Survivors of Internment Have Mixed Emotions on Payments

In 1942, on order of the U.S. government, Dorothy Shundo left her family’s lettuce farm in West Covina and was transported to a gray, dusty place called Heart Mountain, Wyo. She wore a houndstooth jacket and carried one battered brown cardboard suitcase.

On Wednesday, after the U.S. Senate vote to give official apologies and $20,000 tax-free payments to all surviving Americans of Japanese descent placed in camps during World War II, Shundo carried that same suitcase into the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo.

And that same jacket was inside it. She kept them all these years, she said, first as a symbol of what little she had. Her family lost the lettuce farm and had to start over again in 1944.

Reflects on Vote

Now she keeps the jacket and suitcase as a symbol of what she survived. The 64-year-old Shundo, a secretary living in Torrance, elegantly dressed in a wool suit, fingered the faded old jacket and said of the Senate vote:

“I have mixed emotions. I’m elated that Congress passed this, but I feel saddened that so many have not lived to see this day.”

Of the 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry detained in the camps--more than half of whom were from Southern California--only an estimated 56,000 survive, said Kathy Masaoka, a Los Angeles resident and co-chairman of the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, a California-based group formed in 1980 to lobby for the legislation.

At a press conference at the cultural center, Masaoka said that the Senate vote represented a “major triumph” and a “significant victory for all Americans, for it deals with the basic foundation of this country--the Constitution of the United states.”

‘Nominal’ Sum

Tom Nabara, 65, who had been taken at age 18 off his brother’s vegetable farm in Downey and sent to a camp in Rohwer, Ark., said that he had mixed emotions as well. He is a retired accountant, living in South-Central Los Angeles. The $20,000 payments seemed a “nominal” sum, he thought, when compared to the total loss of property “and suffering we went through. It’s hard to place a monetary value on these things.”

But Nabara, who left the camp at the end of the war to enlist in the U.S. armed forces--and served in military intelligence--said: “I feel the apology from the government is enough for me.”

Sumi Seki, whose family farm in San Pedro was lost during the internment and who now lives in Long Beach, said: “I’m so relieved. I have my faith and my dignity back.”

Still Have ‘Flashbacks’

She and other former internees at the center said that they still have “flashbacks” and have never forgotten the camps. Seki added that she recently attended a “reunion” of detainees at Santa Anita Race Track, where she had spent six months in a makeshift camp. “The horses were treated better than we were,” she recalled.

Shundo said she had only recently admitted to the “trauma” she felt. For most of the last 46 years, she did not speak of her time at Heart Mountain, she said, because she felt so shamed. “You feel like you’re at fault. That’s why today is such a vindication.”