As Japanese-Americans, He and His Family Were Interned During War : Congressman Mineta Recalls the Days When the Constitution Failed

Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), who has risen from the barbed wire of a Japanese-American detention camp to the halls of Congress, remembers seeing his father cry three times.

“One was on the 7th of December, because he couldn’t understand why Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor,” Mineta said.

“Secondly, the day we were leaving San Jose on that train to Santa Anita.”

Scores of Japanse-Americans, some with scarcely 72 hours’ notice, were forced from their homes during World War II because of what a congressional commission later called war hysteria and racism.

The government feared spying and sabotage by the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who mostly lived on the West Coast and packed them off to “internment” camps in remote areas of the West and South.

They had no legal rights. No charges were ever filed. Many were second- and third-generation Americans.

Mineta, 10 years old and proudly wearing his Cub Scout uniform, left his dog, Skippy, behind.

Taking only what they could carry, Mineta and his father, mother, brother and sister boarded a train for a 400-mile trip to the grounds of Santa Anita race track.

His father’s insurance business, built on money earned as a farm laborer after he emigrated to the United States in 1902, was wrecked and his savings were confiscated. Kay Kunisaku Mineta’s emotion showed in his tears, as it did years later when his wife died. That was the third--and last--time his son saw him cry.

“The intensity and trauma of that (war) experience he was in was deeply embedded in him and everyone else,” Mineta said.

But the wrong may soon be partially redressed. Congress has passed a bill in which it apologizes to those Japanese-Americans and for the injustice of their internment and awards each of the estimated 60,000 camp survivors a tax-free $20,000.

“I think the amazing thing is that out of the 120,000 who had been evacuated, I don’t think as a group that we came out of this with rancor and bitterness,” Mineta said.

“But there is a very strong feeling in the community about making sure that this never happens to anyone else, ever again.

“The benefits of that bill are really directed at all Americans, because it deals with the guarantees of the Constitution. The Constitution at that time failed that small group of Americans who by accident of birth were of Japanese ancestry.

“On behalf of the people of the United States, the U.S. Congress apologizes. That’s got to be unprecedented in the annals of the history of civilization in terms of a nation apologizing for the acts of the government.”

Mineta’s family stayed at the race track outside Los Angeles for four months, then was shipped to a remote camp at Heart Mountain in northern Wyoming in October, 1942. The family arrived in a raging sandstorm.

“You talk about a wind. Being from California, we were not prepared for cold weather. It was not only very, very cold, but when we came into the barracks, silt was coming up through the floorboards and through the windows,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mineta attended school and was in the Boy Scouts.

There was an overnight Boy Scout Jamboree at the camp, including a troop from Cody that included then-13-year-old Alan K. Simpson, now deputy Senate GOP leader.

“We thought of them as spies,” Simpson said. “We thought of them as people who were behind wire because they were trying to do in our country.”

He found out otherwise.

Simpson recalls meeting Mineta and found that he was just another American boy.

“I remember a very animated discussion with him, seeing how lively, bright and curious about things he was,” Simpson said. “We talked about all the things 13-year-old boys talk about.”

Mineta also recalls the conversation.

“He’d say, ‘I don’t understand it. You guys are Americans, inside the camp here. I’m an American, but I happen to be on the other side of the barbed wire.”

Simpson met a Japanese-American mother, who showed him pictures of her son. “He is in Italy now, fighting for this country, the United States of America,” Simpson quoted her as saying.

Simpson said that Japanese-Americans suffered a grave injustice, but he is still troubled by the current bill’s call for $1.3 billion in compensation.

“An apology may be long overdue and may be so appropriate, but coupled with money, it takes away some of the sincerity of the apology somehow,” he said. “I think that somehow is unbecoming.”

Mineta countered that awards for injuries and damages are part of the American legal system.

Then the two former Boy Scouts shook hands and the Senate passed the bill. It currently is in a joint conference committee to iron out differences between the House and Senate versions. There has been no indication whether President Reagan will sign it.