Japanese-Americans Recall Harsh Life at WWII Camp : Memorial: San Diegans join in dedication of monument at relocation center in Arizona desert.

Jimmy Takashima had no idea what awaited him half a century ago when, after several months living in converted horse stables at a California racetrack, he got off the train in the middle of the Arizona desert.

What he and other Japanese-Americans who were put into an internment camp during World War II found was a harsh and desolate place of sweltering tar-paper barracks set behind barbed wire.

“We were brought into Poston about the middle of September. At that time it was very hot, windy and dusty,” said Takashima, 78, of San Diego.

“When you went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you could hear the coyotes howling,” said Rose Yamauchi, 55, also of San Diego, who was 4 when her family was sent to Poston.

On Tuesday, Takashima and Yamauchi were among 1,400 people from around the country who gathered to dedicate a monument at the site of the Poston War Relocation Center, the largest of the camps used to intern people of Japanese ancestry during the war.

The three-story concrete obelisk cost $300,000, raised through donations. It was built with volunteer labor.

The commemoration came more than 50 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order paving the way for the evacuation of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast on the grounds they were a threat to national security.

“Fifty years ago the failed leadership of our country condemned guiltless people into concentration camps,” George Ikeda, 70, of Emmaus, Pa., said at Tuesday’s dedication. The presidential order “legalized racism and made the accident of birth a crime.”

The Poston Memorial Monument Committee had originally planned to build a Japanese-style pagoda on the site but changed the design for fear of anti-Japanese sentiment, said George S. Oki, co-chairman of the committee.

Instead, the bottom third of the monument resembles a Japanese stone lantern, which is topped by a 20-foot shaft that towers over the scrubland ringed on all sides by rugged mountains.

Poston and Manzanar, in the Eastern High Sierra, were the first of 10 such relocation camps. One other camp was built in Arizona; the rest were in Arkansas, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and California.

From 1942 to 1945 Poston was home to nearly 20,000 Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children. They lived in blocks of wooden barracks, with communal bathrooms and laundry rooms for every 14 barracks.

Very little remains of the three camps--Poston I, II and III--that sprawled over 71,000 acres of the Colorado River Indian Reservation in western Arizona, about 80 miles south of the gambling resort of Laughlin, Nev.

Takashima was one of the lucky ones. Sensing what was coming, he leased his San Diego celery farm to a tenant who returned it to Takashima after the war. But many of those who were uprooted never got their property back.

Under a 1988 law, each person who spent time in the camps is due $20,000. Two weeks ago, President Bush signed legislation authorizing an additional $400 million to complete the reparations.

In 1983, a government commission concluded that not a single documented act of espionage or sabotage was committed by a Japanese or Japanese-American on the West Coast.

Many of the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, who entered the camps as children remember those years as an adventure.

“It was like camping without a motor home,” Yamauchi said.

“There were outdoor movies and we would take our own stools and eat mayonnaise sandwiches,” said Ruth Fukuchi, 58, of San Francisco.

But the older Nisei, whose livelihoods were disrupted or who better understood the suffering of their parents, spoke with more bitterness.

“It was one hellhole,” said Bruce Nagasaki, 68, of San Diego, who went on to volunteer for the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in Europe and became the most decorated U.S. unit in the war.