A Flood of Memories as Ex-Internees Gather : Reunion: Japanese-Americans who spent World War II in an Arizona relocation camp recall their experiences.

It was the pigtails that caught the attention of Kazue Tsuchiyama as she gazed at a black-and-white photograph of Japanese-American internees at an Arizona relocation camp.

“There I am,” said Tsuchiyama, motioning to a beaming teen-ager posing with about a dozen other World War II internees. “I always get tickled when I see it. We were the first graduating class, the summer of ’44. We had our commencement outdoors. Right in the middle of it, we had a big dust storm. That ended it right there.”

Tsuchiyama, a Santa Maria resident, was among more than 1,100 former internees who gathered at a Torrance hotel this weekend for a reunion and a chance to share memories about their experiences during the war.

It is the 50th anniversary of the relocation of thousands of Japanese-Americans to the Colorado River Relocation Center, which contained three camps near Poston, Ariz.

The center opened in May, 1942, and closed in November, 1945. Almost 20,000 people were housed at the center’s camps; members of Camp One, the largest camp, hosted the Torrance reunion, the first such gathering for that camp’s internees.

“It’s quite remarkable that a shared experience, in many cases for as little as a year, would lead to a lifetime of friendships,” said Edwin Hiroto, a Silver Lake resident. “I look at (the internment) as a healthy test for everyone.”

Still, life in the camps is a bittersweet memory for many at the reunion, the theme of which was omoide , Japanese for “memories.”

About 120,000 Japanese-Americans, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, were taken to 10 desolate, makeshift relocation centers after the beginning of World War II.

“At first, for many years, no one wanted to talk about it,” said Paul Chikahisa, a Torrance resident and former internee who helped organize the conference. “After the camps, they avoided other Japanese. And if people asked you where you had been the last couple of years (during the war), it was, ‘Oh, we were on vacation.’ It was uncomfortable to talk about.”

Chikahisa, 62, lived at Poston with his parents and seven brothers and sisters.

“For a 12 1/2-year-old kid, part of it was an adventure,” Chikahisa said.

His early memories of camp life were of confusion.

“You go there on these buses and it’s desert,” Chikahisa said. “Nothing but dust and confusion. There was signing up, processing, long lines. Then you filled up cotton mattress holders with straw to make beds.”

Stone Ishihara, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District teacher, was interned for one year when he was 19 before he volunteered for the Army, where he served as a photographer.

“Some people ask me, ‘Aren’t you bitter?’ ” said Ishihara, 69. “I say no. There’s no future in being bitter. This is a small, minute part of history. It’s just unfortunate that it happened.”

Exhibits at the reunion documented day-to-day life in the camps through photographs, poems and essays.

A yearbook from a 1943 camp school was turned into a book, “Through Innocent Eyes.”

The introduction to one of the passages reads: “To our fellow Americans, deep from out (in) this lonely desert’s vastness, we, the Japanese-American youth, innocent of wrong, firm in our hope and our faith . . . extend to you . . . our fellowship.”