have strong leaders that felt that we should do anything differently it's not that there weren't any civil rights groups at that time it was just that they weren't vociferous enough they weren't vocal enough nor were there with a great in numbers I know the Quakers and the church groups were all for us but for some reason or other there we're not hurt the American Civil Liberties Union we're very active but they too were we're kind of a minor voice in the wilderness now did everybody go that was supposed to well we were told every one of Japanese ancestry and that's right and the 1940 census showed that there about 126 thousand Japanese and American born Japanese and over sixty percent were made of born citizens like we were we were born here in the United States therefore supposedly had the rights as citizens as you have or human hair but but our parents were as Ben said they were ineligible for citizenship because of the alien law they had if you didn't sign up or whatever a report would they well if you didn't sign up if you didn't register and go then you were in violation of the curfew that was imposed at that time and several people has served as test cases and deliberately violated these curfews just to get arrested so that they can prove a point and they were arrested and at that time the the courts ruled that the government was just in arresting and imprisoning these individuals but since then the courts have overturned some of these decisions that it was a violation of their civil liberties took a lot of years and I think maybe that's what we want to go back to for a few minutes is just to talk a little bit about your own families at that time you know how old were even when this happened well I was 21 my mother and father had come from Japan in the early part of nineteen hundreds and then my father died when I was 10 but there are five of us in our family and we five were all citizens American citizens because we were born in California I had three brothers and one sister and one brother had was already in the US Army at that time then I had one brother who was out in the working world and then one had just finished the University of California I was working for the state of California and I might insert at this time that he was he had to quit because of the evacuation orders you were a student nurse I was at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and we're nursing there and then I finished my nurses training at st. Mary's of Rochester Minnesota after being out of camp now that brings us up-to-date on your family what about your background man at this point you two were both students you weren't married could you tell us a little bit about your family well I have two older sisters that lived in San Francisco as a family all that time and I was a senior at California Berkeley and fortunately I was able to continue classes until it was time for for us to really move at which time it was such that the university allowed us credit for that spring semester in 1942 and I was able to graduate with my class receiving my diploma by mail I think the the sad part was one of our classmates japanese-american student had the highest scholastic average in the senior class of 4000 students and he was not able to go to commencement to receive his gold medal from the president because he was incarcerated behind in one of these centers we want to go back to that moment of when it happened now that somebody knocked on your door and said you are to report we don't know where did you have to report what was this called or yes well I'll just my personal experience but I was sent to the assembly center and this was in April or the first part of May of 1942 and the seventy centers were just temporary quarters but therefore but to facilitate all this getting us out of California they picked the easiest way out I guess many of us ended up in fairgrounds and State Fairgrounds free tracks that's where you were ten temporary quarters on a racetrack at temp around just south of San Francisco and our family was housed in some whitewashed stalls but no one came to our door and says thou shalt leave tomorrow they had public signs posted in the neighborhoods and you're supposed to keep an eye open for when your particular community had to move to the so called assembly centers well then was it up to you to use your own transportation or do like where their buses that came through there was a meeting place for each contingent so we just carried our things to whatever meeting place was designated and then they checked their numbers and gave us tags and boarded us on buses some probably went by train to my case to the racetrack and also when we were in the assembly center we were living in better like we were living in barracks but we had to eat and a community probably called mess hall and that's about what some of the food was at time I shouldn't say that but like I worked at the hospital therefore I ate at the dining hall which was close to the hospital and my brother worked teaching so then he ate with his teacher friends at another dining hall well mother ate where our living quarters were with my sister and so we were adults so it wasn't so bad but when there's children and the children are doing this the family was not a complete unit they were not even getting together to eat meals together many times and I think this was sad and they and father couldn't say all right come on everybody we're eating we're we're told whether we were on first call second call a third call and they said okay we're on first call so I want you back here by let's say 5:30 because we'll all go to eat together and he felt that he didn't have that authority to say that anymore because he was not the breadwinner nor they the head well the family structure really broke down and then you went from that to the internment camp now they call it relocation centers yeah the relocation Center and no where were these then there's a ten of those and there was one in topaz Utah that was from in was and then two in Gila Arizona and I was in one of those and then the others in Colorado and Arkansas and Wyoming and I don't know and two in California but I think the most frightening thing is that just like when we were taken from our assembly centers to our relocation centers we had to go by trains these trains were quite antiquated because the military were using troop trains and using the better trains and the MPS had their guns out at all times with the bandits in place looking over us with their sidearms and when we stopped on our way from California to Arizona in the middle of the desert to stretch our legs we had to wait for them to build a ringed a barbed-wire fence and got the MPS out there then they let us out in groups to stretch our legs and I don't know where they thought we'd be going in the middle of the desert but they made sure that we were secure and they and then we had to do it with all our shades drawn and I don't know how that was that they didn't want us to know where we were going or they didn't want the people to know that we were in there and maybe they thought they were you know trying to make it safe for that yeah but when were in camp I mean you can imagine living behind barbed wire fence with machine-gun towers with a machine gun pointed towards camp 24 hours a day with a spotlight on 24 hours a day and they tried to tell us that if that them that we were in turn for our own protection and we said well if it's for our protection why does guns pointed at us to quote-unquote protect us they kept saying what was camp life really like I mean like psychologically and physically your surrounding - of course I speak just for Gila and my personal experiences but the communities were usually at eight or ten thousand people and we had about ten thousand there and when you consider all the needs of of a town like a ten thousand population why the needs are many and varied and there were really literally tarpaper villages that were modeled after army barracks and they were so designed to care for troops really instead of home family units and so we lived in barracks six units to a barrack and the family in each unit and so we had a room like about 20 by 20 and no privacy um you could hear from one end of the barrack to the other what was being said or people snoring or bickering or laughing or whatever goes on in a normal household and then we had of course bed checks morning and night and we had the internal security in the camps and we had community bathrooms back to back stalls of toilet seats and no shower stalls but just one room with a bunch of showerheads and it was especially very hard I felt for the older people who respected each other's privacy and have never lived that type of love free type of living well I think you've got the picture this 20 by 20 space the only thing that was provided you was a cot and a mattress filled with ticking and you have to have your own bedding and whatever furniture you had you had to either buy or scrounge or develop some way or another the only and there's no running water in these units so it was strictly a living quarter or sleeping quarters and whether you had a family of two or or six or seven you still got the same space and then you worked at a hospital yes I did and that hospital was for a jacket for that community oh it's for the community of Japanese defendant okay and our parents okay and we did have some civil service workers that came in and we had civil service doctors and then the evacuate doctors and dentists and and everything from security to the janitors and everything that and like any other hospital would have with the nurses and the doctors we also had technicians and dentists and dietitians and nurses and then we had church services every Sunday we had both the Christian and the Buddhist ceremonies we had the ministers that some of them lived in camp and some of them went from Camp to camp and others came in from the communities and had services for us so we were very fortunate about that because we also had a school set up we had to because there were 30,000 school-aged second generation and in third generation and so when you split that up into about ten camps you had about 3,000 students in each camp and so the teacher we didn't have that many teachers so a lot of the students your age who were in the midst of their college helped teach school and those who were graduates helped teach school and so the students the elementary school system was run really by young adults I think the intent at that time was to make it as near normal as possible for their residents in terms of their social needs their educational needs and within certain bounds I think these services at least an attempt was made to provide these services and and then we had a lot of cultural things going on we had of course musicians within the group and also people came in from within the outside of the come of our community they came and performed for us and we had arts and crafts and this was especially nice for the East Bay folks who for the first time in their lives for many of them they had free time on their hands they had been so busy livin wherever they had lived working from morning till night that these nice I say nice things they didn't have time to do and maybe they had done it when they were in Japan but they didn't have the opportunity or the time or the money to pursue since they had come to America and the and you should have seen some of the things that they've made and produced it was just unbelievable how talented many of them are how was it within your camp oh do you like green eggs we had we had powdered eggs no there were they said that it cost about 25 to 45 cents a day to feed us and to this day I do not care grape jelly or apple butter in our house among other things but the the cooks were we had Japanese food and American food because the the workers in the mess halls or the dining halls were the evacuees and a lot of them were good cooks because they used to work at restaurants and they were very inventive and well I still remember one time when I walked into the mess hall in the middle of the day I saw an octopus hanging in the in the kitchen I didn't go to eat that bite or selective another thing you mentioned one time when we were talking grace was he told about how your mother made those barracks homey even under those circumstances that's right and she'd crochet pillow tops and made curtains and she was a seamstress by trade and so she was very handy with her hands and and we made them of course we use blankets as wall partitions but she was able to do so much around the house with all these little things and our she barter with people who would make other things and she would barter her skills and so it was a very amicable way of not being able to buy things but getting things and making know-how so look a little more homey there are many opportunities for philosophical conflicts amongst the people there I think one of them centered around whether the sending let your sons go off to war for example that created a lot of tension and many of the camps of even to the point of having riots that seems incredible to me that you're being kept by the United States government and and now you're gonna volunteer well the young men were asked to volunteer for the services and this is another to prove their loyalty and they were in need of interpreters and translators and then they of course we were brought up going to language school so some of us were better than others but at least we had a background and within our homes we spoke the language and they found that it might be easier to teach the young men who were exposed to language and had some training to be interpreters and translators and sent overseas and so they asked for volunteers they came to camp and they they picked up the fellows for military intelligence press 200th infantry in the 442nd who were of course very they proved themselves very good soldiers but it was hard because the families were ridiculed and they said well why should you send your boys off to be killed or possibly be killed when here they you're the country is putting you behind barbed wire fence but you can see the type of philosophical conflicts that could arise under those circumstances yeah I think it'd be hard for fighting for a country who's done this to you that's right but still as American citizens that's your country you know I mean United States is our country and Japan is is the your enemy so these are some of the unfortunate aspects of what happened during those days right there are some questionable questionnaires that came by and you answered the wrong way while you were incredible well that the older folks who were ineligible for American citizenship were asked to denounce their Japanese citizenship and this caused a lot of problems because you couldn't expect them to give up the Japanese citizenship without giving them something in return and at that time that was not possible to give them anything in return and there are some people who said to heck with the u.s. we've got a we owe our allegiance to Japan now if this is the way the u.s. is going to treat us we don't want a part of it and many were repatriated out of these camps on the basis of their answers to these questions and I think down the road they decided that some of these answers were were given under duress of the moment and and they were allowed to come back to the US again but then when did your families get out or how long did this total internet last well I stay didn't care men men came out early I spent about a year and a half in camp before I was left for my job and then my mother and my brother and family stayed in there until about 45 I think and the camp itself see it opened in 42 in April and they closed in the spring of 1946 so roughly it was four years of camp if those who stayed till the bitter end but my family went on to Cleveland but later you know many of them did return to the west coast and there was still racial discrimination out there there are vigilantes that took things into their hands those arsons of our killings and in some areas like the American Legion scratched out the names of the Nisei names on the honor roll of the war did you keep using the term nice day okay I think our students maybe need to know okay when I've been using the word issei issei is the first generation which would be our parents who came to America and the Nisei is a second me means two so second generation and that's our generation and then some say would be like our son a thirst that would be the third generation now if they have children Beyonce which what and it goes on this whole thing is just so hard to believe that it even happens I mean you know we're supposed to be free country and everything but now when you look back at this I'm sure a lot of people look back at it and they think you know we didn't fight back are they fighting back now or is anything being done about it today yes and several things have contributed to what's happening today most important is the Freedom of Information Act which released a lot of government documents related to our detention and movement and it gave those of us who are concerned some ammunition to prove that what the government did was done under false pretenses they weren't given the full information when they when important decisions were made this information was withheld from government agencies so the decisions to move us was very hastily made but thanks to the Freedom of Information Act a lot of these papers have come forward and the details of what happened and transpired in those days really came to light and to investigate the situation the Congress and the President appointed a commission to study this tonal episode and this Commission this was in 1980 and this Commission came up with a number of recommendations to the Congress one of which was to recommend that a joint statement be issued by the two houses of the Congress and signed by the President to constitute really an an official apology from the nation for the acts of detention the acts of exclusion the acts of removal and secondly to demonstrate that an injustice was done by providing some sort of financial redress collectively to this group of people and individually to persons who were affected so then one one way is an apology an official party and then the second way of distributing money financial redress to set up a trust fund for collective as well as individual financial redress yes do you think if this bill ever goes through the education system we'll be able to teach it more because when I was in school it was well part of this redress funding was to go for education and research and some of it will be directed towards providing materials to the school systems and part of it will go for individual redress yes is there total agreement on the subject of redress not absolutely and there's not a total agreement amongst even the members of the house that passed this redress bill and I think it's it's rightfully so because there are those who feel that others suffered as a result of of the war 40 years ago families were broken up and they got no compensation for it people were killed some were taken prisoners of war and we too were more or less prisoners of war but the big difference is that the real prison the regular prisoners of war were prisoners of the enemy forces we were prisoners of our own government and I think that's the big difference at that point today we've had the opportunity to talk to Professor min Amamiya Iowa State University in agronomy and grace Amamiya who is active in our community and church work and has given many speeches to Iowa State University education students on the Japanese internment they are the parents of two children and when I talk to them I think about that they are not bitter and yet they must look back and have some idea about some reflections on this time well we can really felt very strongly about it and I do stand up on my soapbox occasionally and in closing I just like to say them yes we were incarcerated that's the word to use I think but we were charged with no crime and we were United States citizens we were not proven guilty in any court of law but just by the stroke of the pen by the then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt we were taken away from our homes and put into camps we're stripped of our freedom and our civil rights as citizens and also subject to military law without martial law even being declared and this incarceration I think was an insult to our constitutional liberties as citizens of the United States to be incarcerated charged with only one crime that crime being to have been born Americans of Japanese descent with oriental features and living in the wrong area of America and to me is this is that the Bill of Rights was a mockery internment in America yes it can happen incarceration in concentration camps in America yes it did happen but may it never happen again may our experience as the example of one of them most disgraceful incidents of our governments history never be repeated and may I close by saying to all of you you know to hold dearly your American citizenship and civil rights and constitutional liberties and don't ever take them for granted does this too could happen to you and/or your loved ones just as it happened to us and ours and when the rights of one minority is threatened the rights of all are endangered so with this I close thank you thank you thank you all for coming this afternoon we appreciate all of the information thank you very much