Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992 TAG: 9202260334
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By STEVE SUO
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
AMERICA'S `BIG MISTAKE'
Camp. That's what my relatives in California call it, gathered around the dinner table for aburagei and fish. "Remember that time in camp?" they say. The expression always makes it sound like 4-H.Fifty years ago last week, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, sentencing my family and 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry to prison. In the heat of a horrible war, they were collected, processed, and dispersed to relocation camps around the country.
I have been wondering and asking about those events for as long as I can remember. Born two decades later, I have inherited an image not of barbed wire and guards with bayonets but of friends and neighbors, schooldays and sports. Ordinary. Acceptable.
For all the humiliation they suffered, whatever pain they feel today, those who were there will always have trouble describing their experience in such terms. My family still portrays it as a part of life and a matter of fact. They moved on. Not until five years ago did my grandfather, speaking about it in his broken English, finally say, "America. . . That . . . big mistake."
It was a remarkable moment.
By February 1942, my uncle already had burned his bamboo sword. It was blunt and harmless, used only in the martial art of kendo, but he feared it would be seized as contraband. Very soon, my grandfather would set about storing, and later selling, his only possessions: a 1942 Ford and his tractor.
It was winter in the arid Central Valley of California. My grandparents and their four children spent the first months at the Fresno County fairgrounds, then were taken by Army train to Jerome, Ark. With about 7,000 others, they moved into tar-papered barracks perched on the Mississippi flood plain.
My grandfather had come to this country with his father in 1917, hoping to make his fortune and return home quickly. Marriage and the Depression intervened, but then federal laws prohibited him from becoming a citizen - because he was Japanese.
Among the items Grandpa carried with him to Arkansas were his enemy alien papers, which he kept in a hand-sewn pouch, and his draft card.
My grandmother was born in the United States but lost her citizenship when she married Grandpa. She regained it, oddly enough, by becoming naturalized. Her high school portrait shows a radiant valedictorian of the class of 1929. Scribbled in the yearbook margins are a lot of "To a good friend" notes, mostly signed with European names.
That was behind them when they arrived in Jerome. In the family's quarters there, six people lived in one room with a concrete floor. Curtains were hung for privacy, and some couples put off plans to start a family until after the war. Many families dispersed in the open expanse of the mess hall, but my grandfather insisted ours eat each meal together.
Although cameras were prohibited, people persuaded friendly guards to take a few snapshots. I asked my aunt about these a few years ago and she hauled out an album, with several shots from camp.
"Why didn't you tell me about these?" I asked, incredulous.
"You never asked," she replied.
In one photograph, the family stands smiling on a barracks stoop. It might have been taken anywhere, but for the stenciled number "15-6-D" beside the door.
In another shot, Grandpa, a former wrestler, hefts an enormous mallet over a churn of mochi, gummy balls of pounded rice. He is sturdy and handsome, with a wool cap snapped jauntily on his head. The cooking fire burns in his eyes.
Grandpa drove a tractor on the camp soybean farm for $19 a month. Money didn't matter much there since meals were provided, but I think he needed the work to satisfy a more fundamental desire. It showed that, stripped of his freedom, he still had strong arms and a powerful will to use them.
Growing up, I used to wonder whether my family put a bright face on their experience for fear we kids would resent America and be held back. But other factors tinged their memories, as well. In spite of where they were, camp was still a time when they were young.
My kendo-fighting uncle remembers basketball games and senior proms. First generation parents opposed the latter. ("Why have dancing during the war?" they complained. "People are getting killed.") The rowdy second generation fought for their right to jitterbug - and won.
Every boy was a scout, marching in uniform under the American flag, though camping itself was not allowed in camp. At night, my father roamed the compound in search of ghosts.
Later, when the family was moved to a relocation center in Gila River, Ariz., there was a couple a few barracks away who had hauled along an ice cream maker with the rest of their belongings. My father slipped over there in the summer heat to beg a scoop.
In Arizona, camp officials started showing movies in a natural ampitheater carved from the side of a mountain. It was there, on a clear night in July 1945, that my father saw an eerie flash appear on the horizon. Shortly after the war ended, he began to consider its possible source: the first test of the atomic bomb, several hundred miles away in New Mexico.
Dad visited Gila in 1983 to see what was left of the camp. It was easy to find, wedged beside an old Indian reservation. The barracks had all been torn down, but their foundations still poked through the dust and sage brush.
After some wandering, he discovered what he was looking for. One block over from the corner of the compound, lay a concrete tub. He recognized it: the family mochi churn. My grandmother had prepared food in this place 45 years before.
In a way, Dad was home.
No one would deny there was pain in confinement. In some camps, it erupted into riots. In most, it merely simmered.
Hard against deserts and barren plains as most camps were, the fences and guard towers were almost overkill. Even if the camps had been in the middle of New York City, Dad says, "you were still locked up."
As the war drew to a close in the summer of 1945, my grandfather joined the line at the administration office each day to learn when the family could return to the West Coast. A few days after the surrender that Aug. 15, Grandpa walked into the barracks and announced they had been released.
Although my family rarely talks about this part, it's clear that to walk free was a rich sensation. After three years, an enormous burden had been lifted.
Yet there were other troubles to face. Even my aunt, who once told my mother that camp was "just something in the past, something that happened," remembers the bus ride home with dread.
"It was all Japanese people from Phoenix to Los Angeles, but from Los Angeles to Fresno, we had to ride with the rest of the people," she says. ". . . That was the most miserable bus ride."
My aunt could read nothing overt in the people's expressions that day, so she was left to imagine what thoughts they concealed.
It was an abrupt transition. Two weeks after returning to Fresno, my father, 10, began the fifth grade.
"Didn't any of the white kids ever ask you about camp?" I ask him.
"No."
"Didn't you talk about it with your Japanese friends?"
"Only about friends we had there and what they were doing after the war."
And, after a pause, he says tersely, "It wasn't talked about, but that doesn't mean it wasn't thought about."
The Japanese Americans who came out of those camps shared a common but unarticulated desire: to prove their loyalty and make good for their children.
Dad's brother eventually joined the Air Force and flew KC-135s over Vietnam. Dad graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and joined the Army. When I was a kid, he would chew me out something good if I ever dropped a toy flag on the ground. He still tells me to buy American - a noble policy I curse every time my Pontiac breaks down.
(Perhaps it's less than ironic that today he works for a large defense contractor, trying to keep the aircraft engine industry a step ahead of Japan.)
While Japanese Americans tried their best to put camp behind them, the rift left by the war seemed unbridgable at times. Fifteen years afterward, when my father was engaged to a Scotch-English woman from New England, his parents stayed home from the wedding.
My mother and grandmother later met and became fast friends over recipes and love of a grandson. But then Grandma didn't talk much about camp, Mom says.
Everything about their experience told them they were to blame. Around the time of the Bataan Death March, for instance, one of my uncles was sued for failing to maintain his fields while imprisoned. His lawyer told him not to bother fighting it in court.
I think what lingered after the war was not bitterness, but shame. Partly out of circumstance and partly from Japanese culture, the burden of the accused was a stigma not easily shed. It seemed to fall to my generation, the sansei, to express the outrage that our parents could not.
Surely I have done so, at times. But as I grow older, I find this emotion tempered.
Camp was a deprivation in a long litany of American injustices - slavery, the annihilation of Native American cultures, Mylai.
Yet it is one that, like the others, diminishes us. It reminds us how fragile is an equally substantial list of triumphs that includes the Constitution, the civil rights movement, and yes, victory in World War II.
I want my children, when they are born, to know both sides of this story. I want them to wave the flag in honor of what America can be, learning from this nation's errors the will to make it whole.
Next fall, I plan to begin a master's program in public policy. Dad has offered to pay part of my way with the reparations check the government is sending him this year.
I hope I can make him proud.
Steve Suo is a staff writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star.
ABOUT THE CAMPS
\ On Feb. 19, 1942: President Roosevelt's relocation order didn't mention Japanese-Americans. It merely authorized military officials to declare security zones and exclude anyone they deemed a threat. Soon, however, American citizens with at least one-sixteenth Japanese blood were barred from living, working or traveling on the West Coast.
\ In 1982: A federal commission concluded the internment was not based on military necessity, and more than 25,000 claimants have received the $20,000 redress checks Congress authorized in 1988. More than 72,000 former internees are living.