REMEMBRANCES : CHILD : Camps a Mystery to Children

Audrey Yamagata-Noji, 39, of Santa Ana is an administrator at Rancho Santiago Community College and is Orange County’s only Asian-American elected school board member.

Many children of Japanese-Americans interned during the war were kept in the dark about the camps because their parents either internalized their emotions or wanted to forget what they considered the shame of those years.

“I was fairly inquisitive and I would sit down with my father and ask him point blank, ‘OK, Dad. What happened?’ But getting him and other Nisei to talk about the camps was pretty difficult,” Yamagata-Noji said.

“When I was growing up, I thought that everybody in the country went to a camp. I thought it was summer camp because no one ever explained to me anything beyond the word camp. “ When her father, George Yamagata, gave a eulogy at his mother’s funeral, he glossed over the war years and only briefly mentioned their home in Long Beach.

“They owned a market and had a home in Long Beach before the war. After she and my grandfather were released from camp, they first settled in Chicago and then returned to Long Beach, where they had lost their possessions, everything,” Yamagata-Noji said.

“My father, in his eulogy, said that ‘Mrs. Yamagata moved to Chicago and then relocated to their home in Long Beach and retired.’ Retired! Can you imagine? That’s it. Nothing more about their home or their market they lost or the rest of the Japanese community. He never mentioned any of those things.”

At her church, Yamagata-Noji decided to hold talks with the Japanese elders on the subject of the $20,000 redress checks. “Do they give it to the church, a group, to themselves, or their children? It’s a confusing dilemma and one that stirs up emotions and often leaves them feeling guilty.”