Ex-Internees React: Pain, Happiness and Old Fears : Redress: Some Orange County detainees are glad to see the reparations. Others fear a reopening of wounds.

Although Henry Kanegae is thankful that $20,000 payments are finally being sent to thousands of former detention camp internees, the 73-year-old Japanese-American still remembers the infamy of what happened to him.

“We feel gratified that the people of the United States do admit that sending us to camps was a big mistake . . . it was against the principle of the United States Constitution,” Kanegae said Wednesday, a day after the government handed out the first reparation check in Washington.

The letter Kanegae received from the Office of Redress Administration notified him that his payment should arrive by Oct. 22.

Within six months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Kanegae and his family were forced to board buses in Huntington Beach for a long journey to Poston No. 1, a detention camp 18 miles south of Parker, Ariz.

For him and thousands of other Japanese-Americans in Orange County, the compensation can never repay them for the betrayal and anger they felt following Dec. 7, 1941.

Kanegae and the others are among the more than 65,000 former internees who are eligible for redress payments from the U.S. government. About 40% of them live in Southern California.

The reparations will be distributed over a three-year period, but the first payments will go out this year to about 25,000 Japanese-Americans who are at least 70 years old. Kanegae was notified in September that he will be among the first to receive the $20,000.

“For a community that has waited 45 years, we’re not holding our breaths about when the money arrives. The ceremony has happened and that means we’re going to get paid,” said Alan Nashio, a member of the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations.

Nashio, now of Los Angeles, was born in the Manzanar Relocation Center near Lone Pine at the foot of the Sierra Nevada.

When the reparations bill passed the U.S. Senate, Jim Kanno of Santa Ana said it was a “nice” gesture, but he added that the internment issue should be “left buried, put aside, because it brings out the old wounds.”

Kanno, who later became mayor of Fountain Valley, was plowing land on May 12, 1942, when FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies pulled up in a car and arrested him. He was 16. Eventually, he was taken to Poston in Arizona.

Today, he said he fears that the reparations could prompt anti-Asian sentiment in some of the people who originally wanted the Japanese to be incarcerated.

Other Japanese-Americans recalled how the bombing of Pearl Harbor touched off hatred toward the Nisei--first-generation Japanese-Americans--by many non-Asians. In contrast, those who have retired and reached old age only expressed satisfaction with the government’s reparations.

“I don’t feel it was right to be taken into a camp without due process,” said Richard Ochiai, 74, of Santa Ana. “When I was young, I had to attend a segregated school. We were always second-class citizens. So when they took us to a camp in Jerome, Ark., I didn’t know if I was ever going to return.”

Ochiai and his wife, Sachi, 71, who was interned in Manzanar, both viewed this week’s government action as a vindication of sorts, saying, “It rights a wrong, a terrible mistake.”

But can it happen again?

“We don’t know,” Sachi said in a serious tone. “There still is a lot of racism and prejudice around. We read about it and see it on the TV. I really don’t know.”

Ochiai said that despite his incarceration, he and his wife love the United States and its freedoms. But he believes that “we all have to keep working on it, so that it doesn’t happen again.”

They intend to buy a new car when the payment arrives.

The afternoon of Dec. 7 was a harbinger of much more to come for Ochiai and Kanegae.

“I turned on my Zenith radio and heard a little bit about it, then got in my car to go buy a newspaper,” Kanegae recalled. “I stopped at several places in Santa Ana to buy one, but they were sold out. As I was walking back to my car, I saw a civilian with a National Guard uniform carrying a rifle with a bayonet on it.

“He came running at me and shouted, ‘Halt!’ I was 25 at the time, and he was younger than I was and seemed more scared, too. I said, ‘Watch it, you could hurt someone.’ ”

Kanegae, who was then president of the local chapter of the Japanese-American Citizens League, was cooperative, though confused by the man’s behavior. Then a deputy sheriff drove up and questioned Kanegae and they both searched his car.

Five months later, Kanegae received his evacuation order. He had two months to sell or lease a two-bedroom house he had built and settle other personal business before he, his wife, Akino, and two children could prepare for the trip to Poston.

“We could only take one suitcase per person and a footlocker per family,” he said. “At the depot in Huntington Beach, everybody was concerned, frightened and unsure about the future.”

Kanegae recalled that a month before the evacuation, the Japanese-American Citizens League office in Santa Ana began receiving some unusual visitors, including a deputy sheriff from Central California who demanded a list of homes owned by evacuees.

The deputy said he was working for farmers in the Central Valley who wanted to buy unused farm equipment.

Next, a fleet of trucks sent by an entrepreneur in Los Angeles arrived. “They wanted a listing of the evacuees’ homes so they could find out where they could pick up home furniture real cheap,” Kanegae recalled.

The trip to Poston took hours, and despite a military escort, the convoy of buses got lost in the arid Arizona desert.

At the camp, Kanegae recalled, the conditions were deplorable.

The bunk beds were hard and small. The floors and walls were cracked. The latrines were dirty and the food in the mess halls was bad.

“It was hot. Boy, was it hot. and when the winter came, it was very cold,” he said. “We stayed there nine months and I returned to farming in Talbert, which was what Fountain Valley was called in those days. I was born there, you know.”