Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT JAPANESE INTERNMENT : ‘Collective Experience That Seared the Consciousness’

I was born in Little Rock, Ark.--unusual for a Japanese American, but I was born in an Army Camp during World War II. My father was part of a segregated all Japanese American unit that fought in the European theater.

During the D-day celebrations in Europe, there was no mention of the Japanese American members of the 442nd Battalion, who gave their lives in battle in France and Italy, and of the 542nd Battalion, who broke open the gates of Dachau (details of which are disputed by some historians).

The Japanese American units suffered more casualties--and won more medals of valor--than any U.S. Army troops in any war in the history of the United States, at a time when their families and children and friends were imprisoned behind barbed-wire fences. Many, like my family, had been here for three generations. My grandparents had been Americans and been Episcopalians since the early 1900s, yet my mother was sent to the camp.

My parents got married shortly before the war. They were working at a Japanese American newspaper. My father was drafted and my mother was sent to Santa Anita--the smelly stables there were set up as a holding center until the government decided which camp they were all going to be shipped to. My mother was shipped to Manzanar, where she became editor of the camp newspaper.

When she found out she was pregnant, she was allowed to join my father at the Army base near Little Rock--except he was shipped overseas. She stayed there, waiting.

She had the right to live at the base rather than at Manzanar, but once she was there her travel was restricted. It was like being in a camp because you were not allowed travel privileges and you could not visit your relatives in the camp.

The camps represent a collective experience that seared the consciousness of every Japanese American, born in the camps or not. Most of my parents’ generation of Japanese Americans tried to bury that camp experience. They wanted to really shield us, the third generation. So they never told us the horrors of the camp. They used to only bring up the light-hearted parts, like, “Oh, so-and-so met her husband at Manzanar.” My generation grew up through the ‘60s and ‘70s, a time of activism and creative thinking, feeling that our parents didn’t fight back. We had no idea of the type of pressure that they were under.

The United States fought that war against not only Japan but also Italy and Germany. And yet, no German Americans or Italian Americans were sent to camps. But 110,000 Japanese were. At that time the issue of the camps was not included in our textbooks.

In 1979 a presidential commission was set up to take testimony around the country from people who had experienced the camps. The hearing rooms were packed. People had amazing stories--a boy was shot in the back during a camp riot. His mother had carried his shirt with blood-stained bullet holes in the back in her mind all these years. She testified at the hearing.

The Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians came out with 1,000 pages of findings. Their primary conclusion was: “Race prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a lack of political leadership” was the cause of the camps. They recommended monetary restitution.

The next issue was to fight for legislation that would mandate redress and reparation. I spent 10 years of my life fighting for this. The whole process was the political education of the entire Japanese American people. It was the first time that an Asian Pacific American community really became involved in the political process.

One of the other empowering things about redress was that it helped us to recapture our own history--the history that my parents had never shared with me. Many of our fathers were part of the heroic 100 RCT 442nd Battalion and the 542nd Battalion. That was the unit that broke open the gates and liberated Jews from the Nazi death camp at Dachau.

We learned that the U.S. Army threatened the men not to talk about it and had a non-Asian Army unit march victoriously through Dachau for the news media at the end of the war. The men were starting to talk about it after the redress law was passed and we found some Dachau survivors who remembered their Japanese liberators. Two years ago, we organized an emotional reunion of the survivors of Dachau and the heroic 542nd unit here in Los Angeles. This redress issue helped bring back a lot of the positive parts of our history.

There’s an old Asian saying: “The people are the makers of history.” And I think this whole redress struggle was an example of that. A community effort got a law put onto the books of the United States. That was a proud victory. However, it is a continuing struggle.

This is the third year since the issuing of the redress payment and some people are still being denied. For example, those Japanese Americans who were taken without their consent--and in some cases, without their knowledge--from the camps, shipped to Japan and used in prisoner exchanges for a white American, and then held hostage in Japan.